The Academy Blog

Nayland Blake

The editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, Hrag Vartanian is an editor, art critic, curator, and lecturer on contemporary art with an expertise on the intersection of art and politics.

Hrag co-founded the publication Hyperallergic in 2009 in response to changes in the art world, the publishing industry, and the distribution of information. Breaking news, award-winning reporting, informed opinions, and quality conversations about art have helped Hyperallergic reach an audience as high as a million visitors per month.

In 2016, Hrag launched the Hyperallergic Podcast and travels around the globe to uncover the evolving world of art (iTunes). Some notable episodes have delved into the history of Surrealism in Egypt, the little-known story of female Abstract Expressionists, and front-line coverage of the artists taking part in the #StopDAPL action at Standing Rock.

He helped champion a type of straight-forward online art criticism that believes in the power of journalism, while retaining a sensitivity to the cultural and economic realities that inform the world of art, culture, and politics. In May 2018, art critic Mary-Louise Schumacher wrote about the rise of Hyperallergic for Neiman Reports at Harvard University and quoted ARTnews’s Editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas as saying, “I think [Hyperallergic] managed, kind of against the odds, to reinvigorate art criticism.â€

His curatorial interests are focused on theories and practices of decolonization and he prefers to work in unorthodox spaces. In 2010, he moved Hyperallergic into a gallery at Outpost in Ridgewood, Queens, to stage #theSocialGraph, the world’s first multi-disciplinary exhibition of social media-related art. In 2015, he orchestrated Jade Townsend’s Crazy Amazing Garage Sale exhibition at Auxiliary Projects, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The three-day liquidation sale of unsold art was an attempt to “free†the capital trapped in one artist’s storage unit — it liberated over $3,000.

In 2017, he began a 10-year project exploring the contemporary legacy of Ottoman studio photography with an exhibition at Minerva Projects in Denver, Colorado.

He regularly visits universities and colleges as a visiting critic, including RISD, Brooklyn College, UC Davis, Pratt Institute, American University, Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, and UNLV, and he has moderated panel discussions and juried exhibitions for various organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Ford Foundation, and Chautauqua Institution.

Beyond his writing and research, he is an avid photographer and collector of historical studio photographs. He maintains an extensive archive of mostly art-related images (15,000+) on Flickr, which he has uploaded under a Creative Commons 2.0 license. His original blog, simply named “Hrag Vartanian,†was very active between 2006 and 2010 and focused on politics, writing, and mostly art. It was part of the Culture Pundits network and the blog attracted guest contributors and thousands of daily readers.

You can also subscribe to his current blog or subscribe to Hyperallergic’s newsletter to receive his weekly ‘Letter from the Editor’ (every Tues.), which highlights the major stories of the day and includes reflections about current events.

For more information on Hyperallergic and his thoughts on art writing, you can listen to a 2012 interview he gave to the Bad at Sports podcast, a 2014 episode of The Conversation Pod podcast, or a 2017 chat for the Philbrook Museum and NPR with artist Sharon Louden. He’s also prepared a “30 Things of Mine You Might Want to Read†list of favorite essays, interviews, articles, reviews, and op-eds for those who may have only recently discovered his writing or are still unfamiliar with his interests and work.

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.

Julie Heffernan is represented by PPOW Gallery (New York) and Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco). She has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Japan and Europe, and a travelling museum show entitled “When the Water Rises” originating at the LSU Museum of Art in 2016 in Baton Rouge and travelling to museums in red states throughout the country through 2019. She has participated in numerous group shows–at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, in Bremen, Me Museum, Olbricht Collection in Berlin and the Palazzo Reale in Milan, among others.

Heffernan has received numerous awards, including the NEA, NYFA and Fullbright, as well as a PS1 Artist-in-Residence, a Fellowship of the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; a Milton And Sally Avery Fellowship from MacDowell; and she was invited to be the Commencement Speaker for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the featured artist at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art in America, ArtForum and The New Yorker, among others; and is in numerous museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Me Museum in Berlin and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, VA.  She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Damian Loeb (born 1970) is a self taught classical painter currently living and working in New York City. Loeb’s creative process involves collecting, studying, and creating intimately potent images through both painting and photography. In creating an empirical sense of reproduction, Loeb invents a dialogue between relativism and individual interpretation; exposing cultures codification of a popular visual vocabulary.