Sidebar

The New York Academy of Art is focused on connecting it students and their unique skill sets with established artists and their studio practices in the form of apprenticeships and mentorships. Apprenticeships give Academy students direct access to the studios of established artists and a professional outlet to apply their unique skills. Mentorships bring established artists to our students’ studios to provide feedback over their time here at the Academy.

In the past, these artists have included:

John Alexander · Barry X Ball · Hugo Bastidas · Lesley Dill

Rachel Feinstein · Jeff Koons · Damian Loeb · Alexis Rockman

Current Artist Advisory Council Members
John Alexander Born in 1945 in Beaumont, Texas, Alexander remained in southeast Texas until entering graduate school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1969. Upon completing an MFA in 1970, he moved to Houston, established a studio and became a member of the art faculty of the University of Houston. In the late 1970’s Alexander left Texas for New York where he is to this day. The artist currently divides his time between New York City and Amagansett. John Alexander has exhibited extensively in the United States and around the world, most recently in Beijing. He has had a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. His work is included in the permanent collections of leading museums including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Dayton Institute in Ohio, the Dallas Museum of Art; The Meadows Museum in Dallas, The McNay Museum in San Antonio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nevada Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as many other distinguished public and private collections worldwide. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Ali Banisadr Born in Tehran in 1976, Ali Banisadr grew up during the Islamic revolution and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. In 1988, he and his family left Iran, first to Turkey and then to California. In 2000, he moved to New York City where he currently lives and works. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2007. Since his first solo exhibition in 2008, Banisadr has exhibited in the United States and abroad. The artist’s work has been featured in many international group shows, including “Love Me/Love Me Not: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and Its Neighbors” at the Venice Biennale (2013). Banisadr’s works are in important public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The British Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Will Cotton Will Cotton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts and raised in New Paltz, New York. His education includes studies at the Beaux Arts in Rouen, France, the New York Academy of Art and a Bachelors of Fine Art degree from Cooper Union in New York City. He has been represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York since 1999. He exhibits with Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO; Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France, and Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany. His paintings have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art (2000); the Seattle Art Museum (2002), the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2004); the Hudson River Museum (2007); the Triennale di Milano, Italy (2007) the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (2008) and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. Cotton’s work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Washington and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, as well as many prominent private collections. Other projects have included a pop-up French bakery at Partners & Spade, New York. Cotton recently served as the artistic director for the California Gurls music video for pop singer Katy Perry. Cotton lives and works in New York. Cotton is the subject of a new monograph, published by Rizzoli, USA. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Eric Fischl Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents had moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. Fischl’s suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content. His early work thus became focused on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. His first New York City solo show was at Edward Thorp Gallery in 1979, during a time when suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. He first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. Fischl has collaborated with other artists and authors, including E.L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz and Frederic Tuten. Eric Fischl is also the founder, President and lead curator for America: Now and Here. This multi-disciplinary exhibition of 150 of some of America’s most celebrated visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers is designed to spark a national conversation about American identity through the arts. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Natalie Frank Natalie Frank is an American artist currently living and working in New York City. Frank earned her BA in Studio Art from Yale University in 2002, and her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2006. In 2003, Frank earned a Fulbright Scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, Norway. She has also studied at the L’École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris in 2001, and the Florence Academy of Art in 2000, among others. In her oil-on-canvas and mixed-media paintings, Natalie Frank plumbs human nature, seeking to convey, through her roiling, lush, and visceral compositions, the complexity and mutability of identity. As she describes: “The narrative—the stories that people tell and use to construct their lives, whether it be religious, humanistic, mythical, social, was and is my entry point in painting and the figure.” Frank, who has been called a “painter’s painter”, draws inspiration from literature and art history, and cites the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, Italian Renaissance painting, the German and Austrian Expressionists, and R.B. Kitaj as influences. Her works—ranging from small-scale portraits to large narrative scenes—are centered on the human figure, rendered semi-abstract and in heighted physical and emotional states. Frank is a storyteller. Through her bold, dramatic handling of paint, she reveals the struggle of being human. