The Academy Blog

Canadian artist Zachari Logan works mainly with large-scale drawing, ceramics and installation practices. Exploring the intersections between identity, memory and place,Logan re-wilds his body as an expression of queerness.

Logan has exhibited widely throughout North America, Europe and Asia and is found in private and public collections worldwide, including; National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Remai Modern, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (NMOCA), 21cMuseums Hotel Collection and ThetisFoundation, among others. Logan has attended many residencies; including Vienna’sMuseums Quartier MQ21 Program, the International Studio & Curatorial Program inBrooklyn,Wave Hill Botanical Gardens Winter Workspace Program in the Bronx and was artist in residence at the Tom Thomson Shack at the McMichael Gallery. Logan has worked collaboratively with several celebrated artists, including Ross Bleckner andSophie Calle and his work has been featured in many publications worldwide, includingBBC Culture, The Globe and Mail, Border Crossings, Huffington Post and Hyperallergic to name a few. Logan’s recent projects include the 2-person exhibition,Shadow Of TheSun: Ross Bleckner & Zachari Logan, at Wave Hill Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, Wildflowera solo exhibition at the Canadian High Commission in London UK, and Ghost Meadows, at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada. Logan’s current exhibition Remembrance opened at the Peabody EssexMuseum in Salem Massachusetts, May of 2022.

Kyle Staver earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1976 and her MFA from Yale University in 1987. In 2015, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. She is a member of the National Academy ofDesign. She has had 2 solo exhibitions at Zürcher Gallery in New York (2018 and 2020) and in 2019, had a solo exhibition at Galerie RX (Paris) curated by Gwenolee Zürcher. In 2020, Zürcher Gallery participated inthe Armory Show for the first time with a duo-presentation of Staver and Matt Bollinger in the Focus Section, curated by Jamillah James. Her work is in the collections of the National Academy of Design (New York), TheAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), The National Arts Club (New York), The McEvoy Foundation (San Francisco), and Portland Community College (Portland, Oregon).

Matt Bollinger received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

His work has been exhibited in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles,Paris, and London. Recent museum exhibitions have been at the AkronArt Museum (2022),Westmoreland Museum of American Art (2022), South Bend Museum of Art (2020), theSchneider Museum (2018) and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Métropole(2016). Residencies include the Seven Below Arts Initiative in Burlington, VT, the Fine ArtsWork Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY.In 2016 and 2021, he received NYFA fellowships in Painting.He is represented by mother’s tankstation and lives and works in New York state.

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE)

Chris Cook, Executive Director

In 2015, Chris Cook moved to Omaha, Nebraska from Miami, Florida to join the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts as the Executive Director. In this role he drives Bemis’s long-range strategies, provides creative direction, and oversees the financial advancement and operations of the 41-year old artist-founded nonprofit. In 2019 he launched Bemis’s Sound Art+Experimental Music Program with lead support, now totalling $1Million, from the Mellon Foundation to advance the creation and presentation of new forms of sound and music by today’s leading composers, sound artists, and musicians. In addition to growing Bemis’s annual operating budget and professional staff, along with expanding its Board of Directors nationally, he rebooted the voice and identity of the organization through a multiyear rebranding project and is now embarking on a campus-wide facility master planning project to reimagine Bemis’s physical plant and impact in downtown Omaha. He brings to Bemis 20 years of curatorial and non-profit management experience. Previously, Chris was the Executive Director of the experimental arts organization Cannonball in Miami and he served as the Executive Director and Curator of the Salina Art Center in Salina, Kansas. He has held curatorial positions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa. As a curator he organized exhibitions, commissions, and special projects with artists Paula Wilson, Mary Reid Kelley, Stephen Vitiello, Adam Pendleton, Chakaia Booker, Julian Dashper, and Fred Sandback, among many others. He holds a graduate degree in art history, theory, and criticism from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

https://www.bemiscenter.org

Fountainhead Arts (Miami, FL)

Nicole Martinez, Associate Director

Nicole Martinez is a veteran arts communications professional and the current Associate Director of Fountainhead Arts, Miami’s only live/work artist residency that has hosted nearly 500 national and international artists since its founding in 2008. She leads the organization’s communications strategy while overseeing its fundraising, operational, and administrative departments. Throughout her career, Nicole has worked with leading local artists, cultural institutions, and art companies on developing and implementing integrated marketing and communications strategies, with a particular focus on creative content development. Her work has supported some of Miami’s most visible organizations, including Museum of Art and Design at MDC, Perez Art Museum Miami, Bakehouse Art Complex, and the Frost Science Museum. A storyteller and critic, her writing has appeared in a variety of leading arts publications including ARTnews, Cultured, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Miami Herald, Wallpaper*, and more. In 2019, she was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists Florida for excellence in arts reporting. She also was awarded a Special Jury Mention by Oolite Arts for her short documentary film, La Peña.
https://www.fountainheadarts.org

Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA)

Holly Blake, Residency Manager

Holly Blake is a painter who has a BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has served as Headlands Center for the Arts’ sole Residency Manager, and has worked at Headlands for 34 years.
https://www.headlands.org

Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency (Saugatuck, MI)

Shannon R.Stratton, Executive Director

Shannon R. Stratton is Executive Director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI. Trained as a studio artist in painting and fiber, Shannon’s practice includes 12 years in the artist-run field as a co-founder of Threewalls, Chicago and other adjacent artist-run projects, work as an independent and institutionally affiliated curator, and writer. She lives in Chicago with a senior dog and two sibling cats where she is also current Director of the Post-Baccalaureate in Painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
https://www.ox-bow.org

This year the Academy’s Take Home a N*de returns honoring the inimitable Tracey Emin. In addition to being one of the most noted artists of our times, her recent shows have celebrated the figure on a large scale. Having recently recovered from cancer, her return to New York will make this Take Home a N*de an event not to miss.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. Emin is best known for her poignant works that mine autobiographical details through a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and neon text. She is a prominent member of the Young British Artists who rose to fame in the late 1980s. Emin’s seminal works Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998)—her own unmade, messy bed installed at the Tate Gallery—provocatively contributed to feminist discourse with the raw, confessional nature of her art.

Emin went on to receive her MA from the Royal College of Art in London, where she is now a Royal Academician and Honorary Doctorate. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2013. Emin currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.

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.

Christa Clarke is an Independent Curator and Senior Advisor at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Previously, she was curator of the arts of global Africa at The Newark Museum of Art, where her work was supported with major grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment of Humanities. During her sixteen-year tenure at Newark, she organized exhibitions on topics ranging from men’s fashion to Nigerian modernism and established Newark’s significant collection of modern and contemporary African art. Since 2018, Clarke has served as consulting curator to various institutions including Smith College Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Williams College Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to her curatorial work, Clarke has been a research fellow at Harvard University, the Clark Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian, and held teaching appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi, University of Pennsylvania and Boston University. Her books include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (2011, co-edited with Kathleen Berzock), the award-winning African Art at the Barnes Foundation (2015), Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection (2018), and The Activist Collector: Lida Clanton Broner’s 1938 Journey from Newark to South Africa (2022). Clarke was a 2012 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership and, from 2017 to 2019, served as board president of the Association of Art Museum Curators, of which she is now lifetime trustee. Clarke received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Julia Halperin is Executive Editor of Artnet News, where she oversees editorial operations for the world’s most widely read art news site and manages a staff of editors and writers in London, Berlin, and New York. She is also the co-founder of the Burns-Halperin Report, a data-driven report on equity in museums and the art market. Previously, she served as museums editor of The Art Newspaper, where she oversaw international coverage of museums and other major art institutions, and as news editor of Art + Auction magazine. Her writing has appeared in WIRED magazine, the New York Observer, and New York magazine. Halperin holds a BA in art history and English literature from Columbia University.

Arthur Lewis is a Partner and Creative Director of Fine Arts and UTA Artist Space at leading global talent, entertainment, and sports company, UTA. A patron of the arts and a significant collector of both emerging artists and Contemporary African American Art, Lewis is a member of the board of Governors for Otis College of Art and Design and on the boards of amfAR, Prospect New Orleans and USC Roski School of Art and Design. Additionally, he is a member of the National Advisory Committee for The New Orleans African American Museum and is a Global council member for the Studio Museum in Harlem.

A well-known and distinguished figure in the art world, Lewis joined UTA in 2019 to oversee the Fine Arts division and exhibition space. During his tenure, the Artist Space has exhibited diverse showcases for artists including Blitz Bazawule, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Ernie Barnes, Chloe Chiasson and Mandy El-Sayegh, among others.

Prior to UTA, Lewis previously served as Executive Vice President of the New York Design Office for Kohl’s, where he oversaw product design and development. Lewis has also held executive leadership roles at HSN, Hautelook, and Gap Inc., where he focused on brand management, merchandising and product development. 

Lewis, who spends his time between Los Angeles and Atlanta, is a tireless advocate for artists and the arts community at large.

New York based painter Alexis Rockman is an eco-warrior who began making paintings and work on paper in the service of environmental awareness long before it was fashionable, embarking on expeditions to far-flung locations like Antarctica and Madagascar in the company of professional naturalists.

His work tell stories in which natural histories of the past confront dystopian futures.His work has been exhibited around the world and showcased at prestigious galleries and museums including theVenice Biennale, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Serpentine Gallery and many more. Rockman also notably worked on Life of Pi with Ang Lee. Rockman’s art served as the backbone for much of the film’s aesthetics.