The Academy Blog

Ali Banisadr Artist Talk

Posted on December 2, 2024

Ali Banisadr, born in 1976 in Tehran, Iran, emigrated to California with his family in 1988 at the age of twelve, where he became immersed in the local graffiti art scene while studying psychology. He later moved to New York City, earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2005) and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art (2007), and he currently resides and works in Brooklyn, NY. Banisadr’s expansive, highly detailed paintings evoke tumultuous worlds, where intricate rhythms and a rich array of references from art history converge to offer profound reflections on the human condition.

 

His work draws from a vast spectrum of sources, including ancient and contemporary history, mythology, personal experience, and sonic memories, creating unique realms that explore both the personal and the collective. His paintings are informed by a dazzling mastery of various artistic traditions—from the precision of Persian miniatures and the energy of Abstract Expressionism to the narrative clarity of Dutch masters, the splendor of Venetian Renaissance art, and the surrealist impulses of early 20th-century painters. Banisadr’s scenes are both figurative and abstract, blending autobiographical narratives with larger themes of world history and collective memory.

 

His first major U.S. survey will be held in 2025 at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York, and his work is included in prestigious public collections worldwide, including the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden ,and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Notable solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions such as the Museo Stefano Bardini and palazzo Vecchio in Florence (2021), the Benaki Museum in Athens (2020), the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (2020), and Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria (2019); while his work has also been featured in significant group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2013-14) and the Prague Biennale (2013), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2021), Museum of Fine Arts ,Houston (2017), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2012). A major book will be published in March 2025 by Yale University press with critical essays by Dr. Gražina Subelytė, Associate Curator, Peggy Guggenheim Collection; Dr. Bill Sherman, Director, The Warburg Institute, University of London; and Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, Director, Katonah Museum of Art. It will also feature a transcribed conversation with the artist and noted art historian Robert Storr.

Katherine Bradford in Conversation with Dexter Wimberly

Posted on December 1, 2024

Katherine Bradford’s mesmerizing yet rigorous visual language freely traverses the relationship between nonobjective and representational painting, allowing potential narratives to unfold and interweave with the investigation of form and color. Vast expanses of color divide her canvases into distinct horizontal planes while the variations in saturation and tone evoke an elusive yet almost palpable atmosphere. Lighter and darker hues are interchangeable and used without functional or hierarchical distinction, introducing spatial elements such as the sea and the sky, beaches and poolsides. These monochromatic backgrounds are occupied by human figures, often swimmers and bathers, whose androgynous, featureless bodies are roughly sketched. driven by an unbiased curiosity, the artist allows her imagery to acquire a porous malleability where a pictorial sign becomes a signifier. Bradford’s practice has honed over four decades, maturing into a nonacademic, creative freedom that resonates deeply with the aesthetical and socio-political concerns of our time. It is her commitment to dynamic change and to the fluid state of human togetherness that Bradford so poignantly expresses in her radiant liquid fields. Katherine Bradford was born in New York in 1942. She lives and works in New York.

Selected Museum Exhibitions

Katherine Bradford’s work has been exhibited internationally at Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2023); Portland Museum of Art, Portland (2022); Hall Art Foundation, Reading (2021); Carpenter Center for Visual Art, Cambridge (2021); Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, New York (2020); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2019); The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans (2017-18); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2017); MoMA PS1, New York (2007); among others.

Public Collections
Bradford’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; The Menil Collection, Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, among others. Source: kaufmann Repetto.

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; The Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Texas; The Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, North Carolina; KOKI Arts and STANDING PINE in Tokyo, Japan; BODE in Berlin, Germany; Lehmann Maupin in London, U.K.; SECCI in Milan, Italy; and The Third Line in Dubai, UAE. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications including The New York Times and Artforum; and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Kinkade Family Foundation. In 2023, Wimberly participated in Hauser & Wirth’s International Curatorial Residency Symposium in Somerset, England. Wimberly has been profiled in Elle Decor and Artnet News. Wimberly is a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency in Japan.

 

swimmers by the town, 2004
acrylic on canvas
80 x 68 inches

carry painting, mother, 2023
acrylic on canvas
80 x 68 inches

Camping Trip, 2016

acrylic on canvas

68 x 80 inches

All images copyright Katherine Bradford

Chubb Fellows at Art Basel Miami 2024

Posted on November 8, 2024

 

The Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship is the highest honor the New York Academy of Art can bestow on its students. Under the program, the Fellows have the opportunity to expand the breadth and depth of their artistic prowess while serving as teaching assistants and mentors to a new crop of talented figurative artists. Chubb Fellows also receive studio accommodations, exhibition opportunities, and a stipend.

