The Academy Blog

Join us for an in-person Conversation with the Critics! This discussion about art, culture, and community in New York City will be moderated by New York Academy of Art Senior Critic, Dexter Wimberly.

Heather Bhandari
Program Director, Foundation for Contemporary Arts

Heather Bhandari (she/her) is known for her work as a curator, writer, educator, and artist advocate. Prior to joining Foundation for Contemporary Arts as Program Director, she co-founded CreativeStudy, a business and financial health education platform for creatives. She is a trustee of Art Omi, a visiting critic at RISD, and an adjunct lecturer at Brown University. She is co-author of ART/WORK (Simon & Schuster, 2017), which will appear in its 26th printing this fall. From 2000 to 2016 Heather was a director of Mixed Greens gallery where she curated over 100 exhibitions and managed a roster of two-dozen emerging to mid-career artists. Subsequently, she was the Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and a lead organizer of Forward Union. Her career began at Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin galleries. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University.

Casey Lesser
Artsy’s director of content, editor-in-chief, and curator-at-large

Casey Lesser is Artsy’s director of content, editor-in-chief, and curator-at-large. She joined Artsy, the world’s largest online art marketplace, in 2013 as a writer and editor on the editorial team. Now, she leads the company’s editorial, curatorial, social media,  and communications teams. Casey has been responsible for conceiving and executing Artsy’s major reports and marketing campaigns, including: The Artsy Vanguard (the annual list of the most promising emerging artists working today); The Women Artists’ Market Report (a data-driven report on the state of women artists’ auction markets); and Foundations (an online-only fair featuring galleries that support emerging artists). Her curatorial endeavors include online and in-person exhibitions, including Artsy’s 2021 exhibition “Trove,” which featured  works by 11 rising artists in Miami Beach, coinciding with Art Basel. Casey is based in Brooklyn and holds a master’s degree in art history from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Rob Fields
Founder & CEO of Mighty Mighty LLC

Rob Fields is the founder & CEO of Mighty Mighty LLC, an art advisory, marketing, and arts consulting firm that connects people, art, and ideas. With a career that spans decades, he’s led cultural institutions, represented artists, produced events and indie film, done PR, published an online magazine, and worked on several account teams at New York City marketing agencies and trade associations. He is the former director of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. Before Sugar Hill, Rob was the president and executive director of Weeksville Heritage Center where he led that organization’s turnaround and secured its designation as the first new member of the NYC Cultural Institutions Group in over 20 years. Rob holds a BA in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently serves on the US Advisory Board of Volta Art Fair and is a member of the Board of Trustees for UnionDocs, the Queens, NY-based center for documentary art. He is also a founding board member of the African Burial Ground Memorial Foundation, which is dedicated to advancing the African Burial Ground National Monument, a National Historic Landmark in New York City, and the oldest and largest known burial ground for free and enslaved people of African descent in North America.

John Vincler
Co-Chief Art Critic of CULTURED magazine

John Vincler is the Co-Chief Art Critic, along with Johanna Fateman, of CULTURED magazine. Previously he was a regular contributing critic to The New York Times and authored a column on what we see when we look at paintings in our digital contemporary for The Paris Review. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University and is adjunct faculty at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Information Sciences, where he teaches classes on artists’ books, the history of printing, and rare book librarianship. He is Library Director at Poets House, and has worked as a special collections librarian for more than a decade, including at The Morgan Library & Museum.

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.

An artistic maverick, Neil Jenney is committed to exploring, and ultimately transcending, realism as both style and philosophy. Having designated his early work “Bad Painting” and his post-1970 output “Good Painting,” he challenges models of taste and subject matter while pursuing an idiosyncratic approach to depicting culture and place.

Jenney characterizes his current work as “painted sculpture,” and uses handmade frames to present crisp, high-contrast canvases. Providing an “architectural foreground” as well as—through stenciled captions—guides to title and setting, the frames situate the paintings as both objects and interpretations.

Linda Yablonsky has been writing about art and artists, as both critic and journalist, for the past thirty years. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, Palmer, W, Wallpaper, Elle Decor, among many others, and contributes the monthly New York Insider column to The Art Newspaper as well as reviews. She is also the author of The Story of Junk: A Novel, numerous essays for artist monographs and exhibition catalogues, and is currently at work on the first full biography of the artist Jeff Koons.

Neil Jenney Photo Credit: Debra Jenney
Linda Yablonsky Photo Credit: Grace Roselli for the Pandora’s BoxX Project