The Academy Blog

Join us for a conversation about all things NFTs! New York Academy of Art Senior Critic, Dexter Wimberly will moderate a discussion about the NFT market from the perspective of their potential to empower individual artists and artist communities. The panelists will share their experience in this emergent, rapidly evolving space, as well as insights on how NFTs will continue to shape the traditional art world in 2022 and beyond. The panelists will also explore potential pitfalls and ideas on how NFTs can benefit both creators and collectors. Wimberly
will be joined by artists, Kenny Schachter, and Kennedy Yanko, as well as Tam Gryn, Director of Fine Arts at Rally.io, and Sho-Joung Kim-Wechsler, Founder & CEO, If So, What? and XVERSO.

Kenny Schachter has been curating contemporary art exhibits in museums and galleries and teaching (art history and economics) for more than thirty years; presently in the graduate department of the University of Zurich (appointed to advisory board January 2021) professorships at the School of Visual Arts (NY) and New York University. He has lectured internationally, been the recipient of a Rockefeller supported grant in Mexico, and contributed to books on Paul Thek, Zaha Hadid, Vito Acconci and Sigmar Polke/Gerhard Richter. Schachter has a regular column on Artnet.com in addition to writing widely for various international publications including most recently New York Magazine and The Times Magazine (UK).

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) is a sculptor and installation artist working in found metal and paint skin. Yanko deploys her materials in ways that explore the limitations of optic vision, underlining the opportunities we miss when looking with eyes alone. Her methods reflect a dual abstract expressionist-surrealist approach that centers the seen and unseen factors that affect, contribute to, and moderate human experience.

Sho-Joung Kim-Wechsler is the founder of the If So, What? Art Fair, an event that merges art, music, and innovation. Forward-thinking, Sho saw the potential for crypto art and NFTs before the current craze. In 2018, within the first 10 minutes of the VIP opening of her inaugural art fair, a prominent collector paid $400,000 for a crypto-themed work of art titled “Yellow Lambo,” by conceptual artist, Kevin Abosch. If So, What? has recently expanded into a new technology platform “XVERSO ” that brings together their community of artists, art professionals, art lovers and collectors through social media and art investments in NFTs and fractional shares. Sho strongly believes that education, both on art and investments, can be performed in a playful and communal way that is fun and open to everyone without any prior art history, extensive investment or software development experience. Sho is the former Head of Finance of online art marketplace Artsy, Director of Finance of 1stdibs, and former VP of Private Equity for Fortress Investment Group. Sho has a lifelong passion for the arts and intends to create a global platform for creativity both offline and online.

Tam Gryn is the Director of Fine Arts at Rally.io, where she helps artists create their own autonomous crypto economies. She is also Head Curator at SHOWFIELDS. She is the former Head of the Curatorial Department of the Artist Pension Trust as well as Head Curator for RAW POP UP. Tam has curated multiple art exhibitions as well as charity fundraisers. Clients and collaborators include The Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney Museum, UTA, Glossier, Heineken, Bankless, Evian, Mastercard, and SVA School of Visual Arts NYC. Originally from Venezuela, Tam studied Art History at the Sorbonne University, Politics at Reichman University and Negotiation at Tel Aviv University.

Absorbing the techniques prevalent in scientific field studies, explorer’s notebooks, and lushly illustrated natural history books, Walton Ford’s watercolors recast, reverse, and rearrange the conventions of wildlife art. 

Ford’s practice is research-driven, responding to everything from Hollywood horror movies, Indian fables, medieval bestiaries, colonial hunting narratives, and obscure zookeeper’s manuals. 

By shifting the point of view back and forth from human to animal; from informational to narrative; from scientific distance to passionate emotion; and from minutiae to monumental, Ford transforms his research materials into something akin to hallucinations. 

Ford’s visions are consistently of wild rather than domestic animals. His paintings seek to show us what it means for such animals to live not so much in nature as in the human imagination. 

Ford grew up in the Hudson Valley and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. He currently lives and works in New York City.

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present “We Are Family,” a group show which invites over a dozen contemporary artists to explore the concept of family – both those we are born into and those that we choose. “We Are Family” is co-curated by the Academy Provost Peter Drake and faculty member Clifford Owens, Director of the Department of Critical Studies.

The exhibition will be on view at the New York Academy of Art from February 1 to March 6, 2022. On Wednesday, February 23 at 6:30 pm EST, the Academy will present a panel via Zoom featuring participating artists Kathia St. Hilaire and Alison Elizabeth Taylor and moderated by Drake and Owens.

Peter Drake is the Provost at the New York Academy of Art. As a visual artist his work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US, China and Europe. He actively curates, lectures, and has 27 solo exhibitions to date. His work is held in private, corporate and public collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, Phoenix Museum of Art, MOCA LA, Weatherspoon Art Museum, L.A. County Museum, Microsoft, Kirkland and Ellis and the Progressive Collection among others. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a New York Foundation Fellowship and a Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program Grant. Drake’s Waiting for Toydot, a MTA Arts & Design permanent public art commission for the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) Massapequa Station opened to the public in 2015 and is seen by over 6,000 commuters daily. Drake maintains a studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn and is represented by Linda Warren Projects and Craighead Green Gallery.

Clifford Owens BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MFA, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Postgraduate, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Solo exhibitions: MoMA PS1 (Queens, New York), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Houston, Texas), Cornerhouse (Manchester, England), and others. Group exhibitions: Walker Arts Center, Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, Museum of Modern Art, others. Projects and Performances: Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Performa05 and Performa13, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and others. Collections: Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Art. Owens’s exhibition book, Anthology, edited by Christopher Y. Lew, includes contributions by Kellie Jones, Huey Copeland, and John P. Bowles. His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Bomb, The Drama Review, and New York Magazine. His writings have been published in The New York Times, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and Artforum. Owens is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William H. Johnson Prize, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Ralph Bunche Graduate Fellowship, and others. He was an artist in residence at Artpace (San Antonio, Texas), MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, New Hampshire), others. Owens was visiting faculty and critic at Columbia University, Yale University, Cooper Union, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

Kathia St. Hilaire currently lives and works in Brooklyn and South Florida and has received a MFA in Painting/ Printmaking at the Yale School of Art and BFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the 2019 recipient of the Jorge M. Perez Award. Recent New York group exhibitions include Tang Museum, Half Gallery, Perriton, Blum and Poe and Derek Eller. Kathia St. Hilaire – Interlaces elaborate processes and  personal narratives into her practice. Drawing from Haitian Vodun culture and her upbringing in a South Floridian Caribbean community, St. Hilaire’s interdisciplinary work is densely layered and evocative of traditional tapestry fabrics. Using relief printing techniques and oil based and metallic ink on sugar packaging and box braid packs, she elevates these discarded objects into meaningful materials, reflecting on the notion of beauty products as luxury commodities.

Kathia St. Hilaire, $2.49 Skin Lighting, 2018

Alison Elizabeth Taylor uses wood veneer marquetry, painting, and photography to create a new perspective on painting in a medium which she terms “marquetry hybrid.” Her work is included in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, NY, Museum of Art and Design, NY, Château de Nyon, Switzerland, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, National Academy Museum, NY, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, NY and in the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia. In 2017, she installed Reclamation, a permanent installation at Cornell Tech in NYC. Taylor has received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, a NYSCA/NYFA fellowship and a Smithsonian’s Artist Research Fellowship. Taylor lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2022, her work will appear in a traveling retrospective initiating at the Andover Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA and in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor, On Thinking Thoughts are Feelings, 2020