The Academy Blog

ALI BANISADR Neither fully abstract nor definitively figurative, Ali Banisadr’s richly allusive paintings are as arresting as they are disconcerting. In their conflation of multiple temporalities and narrative dimensions, the paintings might be better understood as “world landscapes” (to borrow a phrase from early Netherlandish scholarship) than as landscapes or abstract compositions. Rather, they reprise art-historical conventions to subtly disquieting effect.

The restless surfaces of Banisadr’s paintings juxtapose competing sensibilities, setting areas of neat, precise brushwork against energetic, gestural passages. Enigmatic figures engaged in ambiguous interactions populate these compositions. They flicker in and out of definition and continuously invert the usual figure-ground relationship, challenging the viewer to reconcile the work’s contradictory spatialities. They appeal to the viewer’s natural intuition of narrative but leave such instincts unsatisfied.

AMY BENNETT (b. 1977 in Portland, ME) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from the University of Hartford, CT and her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the New York Academy of Art.

She has had numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden; Permanent Mosaic Installation, 86th Street & 4th Avenue Brooklyn Subway Station, MTA Arts for Transit, Brooklyn, NY; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; and Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Recent group exhibitions include Southampton Art Center, Southampton, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; MUba Eugene Leroy, Tourcoing, France; Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY; American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, NY; and Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY.

Bennett is the recipient of The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting; American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program 2010-11; New York Foundation for the Arts/ Deutsche Bank Fellowship; Smack Mellon Studio Program; and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Amy Bennett lives and works in Cold Spring, NY.

ALYSSA MONKS is blurring the line between abstraction and realism by layering different spaces and moments in her paintings. She flipped background and foreground using semi-transparent filters of glass, vinyl, steam, and water over shallow spaces in her 10-year long water series. Today, she is imposing a transparent landscape of infinite space over evocative subjects.

The tension in her paintings is sustained by the composition and also by the surface quality itself. Each brushstroke is thickly applied oil paint, like a fossil recording every gesture and decision, expressing the energetic and empathic experience of the handmade object. “I strive to create a moment in a painting where the viewer can see or feel themselves, identify with the subject, even be the subject, connect with it as though it is about them, personally.”

Alyssa’s work is represented by Forum Gallery in New York City. She lives and paints in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her latest solo exhibition “Resolution” was in March and April of 2016 at Forum Gallery. Monks’s paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including “Intimacy” at the Kunst Museum in Ahlen, Germany and “Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820–2009” at the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts, New York. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Savannah College of Arts, the Somerset Art Association, Fullerton College, the Seavest Collection and the collections of Eric Fischl, Howard Tullman, Gerrity Lansing, Danielle Steele, Alec Baldwin, and Luciano Benetton. In 2015, Alyssa gave a talk at the TEDx even at Indiana University discussing her recent work, which is featured on TED.com. Recently, she was named the 16th most influential women artist alive today by Graphic Design Degree Hub.

Born 1977 in New Jersey, Alyssa began oil painting as a child. She studied at The New School in New York and Montclair State University and earned her B.A. from Boston College in 1999. During this time she studied painting at Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence. She went on to earn her M.F.A from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art in 2001. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College in 2006 and has lectured and taught at universities and institutions nationwide. She continues to offer workshops and lectures regularly.

Alyssa has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painting three times and serves as a member of the New York Academy of Art’s Board of Trustees.

JEAN-PIERRE ROY  Born in Santa Monica, California in 1974, Jean-Pierre Roy is a Brooklyn- based painter and teacher. He received his BFA in Film and Studio Arts from LMU, Los Angeles in 1996. Roy received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2002 and was awarded the school’s 3rd year fellowship upon graduation.

A talk with Independent Curators:
who are they and how we do we have access?
Sharon Louden talks with Bartholomew Ryan,
Claire Schneider and Mitra Khorasheh.