 

 

 

AXA Art Prize US 2024 Exhibition

Posted on October 11, 2024

 

For complete details on the competition visit axaartprize.com

AXA XL, a division of AXA, developed the AXA Art Prize in partnership with the New York Academy of Art. Over the past seven years, the Prize has become one of the premier student art competitions in the U.S. and is open to figurative paintings, drawings and prints created by undergraduate and graduate art students. Exhibition Jurors included curators from esteemed art institutions and museums such as the the Hammer Museum, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The first prize is awarded $10,000 and the second prize $5,000. This year, winners will be chosen by renowned artists Huma Bhabha, Jenna Gribbon, and Rob Pruitt, alongside Jennifer Schipf from AXA XL. Prize winners will be announced in November, 2024.

2024 Finalists

 

Wade Schuman Faculty Sabbatical Exhibition

Posted on September 4, 2024

In 1995 my parents bought an 18th century clapboard house on Bowie Hill, a hamlet of a few houses above a tidal marsh, in the very small outpost of Spruceville, in the tiny village of Popham in the not at all large town of Phippsburg, which is on a Peninsula southeast of Bath on the coast of Maine.

My mother came from an old New England family. Art was part of the family, as was love of nature – she had a very New England obsession with birds, trees and plants. I inherited this love, which she got from her mother (particularly a fondness of toads) and her grandfather, (particularly a fondness for birds) and from her father, (landscape – a fondness for everything).

When Covid hit I stayed in my mother’s studio in the old barn and took care of my parents through to their passing. Meanwhile, I was walking many miles at night in the snow by the ocean or in the woods past vernal pools or kayaking through thrashing pogies and the watching harbor seals.

These drawings are a result of this time. They were the animals around us, and ones my mother loved. I worked in ballpoint and acrylic because I was living in a small studio with no real kitchen or bathroom and was not up to the smell of oils and solvent. I liked the reductive simplicity of this hybrid technique. One of the freedoms of Covid was the feeling that devil-be-damned, making something was mainly to please oneself. The idea of pursuits in the larger art world seemed somehow so far away at that time. This was freeing. I also saw this project as an homage to my mother and to her New England family, and as a return to my roots as well: drawing and animals. From childhood through early adulthood, I took lessons drawing specimens at the local natural history museum. So, with this project, many aspects of my life came together.

– Wade Schuman

 

Artist Talk: Andrew Sendor

Posted on August 28, 2024

Andrew Sendor is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. Sendor is most recognized for his extraordinary facility in representational painting that serves to illuminate his ongoing engagement with the power of the imagination. The artist introduces us to fictional characters in storylines whose genesis derives from a unique creative process: Sendor scripts, produces, directs, and documents performances recounting the life and times of his eccentric cast. Representing scenes from these psychologically charged, hallucinatory narratives, each meticulously rendered artwork surveys the materiality of images and the interrelated history of photorealism and evolution of photography. Sendor builds monochromatic compositions using acute pictorial focus along with disrupted visual motifs, and situates the works in artist’s frames whose physicality elevates the painted imagery — and which together comprise an idiosyncratic language of painting.

Sendor has mounted solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater, NY in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2020. In 2015, The Broad Art Museum MSU presented a solo exhibition “Andrew Sendor: Paintings, Drawings and a Film.” More recently, his work was the subject of the two-person exhibition “Micro-Macro: Andrew Sendor and Ali Banisadr” at MOCA Jacksonville (2019). His works have been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Nassau County Museum of Art, NY; Funen Art Museum, Odense, Denmark; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; and the ARKEN Museum of Art, Ishøj, Denmark. Private and public collections owning his work include The Broad Art Museum MSU; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Hall Art Foundation, US and Germany; Rubell Museum, Miami; and Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.

Keith Timmons Lecture Series: Robert Pruitt in Conversation with Monique Long

Posted on August 27, 2024

Keith Timmons Lecture Series
Organized by Clifford Owens, Director of Critical Studies, New York Academy of Art
This lecture series is supported by Keith Timmons, a Baltimore-based art collector, to convene Black artists, scholars, curators, and critics at the New York Academy of Art during the 2024 – 2025 academic year.

