Show us YOUR Studio – MFA OPEN STUDIOS 2011
The New York Academy of Art is pleased to invite you to our annual MFA Open Studio event on Friday, April 29th from 5-9pm. On the heels of Tribeca Ball 2011, five floors and over seventy studios will be open to the public and will present an amazing array of artwork.
We’re so excited about our third annual Open Studios at the Academy that we want to share some studio love with everyone!
Show us YOUR Studio for a chance to win a free Academy t-shirt. Any and every studio will do! Email charis@nyaa.edu a picture of your studio, or upload a photo and tag it to the New York Academy of Art’s wall on facebook.
Your studio shot will be entered in a raffle to win a free Academy t-shirt. We’ll collect the photos in an album on facebook (tag yourself, too!) and then we’ll email the winner and announce it during Open Studios on April 29th!
Studio Shots: Cori Beardsley, Ramona Bradley, Nadene Grey Speer
Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet, part 2
The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present the next installment in this new series on our blog. Eric Telfort, a 2009 graduate of the New York Academy of Art, blogs with us about “keeping the brushes wet.†Eric will be speaking at the Academy as part of the Career Development Workshops on April 21, 1-2pm. Current Students and Alumni welcome to attend! Follow us as Eric writes about what it’s like to be a working artist.
Continued from the last post:
I imagine myself painting and discovering new paths and hidden alleys to “the piece†– the piece we all are chasing as artist. This piece is the piece that tells the world that you have it and have nothing left to offer. I feel as an artist I will always be chasing the truth on a 2-D plane. Like Juan De Pareja before me my dream is to create a truth that is unequivocal. I wake up at 3am paralyzed in bed thinking of the day ahead of me. I peer to my left and see a painting demo from the academy completed a year ago. I observe the subtle shifts of value, and the blind confidence in the brush work. I turn to my right and I see papers. Lots of paper. Loads of paper. Paper that has nothing to do with shifting tone, or creating the illusion of a lily pad floating on water that one does when painting a highlight on the eye.
I blink and the sun addresses me with a cold hello telling me I have to be at work in an hours’ time. Life beyond the Academy is not the fantastical world one imagined it would be after graduating. I mean, in looking back the Academy reminds me of Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr painting. There were amazingly beautiful women everywhere, and I was floating in a sea of artistic enchantment, and, without the pressure to work for money, and given the opportunity to keep my brushes wet. Wet with paint, not turpenoid as they have been for the last couple of months and counting. Gone are the days of being able to spend a day on an idea or carefully studying a head. Time is money now a days and I have neither. I wake up and proceed to my job as an AmeriCorps supervisor.
To be continued…
Studio Shots: Ian Healy, Guno Park and Elena Rodz
“I try to find ways to express pain and anguish in multiple depictions, primarily through animal forms, as people react differently to animals then humans. I try to see what can really evoke feelings of pain and emotion in people. In my work that incorporates human forms, I find the themes tend to be more personal.”
“My paintings are depictions of pure id creatures – running around the forest getting eaten by animals and making love in the moonlight.”
Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet
The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present a new series on our blog. Eric Telfort, a 2009 graduate of the New York Academy of Art, blogs with us about “keeping the brushes wet.†Eric is currently located in Rhode Island, but was able to experience a residency in Zimbabwe during the summer of 2010. Follow us as Eric writes about what it’s like to be a “working artist.â€
Wiggle the big toe. I spent a greater part of my winter vacation sidelined by a turf toe injury that left me ever so helpless. Was it an excuse to not paint? One would answer no. However for me it was different. Being able to dance after finding an unequivocal stroke that cannot be interrupted by another on a canvas is what makes the experience that more exciting. While many find the pleasure in finishing a piece, I find pleasure in the simple contact of a wet brush onto the surface of an unfinished piece. I can recall many a time where painting left me violently sexual wanting to create the most unimaginable pleasures to my ex-girlfriend. In those moments I had to walk away from the work and retreat to Call of Duty on my Playstation 3 to calm me down a bit. Finishing or completing the piece leaves me tired for the most part. There’s an overwhelming feeling of relief and hope when the toe decides to cooperate with my neural senses and inches towards me. I’m gaining my life back… well, sort of. It has been 6 months since I came back from Africa and I have yet to infect a canvas with my artistic thoughts. I have a job. A 9am to 6pm job that drains my energy slowly throughout the day and throughout the day all I think about is art.
To be continued…
Eric Fischl – AMERICA: NOW AND HERE
The Academy is honored and thrilled to share the news about Senior Critic Eric Fischl’s exciting exhibition:
From AmericaNowAndHere.org:
“America: Now and Here
began when the artist Eric Fischl invited a group of friends and peers, all leading visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers, to submit a work of art reflecting their points of view and hopes for America.
Fischl established a not-for-profit to share America: Now and Here with communities across the country through programs, media and a traveling multi-disciplinary exhibition and event.
America: Now and Here is positioned to launch a national dialogue about America through art, to spark local activities and fuel imaginations, and generate innovation from coast to coast.
Through this national creative experience America: Now and Here positions art as a catalyst for bringing people together to discuss important issues and big ideas relevant to what we hold dear: America.
This movement offers an unprecedented opportunity to the American public to engage with art, poetry, film, plays and music by more than 150 of our country’s celebrated artists.
Promoting creativity and innovation as the foundation of our society, America: Now and Here will invite participation through a cross-country tour, website and social media, public programs and youth engagement, publications and Artist Response.”
Find out more from The New York Times.
Studio Shots: Aleah Chapin, Holly Ann Sailors and Richie Fine
my artwork is beautifully haunted. By using vintage photography I am evoking memories of the past and creating a conversation with the present viewer.”
Richie Fine (Painting, Class of 2012):
Do you have your tickets yet?
Artists’ Talk: Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong
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| Yu Hong, Colorful World, 1992, 70×71 in., oil on canvas |
Join us for a very special visit from preeminent Chinese artists Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong. They will present a lecture on their work with curator and translator Michelle Loh.
The husband and wife pair both teach at the Central Academy in Beijing and have shown their individual artworks across the globe, with a recent solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery in New York (Liu Xiaodong) and Guangdong Museum of Art (Yu Hong). Liu Xiaodong’s work is in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Shanghai Art Museum, China and SF MoMA. Yu Hong’s work is in public collections including the Ludwig Gallery, Germany; the Dong Yu Art Museum, China and the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.
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| Liu Xiaodong, Hot Bed No. 1 (+4 others; set of 5), 102×393 in., oil on canvas |
Michelle Loh is a New York-based art consultant who specializes in organizing art fairs and group exhibitions. Michelle advises individual and institutional collectors about contemporary Asian art. Her most recent projects include FOCUS SHANGHAI: Two Contemporary Chinese video Artists at Thomas Erben Gallery, and Trans-Realism: Contemporary Art from China at Christie’s. She was part of the founding team of the Asian Contemporary Art Fair, New York, 2007 and 2008, and the co-publisher of Art Asia Pacific from 2003 to 2005.
All lectures are free and open to the public – we’d love to see you there!
The Armory Show
The 2011 Armory Contemporary Fair was an exciting and stimulating event in the face of today’s often uncertain art world. As an undergrad in NYC I had the chance to visit a handful of the other art fairs during Armory Week, but this was my first time visiting the Armory Fair. I and several of NYAA students decided to see Scope and the Armory Fairs together. Upon arriving at Pier 92 we were blown away by the sheer magnitude of it all. To access the Contemporary section you walk through part of the Modern fair and then descend from the catwalk. Booths extend as far as the eye can see, gallery after gallery laid out in front of you, it is daunting and exhilarating in the same moment.