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Hilary Harkness Hilary Harkness, who exhibits with the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California-Berkeley (where she studied biochemistry and art) and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art. A former professional violinist, she honed her unique artistic worldview while living in San Francisco, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, and the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum. Harkness has been featured in publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview magazine, and Esquire. She has taught painting and sculpture as Artist in Residence at Yale Summer School of Art and Music, and lectured widely at institutions such as Columbia University, Boston University, Yale University, Brandeis University, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Hilary also blogs for the Huffington Post and the New York Academy of Art. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Michael Joo Michael Joo’s work investigates the concepts of identity and knowledge in a hybrid contemporary world. He creates narratives that explore places, people and objects through reinterpreting perception: why do we perceive as we perceive. Joo’s non-linear, almost cyclical approach to his practice together with his combination of scientific language and research, results in work that is a documentation of process. Whether chemically treated, silver-coated or photo-based, Joo’s artwork combines a range of techniques associated with sculpture, painting, photography and print-making. He continues to blur the boundaries between art and science through his investigation into ontology, epistemology and entropy; creating a cross-disciplinary and multi-dimensional dialogue to engage, question, meditate and explore. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Damian Loeb Damian Loeb (born 1970) is a self taught American painter. Growing up in Connecticut, he moved to New York City in 1989. Loeb had his first solo show in 1999 at the Mary Boone Gallery. He is now represented by Acquavella Galleries in New York and has had international solo and group shows at galleries and museums, including White Cube in London, Jablonka Galerie in Cologne, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and a 2006 retrospective at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut. His work has consistently explored the dialogue of narrative tropes in an image soaked contemporary environment. Early works used found imagery collaged to create new contexts from photojournalism and advertising. Successive shows moved on to use and explore cinematic stills as the source of a visual collective consciousness. Having taught himself photography in recent years, his latest body of work takes the dialogue to the next step by incorporating the vocabulary of cinematography and the expediency of his original photographs as inspiration for the new paintings. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Enoc Perez Born in San Juan in 1967, Enoc Perez first took painting lessons at the age of eight. As the son of an art critic, he spent family vacations traveling to museums in different countries and learning about the history of art. In 1986, Perez moved to New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute before earning his master’s degree at Hunter College. Finding himself at odds with the program at Hunter, where students and faculty criticized his paintings as overly seductive and decorative, Perez maintained his belief in the importance of the aesthetics and pleasure in art. Embracing art’s potential for pleasure and beauty, Perez paints sensuous nudes, still lifes, tropical resorts, and modern architectural icons in a sleek aesthetic with dazzling, vibrant colors. Perez is best known for his paintings of modernist buildings that nostalgically capture the utopian ambitions and optimism that inspired their construction. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Alexis Rockman Born in 1962 in New York, where he lives and works, Alexis Rockman has depicted a darkly surreal vision of the collision between civilization and nature – often apocalyptic scenarios on a monumental scale — for over three decades. Recent notable museum solo exhibitions include “Alexis Rockman: Manifest Destiny” at the Brooklyn Museum, in 2004, which traveled to several institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design and the Wexner Center. The Smithsonian American Art Museum organized “Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow,” a major touring survey of his paintings and works on paper in 2010. Concurrent with Rockman’s exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 2013, the Drawing Center featured “Drawings from Life of Pi.” The artist had collaborated with director Ang Lee on the prize-winning film “Life of Pi,” preparing conceptual sketches of a dreamlike journey into the depths of the ocean to serve as visual inspiration. Rockman’s work is represented in many museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Orleans Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. http://www.ArtistLink.com
Bosco Sodi Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City) is known for his richly textured, vividly colored large-scale paintings. Sodi has discovered an emotive power within the essential crudeness of the materials that he uses to execute his paintings. Focusing on material exploration, the creative gesture, and the spiritual connection between the artist and his work, Sodi seeks to transcend conceptual barriers. Sodi leaves many of his paintings untitled, with the intention of removing any predisposition or connection beyond the work’s immediate existence. The work itself becomes a memory and a relic symbolic of the artist’s conversation with the raw material that brought the painting into creation. Sodi’s influences range from l’art informel, looking to artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet, to master colorists such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and the bright hues of his native heritage. http://www.ArtistLink.com