Robert Pruitt’s (Houston, TX, b.1975) art practice centers on rendering large scale figurative portraits. He projects into those images a juxtaposing series of symbols and material references, denoting a diverse and radical black past, present and future.

   

He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally most notably at The California African-American Museum, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the Studio Museum of Harlem. He has received numerous awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, The Joan Mitchell Artist Grant, The Artadia Award, a project grant from the Creative Capital Foundation and the William H. Johnson Award. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum Fine Arts Boston, The Virginia Museum of Fine arts and many others

Robert A. Pruitt currently lives and works in New York.

IG: @robertpruitt   Twitter: @therobertpruitt

Woman with Gold wig, 2024
Tossin, Turnin, Tossin, 2024
Heaven and Earth, 2021


Monique Long is a writer and independent curator based in New York City with experience in curatorial and program development across the United States. Her collaborations include institutions such as the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Guild Hall in East Hampton. Long has contributed to arts publications widely, often writing about contemporary art, personal essays, and fashion history. She is also working on a book about Philadelphia and contemporary art.

moniquelong.com

Laura Frazure Artist Talk

Posted on August 26, 2024

 

Laura Frazure is an artist and educator with a primary focus on the study and practice of sculptural figuration and human anatomy. She is a modeler and inventor of human morphologies with the inspiration or generative material for her work coming from a wide range of sources. These include literature, popular culture, corporate and social media, art history and the study of bodily rhetoric. The work’s content is most typically directed toward the uses, commodification and modes of presentation of women as informed by cultural assumptions and imperatives.

Frazure received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, The New York Academy of Art, the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing and the Tianjin Academy of Fine Art, Tianjin, China. Frazure is a nationally and internationally exhibiting artist with works shown in Asia, Europe and throughout the US. She has received two Pew Fellowship Disciplinary Awards, three Faculty Research Grants from the University of The Arts and the Robert Engman Award from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work is in notable collections, including Nader Tavakoli, New York, and Witold Rybczynski, Philadelphia. She is included in Reinhard Fuchs’, Women in Art, Volume 1, 520 Masterpieces of Visual Art, The Great Female Artists: From The Middle Ages to the Modern Era. In 2024 Laura received the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of the Arts, where she was coordinator of sculpture.

Instagram Essentials for Artists with Margarita Lila Rosa

Posted on August 25, 2024

Join historian and curator Margarita Lila Rosa and Senior Critic Dexter Wimberly for a lively online discussion on how artists can create impactful social media content on Instagram.

Social media algorithms are constantly changing and formats are forever shifting. Is it possible to create authentic content and still garner the likes, comments, and follows demanded by greedy algorithms? What does it mean to be authentic anyway? Margarita Rosa will share Instagram insights she learned while creating content for herself and others. What does “success” on social media mean to her and what could it mean for you? How can you use the structure of the platform to your advantage?

During this event, Margarita will outline what she knows about the inner workings of Instagram and discuss best practices. She’ll answer questions related to timing, format, education, audience, and impact along with whatever questions you bring. She’ll also address AI’s impact on your feed. Whether you have a robust social media presence or your last post was last year, this event is for you.

Margarita Lila Rosa is a Harlem-based historian and curator specializing in Black Atlantic history and contemporary art. Dr. Rosa uses Instagram (@margaritalilarosa) as a tool for public history, creating viral videos on Caribbean history, languages, and archival research. Several of her videos have garnered more than a million views, with one of them surpassing three million. Dr. Rosa has taught history to hundreds of people through digital education.
www.margaritalilarosa.com

Jane Dickson in Conversation with Jerry Saltz

Posted on August 21, 2024

Jane Dickson has been exhibiting her paintings, drawings, and prints in museums and galleries domestically and internationally for two decades. She frequently works with unusual surfaces such as Astroturf, sandpaper, vinyl, or carpet to exploit the implicit references and the textural possibilities these materials offer. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, Creative Time, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Major museums including The Museum of ModernArt, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Karamay Museum in Xin Jiang, China, and most recently theNational Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian own her artworks. In 2008 she completed a mosaic for MTA in the 42nd street station. Her work is also represented in corporate collections such as Microsoft Corporation, The 3M Corporate Collection, and The Paine Weber Collection. Her images have appeared extensively in books and periodicals.

 

Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture, and the author of the New York Times bestseller How to Be an Artist. In 2018 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. A frequent guest lecturer at major universities and museums, he has lectured at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others, and has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.

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