Featuring Bo Bartlett, Vincent Desiderio, Zoey Frank, & Amy Sherald moderated by Noah Buchanan and Carl Dobsky

Against the backdrop of the Big Stories exhibition at the New York Academy of Art, four of the nation’s leading figurative painters meet to discuss The Narrative in art, and its evolving role in today’s world.

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Bo Bartlett (b. 1955, Columbus, GA) is an American realist with a modernist vision. His paintings are well within the tradition of American realism as defined by artists such as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Like these artists, Bartlett looks at America’s heart—its land and its people—and describes the beauty he finds in everyday life. His paintings celebrate the underlying epic nature of the commonplace and the personal significance of the extraordinary.
Bartlett studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. He received a CFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1980 and a Certificate of Filmmaking from New York University in 1986. He holds an Honorary Doctorate of the Fine Arts from New York Academy of Art and Honorary Diploma from Lyme Academy of Art.
Bartlett’s awards include the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the 1858 Prize for Southern Art, and the South Arts Fellowship. Notable collections include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Seattle Art Museum (WA), Denver Art Museum (CO), and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA). In 2018, Columbus State University opened the Bo Bartlett Center.
Bartlett is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery in New York, NY, and he lives and works in Columbus, GA and Wheaton Island, ME.

Vincent Desiderio (b. 1955, Philadelphia, PA) graduated from Haverford College in 1977 and later attended the Accademia di belle arti in Florence, Italy followed by four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He is a Senior Critic at the New York Academy of Art and has been a visiting professor at numerous universities both here and abroad, most recently with a three-year appointment at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in China through the country’s “Thousand Talent Program.”
Desiderio has received several grants and painting awards, among which are the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1991, and the Grand Prize of S.A.S. Prince Ranier III, Thirtieth Annual Show of Contemporary Art in Monte-Carlo, Monaco in 1996. In both 1984 and 1986, he was awarded a studio by the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, P.S.1. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from both the New York Academy of Art and the Lyme Academy. In 2007, Desiderio was invited to be Artist in Residence at Dartmouth College.
His work can be found in many important public collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY); The Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum of American Art (Philadelphia, PA); The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO); Galerie Sammlung Ludwig (Aachen, Germany); The Albright Knox Museum (NY; Museo Botero (Bogota, Columbia) and The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN).
Numerous articles about Vincent Desiderio have appeared in periodicals and magazines including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, The Village Voice, the New York Post, The New York Sun, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquire, Le Figaro, American Art (Smithsonian Publication), Comparative Literature (University of Oregon) and others.
In 2016, Desiderio’s painting SLEEP was used as the basis for Kanye West’s video, FAMOUS.

Zoey Frank (b. 1987 in Boulder, Colorado) makes use of patterns and elements of abstraction in her large-scale multi-figure compositions. Her work draws on a wide range of approaches to pictorial space from across art history.
Frank studied for four years with Juliette Aristides in the Classical Atelier at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, before receiving her MFA in painting from Laguna College of Art and Design in California. She has received numerous honors and awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, and three first place awards in Manifest Gallery’s International Painting Annual. Her work has been featured recently in New American Paintings, Hi Fructose magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, Artists and Illustrators, and American Art Collector, among many others. In 2023, she served as a juror for the Bennett Prize and for the Figurativas award at the MEAM Museum in Barcelona. She is represented by Sugarlift Gallery in New York and Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam.

Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, GA) received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004 and BFA from Clark-Atlanta University in 1997. She documents the contemporary African-American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly figurative paintings. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture to situate Black life centrally in American art. In October 2022, Sherald presented The World We Make, her first European solo exhibition at Hauser and Wirth in London. She was the first woman and first African-American to receive the grand prize from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, and in 2018, was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait commission for the National Portrait Gallery. Sherald’s work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Long Museum (Shanghai); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR); Embassy of the United States (Dakar, Senegal); and the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (Washington, DC).

Click here for more information about the Big Stories exhibition. 

Join Senior Critic, Dexter Wimberly, and lawyer/artist James Nepaulsingh for a lively, in-person conversation about the essential business skills all artists and creatives need.

The talk will cover topics including:

• When does an artist need a contract?
• What to do when you think you can’t afford a lawyer.
• Copyright! …know who owns your work?
• What to do if, and when legal claims are made against you.
• …and much, much more!

* DISCLAIMER: NO LEGAL ADVICE WILL BE PROVIDED AT THE SESSION *

James Nepaulsingh is a multipotentialite polymath: a corporate lawyer, painter, executive coach, board member, techno and house music producer and DJ, podcaster, and lecturer. He is British, based in Tokyo, and is of Trinidadian origin, but he has never been to Trinidad. Since birth, he has always occupied an ambivalent non-space, living between cultures. He regularly enters spaces that weren’t designed for him and sees things others can’t. He translates those experiences into new visual and aural languages. James graduated from the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art, and qualified as an executive coaching at the University of Cambridge.