Current Artist Advisory Council Members

John Alexander

Born in 1945 in Beaumont, Texas, Alexander remained in southeast Texas until entering graduate school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1969. Upon completing an MFA in 1970, he moved to Houston, established a studio and became a member of the art faculty of the University of Houston. In the late 1970’s Alexander left Texas for New York where he is to this day. The artist currently divides his time between New York City and Amagansett.

John Alexander has exhibited extensively in the United States and around the world, most recently in Beijing. He has had a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. His work is included in the permanent collections of leading museums including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Dayton Institute in Ohio, the Dallas Museum of Art; The Meadows Museum in Dallas, The McNay Museum in San Antonio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nevada Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as many other distinguished public and private collections worldwide.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Ali Banisadr

Born in Tehran in 1976, Ali Banisadr grew up during the Islamic revolution and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. In 1988, he and his family left Iran, first to Turkey and then to California. In 2000, he moved to New York City where he currently lives and works. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2007. Since his first solo exhibition in 2008, Banisadr has exhibited in the United States and abroad. The artist’s work has been featured in many international group shows, including “Love Me/Love Me Not: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and Its Neighbors” at the Venice Biennale (2013). Banisadr’s works are in important public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The British Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Will Cotton

Will Cotton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts and raised in New Paltz, New York. His education includes studies at the Beaux Arts in Rouen, France, the New York Academy of Art and a Bachelors of Fine Art degree from Cooper Union in New York City.

He has been represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York since 1999. He exhibits with Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO; Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France, and Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany. His paintings have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art (2000); the Seattle Art Museum (2002), the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2004); the Hudson River Museum (2007); the Triennale di Milano, Italy (2007) the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (2008) and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

Cotton’s work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Washington and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, as well as many prominent private collections.
Other projects have included a pop-up French bakery at Partners & Spade, New York. Cotton recently served as the artistic director for the California Gurls music video for pop singer Katy Perry. Cotton lives and works in New York.

Cotton is the subject of a new monograph, published by Rizzoli, USA.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents had moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. Fischl’s suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content. His early work thus became focused on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. His first New York City solo show was at Edward Thorp Gallery in 1979, during a time when suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. He first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. Fischl has collaborated with other artists and authors, including E.L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz and Frederic Tuten. Eric Fischl is also the founder, President and lead curator for America: Now and Here. This multi-disciplinary exhibition of 150 of some of America’s most celebrated visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers is designed to spark a national conversation about American identity through the arts.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Natalie Frank

Natalie Frank is an American artist currently living and working in New York City. Frank earned her BA in Studio Art from Yale University in 2002, and her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2006. In 2003, Frank earned a Fulbright Scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, Norway. She has also studied at the L’École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris in 2001, and the Florence Academy of Art in 2000, among others. In her oil-on-canvas and mixed-media paintings, Natalie Frank plumbs human nature, seeking to convey, through her roiling, lush, and visceral compositions, the complexity and mutability of identity. As she describes: “The narrative—the stories that people tell and use to construct their lives, whether it be religious, humanistic, mythical, social, was and is my entry point in painting and the figure.” Frank, who has been called a “painter’s painter”, draws inspiration from literature and art history, and cites the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, Italian Renaissance painting, the German and Austrian Expressionists, and R.B. Kitaj as influences. Her works—ranging from small-scale portraits to large narrative scenes—are centered on the human figure, rendered semi-abstract and in heighted physical and emotional states. Frank is a storyteller. Through her bold, dramatic handling of paint, she reveals the struggle of being human.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Hilary Harkness

