The Academy Blog

Eminent critical theorist Donald Kuspit in conversation with Provost Peter Drake, discusses his life in the arts, his training as a psychoanalyst and developments in the progressive figurative and representational art world.

Donald Kuspit is one of America’s most distinguished art critics. In 1983 he received the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, given by the College Art Association. In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Davidson College, in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2007 from the New York Academy of Art. In 1997 the National Association of the Schools of Art and Design presented him with a Citation for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he was the Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow. In 2008 he received the Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. In 2013 he received the First Annual Award for Excellence in Art Criticism from the Gabarron Foundation. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations.

Heather Darcy Bhandari is an independent curator and co-founder of The Remix (a project-based curatorial team), an adjunct lecturer at Brown University, and a consultant to several for-profit and nonprofit arts institutions. She is also the Creative Director of Art World Conference, a new professional development conference for visual artists. The second edition of her book, ART/WORK, was published by Simon and Schuster in October of 2017. Bhandari also lectures and participates in portfolio reviews and panel discussions across the country. She is on the board of directors of visual arts at Art Omi (an artist residency in Ghent, NY) and the advisory boards of CODIFY Art (a multidisciplinary collective of QTPOC artists) and Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn. She was on the board of NURTUREart for nearly a decade. From 2000 to 2016 she was a director of Mixed Greens, a commercial gallery where she curated over one hundred exhibitions while managing a roster of nearly two-dozen emerging to mid-career artists. Most recently, she was the Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon, a nonprofit in Brooklyn. Bhandari received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. Her career began at contemporary galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin, both in New York City.

This talk is part of the New York Academy of Art’s Professional Practice Lecture Series featuring art world professionals in conversation with Senior Critic Sharon Louden.

Julia Kodl is a Los Angeles based concept artist and an art lead at Dreamscape Immersive where she makes the content for story-based, full-roam virtual reality (VR) experiences. Using real-time motion capture technology, full body mapping, virtual reality headsets, and real-life room-scale stage sets, it enables users to move untethered in a virtual environment and interact with both physical and virtual objects. Julia has worked with film legends including Walter Parkes, Steven Spielberg, Hans Zimmer, and Gore Verbinski to transform their stories into VR. She received a BA from UCLA for painting and later attended Gnomon School for Visual Effects, specializing in environment design.

Seph Rodney was born on the island of Jamaica and grew up in New York City. He has an English degree from LIU, Brooklyn, a studio art MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a PhD in museum studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. He is an editor for the Hyperallergic blog, writing about contemporary art and related issues, and a current adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design. He can be heard on the podcast “The American Age” and is also currently under contract with Routledge press to produce a book based on the customization of the museum visit. He has appeared on the AM Joy show, written for MSNBC, CNN Op-ed pages, Contemporary And, American Craft, and Artillery Magazine.

This talk is part of the New York Academy of Art’s Professional Practice Lecture Series featuring art world professionals in conversation with Senior Critic Sharon Louden.

Rachel Uffner