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

Join us for a frank discussion about the relationship between artists and money. This panel will explore facts, misconceptions, and fresh ideas on how artists are building careers and adapting to changes in the professional and economic landscape. New York Academy of Art Senior Critic and independent curator Dexter Wimberly will be joined by visual artists Amir H. Fallah, and Valerie Hegarty, and award-winning author, essayist, and literary critic William Deresiewicz (The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech).

Amir H. Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.

Valerie Hegarty (b. 1967, Burlington, VT) is a painter, sculptor, ceramicist, and installation artist based in NYC. Previous solo exhibitions include Malin Gallery (New York & San Francisco),the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, Nicelle Beauchene (New York), Marlborough Gallery (New York), Locust Projects (Miami), Museum 52 (London), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and Guild & Greyshkul (New York). She has completed public commissions for the High Line in NYC and the Brooklyn Museum, and her work is featured in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Perez Art Museum, the Saatchi Gallery, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Peabody Essex Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Tang Museum.
Valerlie Hegarty photographed by Weston Wells

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the best-selling author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. His most recent book is The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society is forthcoming in August 2022.

Bill has published over 300 essays and reviews. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and a Sydney Award; he is also a three-time National Magazine Award nominee. His work, which has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The American Scholar, and many other publications, has been translated into 18 languages and anthologized in 39 college and scholastic readers.

Charlotte Segall is an American painter and draftsman based in New York City.  Her interrogation of representational image making has led to key accolades; these include publication in New American Paintings and the Aesthetica Art Prize Anthology, fellowships issued by the Vermont Studio Center, The Triangle Arts Association, The Leipzig International Art Programme, and the Altos de Chavón School of Design, among others.  Segall was honored to receive funding for her MFA at the New York Academy of Art through the David Kratz & Gregory Unis Fund, President’s Scholars Award, and the Leslie & Francis Posey Foundation.­  Her work appears in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and Eileen Guggenheim, and has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Angerlehner Museum in Austria.

Kaitlyn Stubbs is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn. She earned her BFA from the University of Georgia (2010) and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art (2012). She has taught people of all ages and abilities in art museums for over a decade, including MFA Boston, MoMA, and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Last year, she completed the Eric Fischl ’66 Artist-in-Residence Teaching Program at West Nottingham Academy. She currently paints in her Brooklyn studio and has a solo show, Windows, on view with the online platform A Vision for the Future (AVFTF).

Jiannan Wu is an artist specializing in sculpture from Dalian, China. He is the Elected Member of American National Sculpture Society, member of American Medallic Sculpture Association, and World Economic Forum Global Shaper of Dalian Hub. Jiannan Wu received his BFA Degree in Sculpture from China Academy of Art and his MFA Degree in Sculpture from New York Academy of Art. Through formats of relief and diorama, Jiannan Wu presents the theme of contemporary urban life in a realism and narrative way.

Jiannan Wu is the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, winner of 2017 Dexter Jones Award presented by American National Sculpture Society,  winner of Compleat Sculptor Award, and other awards. He is selected as 2020 AACYF Top 30 Under 30 presented by All America Chinese Youth Federation. His work is recognized as The Best Original Sculpture in 2019 by Sculpture Magazine of China.  In addition, he was selected for Terra Foundation Residency in Giverny France 2015, ABC Stone Carrara Merit Award Residency in Italy 2016, and West Nottingham Academy Eric Fischl ‘66 Artist-in-Residence 2019 . His works have also been displayed on numerous exhibitions at renowned venues such as Accesso Gallery in Italy, Gallery Poulsen and Art Herning in Denmark, the Sotheby’s, Art Miami, and Southampton Arts Center in America, Bonner Kunstverein in Germany, Chongqing Contemporary Art Museum in China, etc. His works and art achievements have been published in The New York Times, The China Press, Metal Magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, Hi-Fructose Magazine, Collections Magazine, T(here) Magazine, etc. Jiannan Wu currently works and lives in New York City.

Artists often find themselves on the receiving end of intense criticism when they make so-called challenging work. This has been intensified by the current political climate and the effects of social media. Join New York-based painter and art critic, Walter Robinson and Senior Critic and independent curator, Dexter Wimberly for a frank conversation about censorship and freedom of expression in the visual arts.

Walter Robinson is a New York painter and art critic. His most recent exhibitions took place at Air de Paris in late 2021, and at Galleria Mazzoli in Modena, Italy, opening at the end of 2020. Galleria Mazzoli published a 500-page monograph on his work by Richard Milazzo, titled “A Kiss before Dying.” Robinson has also shown his paintings at Galerie Sébastien Bertrand in Geneva, Jeffrey Deitch in NYC, Pure Joy in Marfa, Charlie James in Los Angeles, Stems Gallery in Brussels, Inna Art Space in Hangzhou, China, and Vito Schnabel in St. Moritz, Switzerland. In 2017 his work was included in “Fast Forward: Work from the 1980s” at the Whitney Museum. As an art writer, Robinson was founding editor of Artnet Magazine (1996-2012) and of Art-Rite (1973-1977), and also wrote on art for Art in America, Artspace.com, the East Village Eye and the Observer. Robinson is credited with coining the term “Zombie Formalism” to describe a kind of process-based abstraction that became popular in the contemporary art market in 2014.