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 in Tokyo, Japan; BODE in Berlin, Germany; 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. Wimberly is a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency in Japan. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the online education platform, CreativeStudy. Photo credit: Hiroki Kobayashi

Aleah Chapin (b. 1986 Whidbey Island, WA) is a painter whose direct portrayals of the human form have expanded the conversation around western culture’s representations of the body in art. She has exhibited throughout the US, Europe and Asia, including Flowers Gallery (New York, London, Hong Kong), The Belvedere Museum (Vienna), the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), and the National Portrait Gallery (London). Chapin has attended residencies at the Leipzig International Art Program (Germany) and MacDowell (United States).

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She is a recipient of the Willard L. Metcalf Promising Young Painters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), three grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (Canada), a Postgraduate Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art, and won the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (London). She holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art (New York) and a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle). Chapin’s work has been published extensively, including New American Paintings, White Hot Magazine, Juxtapoz, Vice, ArtMaze Magazine, Huffington Post, BBC, The Sunday Times of London, The Seattle Times, and Schiffer Publishing. Aleah Chapin lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Mickalene Thomas is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate portraits of Black women composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon.

Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Award nominated co-producer, curator, educator and mentor to many emerging artists. Apart from her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums and collaborates with corporations and luxury brands. In addition to an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2018) and a United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015), she is the first Black femme artist to have a scholarship in her name at the Yale School of Art. She has been awarded multiple other prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Appraisers Association of America, Award for Excellence in the Arts, (2019); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019). Thomas is also the Co-Founder of SOULAS House, a cultural hub and retreat for Black women, the Co-Founder of Pratt>FORWARD and founder of Art>FORWARD Artist in the Market incubator for post-graduate students.

Work by Thomas is the collections of numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles among others. Thomas serves on the Board of the Trustees for the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1.

Photo of Mickalene Thomas: Emil Horowitz

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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William Keller (son of Deane Keller Sr. and brother of the late Deane G. Keller (former NYAA faculty)) is an historian of architecture with an interest in cultural landscapes, borderlands, and human geography. Keller graduated from Yale and concentrated on Northern Renaissance art at Columbia University, earning his PhD in art history at the University of Delaware. Keller was on staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale; Maryland Center for History and Culture and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; George Washington University, Washington D.C.; and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he served as Fine Arts Librarian. He was principal investigator   on several privately- and federally-funded bibliographic control and digital projects in support of public access to special library collections and archives.

“I consider the performance of Deane G. Keller, late instructor at the Academy, as inspired by the life and teaching of his father, portrait and mural painter Deane Keller Sr., student of George Bridgman. Critique, discussion, and argument informed the son’s artistic production as he made his way in New Haven, Florence, Indianapolis, Lyme, New York City, and the Mediterranean – learning, resisting, and discovering — leaving us with challenging and rewarding problematics in his own work.”

Alexandria Smith is a mixed media visual artist based in London and New York. She earned her BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University; MA in Art Education from New York University; and MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies including MacDowell, Bemis, Yaddo and LMCC Process Space. Smith’s recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibit, Monuments to an Effigy at the Queens Museum in NYC and a site-specific commission for the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2019. Alexandria currently has a solo exhibit, “Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl’s Window on view at the Currier Museum of Art (NH) and recently had a solo exhibit, “Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens” at Gagosian Park and 75 (NYC). Alexandria is currently Head of Painting at the Royal College of Art in London.

alexandriasmith.com

Elizabeth Colomba was born in France and raised in Épinay-sur-Seine, from parents of Martinican descent. She lives and works in New York City. Elizabeth received a degree in applied art from the Estienne School of Art, Paris and also studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

Drawing on Old Master techniques and sensibilities, Colomba’s incredibly detailed and rich paintings reclaim mythological, historical, and allegorical narratives from the long- standing legacy of portraiture. Her love of storytelling from a young age carries over into the paintings she does today, newly placing and lauding the Black figure into a pictorial narrative form from which it had been historically omitted.

“By generating an environment for my subjects to inhabit a space that honors their presence and place in and through culture and time allows me to redefine not only how black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how black people have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves. ”
– Elizabeth Colomba

Through the power of portraiture, Colomba’s work challenges conventions of beauty and significance, placing her figures in prominence and redressing the erasures of women of color across the canon of art history.
Colomba’s paintings have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Park Avenue Armory, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the Balthus Grand Chalet, Switzerland; the International Biennial of Contemporary Art (BIAC), Martinique; Volta, New York; the Fondazione Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Florence and the inaugural triennial at Columbia University. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Portland Museum of Art, ME,The Studio Museum in Harlem, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Park Avenue Armory, JP Morgan, Yale University and Princeton University Art Museum among others. Her work was featured on the cover of the New Yorker to commemorate Juneteenth 2022 and most recently in the international December 2023 issue of Vogue.

elizabeth-colomba.com

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. Her exhibition, When the Children Come Home, is a solo presentation for David Antonio Cruz, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. 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