  BARTHOLOMEW RYAN is an independent curator based in Minneapolis. He served briefly as Milton Fine Curator at the Andy Warhol Museum. Previously he was Assistant Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he co-curated the historical exhibition “International Pop” (2015). Ryan also recently co-curated the performance exhibition “Scaffold Room” by choreographer and artist Ralph Lemon. In 2013, he curated “9 Artists,” a multigenerational group exhibition and accompanying catalogue that considered the changing role of the artist in contemporary culture, which opened at the Walker before traveling to the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Prior to that, Ryan co-curated “Painter Painter” (2013); Pedro Reyes’s “Baby Marx” (2011); “Goshka Macuga: It Broke from Within” (2010); and Eiko & Koma’s “Naked” (2010). Ryan holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2009) and has contributed writing to a variety of international publications.

CLAIRE SCHNEIDER is Founder and Director of C.S.1 Curatorial Projects. Dedicated to building community through site-responsive projects, C.S.1 commissions and produces new work by collaborating with a wide range of artists, individuals, and institutions. With a focus on participation and experiential knowledge, C.S.1’s projects have highlighted bartering, food histories, gardens, drawing, healing modalities, play, and the night sky. Working with C.S.1 Curatorial Projects is often an opportunity for an artist to expand their practice, reach a new audience, and collaborate with creatives in other disciplines. Currently, C.S.1 is co-leading Nick Cave PLENTY – A Citywide Celebration of Buffalo with Silo City, Lehrer Dance, and Say Yes Buffalo, curriculum and school engagement by Young Audiences of Western New York, for 2019.

As an independent curator, Schneider organized the traveling and award-winning exhibition More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s in 2013. In this age of the individual, More Love considered how to come together again presenting works by thirty-three artists, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Miranda July, and Gregory Sale, and was accompanied by a 240-page catalogue. Schneider, a long-time museum curator, co-curated Extreme Abstraction, 2005, at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and in 2009, founded the series Architecture + Art at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA), which invites architects to create immersive artistic installations in response to the museum and the specific environmental context.

MITRA KHORASHEH is a Canadian curator, writer and educator based in New York. During her 12 years of experience in the creative industry, she has worked as a curator and creative director on a variety of projects. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions at galleries, institutions, art fairs, not-for profits, as well as large-scale public art exhibitions (The Water Tank Project) in the United States and internationally. Her curatorial work has mainly focused on site-specific and performative practices, with an emphasis on the body in performance, painting and other time based media. Her most recently noted curatorial endeavour was a site-specific installation and performance by artists ULAY and JAŠA, marking ULAY’s first New York performance in 30 years. In 2014, Khorasheh established the artist run exhibition space, artist residency and nomadic curatorial project DEP ART (formerly known as The Department of Signs and Symbols), where she is co-founder and director.

Currently, Khorasheh is the curator of New Water Culture, the Curator/Program Director of The Kau Academy, the Curator and Director at Khorasheh + Grunert, and is Director of Exhibitor Relations of the NEWD Art Show in New York.

EILEEN COOPER was born 1953 in Glossop, in the Derbyshire Peak District. She studied at Goldsmiths College from 1971-1974 being in the cohort of students who were selected by Jon Thompson. Senior members of staff at that time included Bert Irvin RA, Basil Beattie RA and Michael Craig Martin RA. She went on to study Painting at the Royal College of Art under Peter de Francia, graduating in 1977 and soon began to exhibit her work.

During the 1980s she became a major figure, well known and regarded for her strong and passionate figuration. Cooper has always taught part time in numerous institutions including St Martins, Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools

She became a Royal Academician in 2000 and in 2010 was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy, the first woman in this role since the Academy began in 1768.

Jerome Witkin is recognized as one of the most formidable contemporary figurative painters. Critically, Jerome Witkin generates notable praise, as exampled by the L.A. Times citing his work to be “a break-through in post-Cold-War art.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker cites that “Witkin’s only peer is Lucian Freud…. Witkin is one of the finest realist painters working today…he stages pictorial dramas that grapple with contemporary historical crises and moral pressures, while offering a lavish physical display of his medium…. ” Witkin’s works can be found in the permanent collection of prominent museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Jerome Witkin is represented by Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in Los Angeles.