Hilary Harkness, who exhibits with the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California-Berkeley (where she studied biochemistry and art) and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art. A former professional violinist, she honed her unique artistic worldview while living in San Francisco, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, and the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum. Harkness has been featured in publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview magazine, and Esquire. She has taught painting and sculpture as Artist in Residence at Yale Summer School of Art and Music, and lectured widely at institutions such as Columbia University, Boston University, Yale University, Brandeis University, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Hilary also blogs for the Huffington Post and the New York Academy of Art.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Michael Joo

Michael Joo’s work investigates the concepts of identity and knowledge in a hybrid contemporary world. He creates narratives that explore places, people and objects through reinterpreting perception: why do we perceive as we perceive. Joo’s non-linear, almost cyclical approach to his practice together with his combination of scientific language and research, results in work that is a documentation of process. Whether chemically treated, silver-coated or photo-based, Joo’s artwork combines a range of techniques associated with sculpture, painting, photography and print-making. He continues to blur the boundaries between art and science through his investigation into ontology, epistemology and entropy; creating a cross-disciplinary and multi-dimensional dialogue to engage, question, meditate and explore.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Damian Loeb

Damian Loeb (born 1970) is a self taught American painter. Growing up in Connecticut, he moved to New York City in 1989.

Loeb had his first solo show in 1999 at the Mary Boone Gallery. He is now represented by Acquavella Galleries in New York and has had international solo and group shows at galleries and museums, including White Cube in London, Jablonka Galerie in Cologne, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and a 2006 retrospective at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut. His work has consistently explored the dialogue of narrative tropes in an image soaked contemporary environment. Early works used found imagery collaged to create new contexts from photojournalism and advertising. Successive shows moved on to use and explore cinematic stills as the source of a visual collective consciousness. Having taught himself photography in recent years, his latest body of work takes the dialogue to the next step by incorporating the vocabulary of cinematography and the expediency of his original photographs as inspiration for the new paintings.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Enoc Perez

Born in San Juan in 1967, Enoc Perez first took painting lessons at the age of eight. As the son of an art critic, he spent family vacations traveling to museums in different countries and learning about the history of art. In 1986, Perez moved to New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute before earning his master’s degree at Hunter College. Finding himself at odds with the program at Hunter, where students and faculty criticized his paintings as overly seductive and decorative, Perez maintained his belief in the importance of the aesthetics and pleasure in art. Embracing art’s potential for pleasure and beauty, Perez paints sensuous nudes, still lifes, tropical resorts, and modern architectural icons in a sleek aesthetic with dazzling, vibrant colors.

Perez is best known for his paintings of modernist buildings that nostalgically capture the utopian ambitions and optimism that inspired their construction.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Alexis Rockman

Born in 1962 in New York, where he lives and works, Alexis Rockman has depicted a darkly surreal vision of the collision between civilization and nature – often apocalyptic scenarios on a monumental scale — for over three decades. Recent notable museum solo exhibitions include “Alexis Rockman: Manifest Destiny” at the Brooklyn Museum, in 2004, which traveled to several institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design and the Wexner Center. The Smithsonian American Art Museum organized “Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow,” a major touring survey of his paintings and works on paper in 2010. Concurrent with Rockman’s exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 2013, the Drawing Center featured “Drawings from Life of Pi.” The artist had collaborated with director Ang Lee on the prize-winning film “Life of Pi,” preparing conceptual sketches of a dreamlike journey into the depths of the ocean to serve as visual inspiration. Rockman’s work is represented in many museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Orleans Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art.

http://www.ArtistLink.com

Bosco Sodi

Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City) is known for his richly textured, vividly colored large-scale paintings. Sodi has discovered an emotive power within the essential crudeness of the materials that he uses to execute his paintings. Focusing on material exploration, the creative gesture, and the spiritual connection between the artist and his work, Sodi seeks to transcend conceptual barriers. Sodi leaves many of his paintings untitled, with the intention of removing any predisposition or connection beyond the work’s immediate existence. The work itself becomes a memory and a relic symbolic of the artist’s conversation with the raw material that brought the painting into creation. Sodi’s influences range from l’art informel, looking to artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet, to master colorists such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and the bright hues of his native heritage.