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| Tony Oursler, Lehmann Maupin Gallery |
Visiting the Armory Fairs provides a taste of the Art World. It offers an insight into the machine that we are all a part of. For some of us the experience was a little frightening, being in the belly of the beast. Others were repulsed at the prospect of having to become a part of that reality.
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| Student Nic Holiber looking at work by Marc Sijan, Cuadro Fine Art Gallery |
Despite the overwhelming commercial vibe of the fair, the work itself definitely had a positive impact. I left the fair having seen some work by artists I’ve been following on my own, and the opportunity to speak to dealers about the artist’s process and studio practice was very exciting. Dressing the part of the collector allowed for some interactions that I otherwise would not have been privy too – and showed me that the art world is not as out of reach as it seems. The surprise on the dealer’s part when they found out that I was in fact an artist and not a potential collector was amusing.
The majority of the artwork was not mind blowing; it was similar to what we’ve been seeing the past few months in galleries, and based on the high level of publicity the show receives I think our group expected to see some extremely profound work. That said, some of the work on view clearly stood out of the crowd. The critic’s pick – Los Carpinteros – two Cuban artists who create objects and installations that comment on contemporary culture in a playful and often humorous way.

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| Mucho Caliente, 2010, Madera, metal. 213 x 128 x 28 cm. Colección Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres |

Contemporary painting was represented strongly by Irish and Scottish Galleries – particularly by the Irish gallery Mother’s Tankstation. Their booth was dominated by Mairead O’Heocha’s evocative landscape paintings of her daily experience in semi-rural Ireland.
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| Van and House, Bray, Co.Wicklow, 2009, Oil/board, 39 x 50 cms |
All in all, the experience showed us that the harder we work, and the better our work is, we actually have a chance of ‘making it,’ if the Armory Fair is a measure of making it. With our eyes on the horizon, I think it is safe to say that the art world eagerly awaits an equally exciting fair in the coming year.
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Jon Beer
Artist – http://www.jonathanbeer.com/
Director, Blind Artists Society