The Academy Blog

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 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.

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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Kylie Manning is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Both art teachers, Manning’s parents often moved their home in Juneau, Alaska, to various regions in Mexico for extended periods. Manning’s work is heavily informed by the atmospheres, latitudes, and colors present in the various geographies of her childhood, where she witnessed the impacts of social, political, and economic change.

Using brushwork, light, and balance, the artist captures moments within her personal history, such as her time working on Alaskan fishing boats and memories of surfing in Mexico. Her works primarily originate from within themselves, but she also sources imagery from old family photographs. Her oil paint compositions center on ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures within expansive, disparate landscapes. While some appear more clearly, other figures are defined by lyrical swathes of paint suggesting a face and the outline of a body. Manning purposefully leaves the origin, gender, and raison d’être of the forms within her paintings up to interpretation, allowing the viewer to step into her world, yet form their own reading of the work. The resulting powerful works vibrate with energy and light, flickering before the viewer’s eyes.

Manning explores the balance between figuration and abstraction through expert draftsmanship, painting, mark-making, and a refined technical process. Within her painting practice, the artist begins each body of work as a family, stretching the surfaces and employing rabbit skin glue, which primes the canvas and provides a buoyant backdrop. She spends a great deal of time spreading oil ground (a material used to prime oil paintings) with a palette knife, before sanding down each layer, building a relationship to each individual piece before she brings in color. She is acutely aware of the scale, energy, and groove of the linen before ‘beginning.’ There are no sketches or predetermined compositions; she finds the image with and in front of the viewer so they may determine how the piece was formed.

When Manning eventually incorporates color, it begins through a hierarchy of refracted light. She grinds pure pigments with safflower oil and starts with a Sumi-e-like wash using broad chip brushes and paint rollers to create thin but wide strokes along. While still wet, she takes a rag and begins to pull the composition out by wiping and ripping away saturated areas. Eventually sketching in paint with loaded brushes, she reiterates or shifts the composition. Each layer is separated with a slightly thicker layer of safflower and walnut oil to refract light, a technique common with Dutch Baroque painters, such as Johannes Vermeer. Orchestrating ethereal sketches of landscapes and figures, she balances delicate whirlwinds of color with a contemporary feminist sense of humor. Manning’s works feel simultaneously thin and radiant, light glowing from within the paintings themselves.

Curator and art dealer based in New York City, Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, is Managing Partner and Co-Owner of CANADA. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery. During her time at Pace, Christiana expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Manning in Spring 2022. She also significantly broadened the gallery’s digital native offerings, establishing and activating a robust online sales strategy.

Her curatorial debut at Pace, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, showcased 17 intergenerational artists from the gallery’s program, alongside works by additional artists within her network. This presentation was available for viewing at Pace’s New York gallery space and online.”

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.