This landmark symposium brings together thought partners from across the United States to discuss systems of fine art education and their futures. Hosted by the Art Students League which has a nearly 150-year-history as an alternative art school, this day-long program comprising two panels addresses both traditional and non-traditional approaches to art education.
The first panel featuring representatives from full- and part-time degree and non-degree programs across the nation discusses a variety of pedagogical approaches and the realities of cost and logistics of art school. The second panel acknowledges that fine art education happens as much outside the classroom as it does inside and highlights programs that provide artists with opportunities to develop practical skills not acquired through curricula in fine art. Culminating in a keynote by artist Jeffrey Meris, who will speak on his experience in residency programs and their impact on his studio practice, this symposium will bring artists, administrators, and instructors together to explore what art education means today.
Doug Ashford (b. 1958, Rabat; based in New York) is an artist, writer and Associate Professor at The Cooper Union in NYC where he has taught design, theory, sculpture, and public art since 1989. Coming from a background of socially engaged public practice in the eighties and nineties as a member of the New York-based artist collective Group Material (1982-1996), Ashford took up painting in earnest after the collective ended. He has lectured internationally at numerous institutes and schools, and a selection of his writing has been collected in a publication produced on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Grazer Kunstverein in 2013: Doug Ashford: Writings and Conversations.
Dushko Petrovich Córdova works in distributed media as an artist, writer, editor, and publisher. He is a co-founder of Paper Monument and serves on the n+1 Foundation board; he is a professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he directed the New Arts Journalism program from 2016-2023 and was Interim Director of the Low Residency MFA program in 2023. He has also taught at Boston University, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University.
Patricia Cronin is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose paintings, sculptures and public art examine issues of gender, sexuality, and social justice. In 2002, Cronin created Memorial To A Marriage, the world’s first Marriage Equality monument. Cronin’s work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, including Shrine For Girls at the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy that traveled to The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; the LAB Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; and Catherijne Convent Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Other solo exhibitions were presented at the American Academy in Rome, and Centrale Montemartini Museum, Rome, Italy; Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans, LA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL. Cronin is the recipient of numerous awards including: the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and her work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Kelvingrove Art Galleries and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland, among others. She is Distinguished Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, CUNY.
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. Ms. Fawundu is a co-author/editor of the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. This book features over 100 women photographers of African descent from around the globe. Fawundu was featured in the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary film, In Our Mother’s Garden directed by Shantrelle P. Lewis. She was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Artist Grant as well as the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship amongst other awards. She received her MFA from Columbia University.
Robert Telenick is a realist oil painter with an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry/Studio Art from the University of Arizona. He worked on a BFA at Arizona State University and also completed an MPA in Nonprofit Management from Baruch College. Having worked at the Art Students League since 1990 in various positions, he currently serves as the Director of Programs.
Moderator:
Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013), which ARTnews named one of the best art books of the decade in 2019, and Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket, 2022), which was named an art book of the year by the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement. He has been Artnet News's National Art Critic since 2016. His writings have also been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Baffler, Jacobin, Slate, Salvage, e-Flux Journal, Frieze, and many other venues. In 2019, Nieman Journalism Lab reported that he was one of the five most influential art critics in the United States. He lives in Brooklyn.
Description:
Speakers will discuss their program’s curriculum and pedagogical approach, touching upon the realities of cost and logistics in light of the recent reorganization and closure of art schools around the country.
Kalia Brooks, PhD, is the Interim Executive Director and Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN. She is responsible for the design and delivery of curatorial exhibitions, public programs, artist projects, community engagement initiatives and the learning environment for the fellowship and apprenticeship programs. Her academic research covers art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on emergent technologies and African American, trans-Atlantic and diasporic cultures of the Americas. Brooks holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is co-editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2019 and 2022). She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and was an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York during the de Blasio administration.
Kate Gavriel is the Cultural Affairs Director at Walentas Family Foundation, the private foundation of the Walentas Family, known best for their Brooklyn-based real estate firm Two Trees Management Co. Since 2011, she has been instrumental in shaping the company’s arts and education initiatives, including overseeing the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, which offers yearlong free studio space to 17 visual artists in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
Her work includes curating public art commissions, developing cultural spaces, and providing affordable workspace for artists and arts nonprofits. Under her leadership, the Walentas Family has distributed over $4 million to public schools in Brooklyn, reinforcing the company's commitment to education and the arts.
Chiwoniso Kaitano is a champion of artists everywhere and joined MacDowell in 2023 to oversee the creative mission as well as the financial well-being of the nation’s first multidisciplinary residency program. Previously, Kaitano was Executive Director of the global gender-justice arts education NGO, Girl Be Heard and also served as executive director of Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, a 30-year-old NYC-based arts and culture organization. Kaitano is an avid traveler, having lived on three continents. She holds a law degree (human rights and the laws of war) from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs. Originally from Zimbabwe, Chiwoniso lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, the political theorist Andrew Sabl and their children.
Katie Sonnenborn is Co-Director of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Focused on emerging artists, Skowhegan’s residency program fosters experimentation and exchange between peers and with a renowned group of artists in residence and visiting artists. Sonnenborn helps shape all aspects of the school’s operation and vision, and has expanded its financial and programmatic capacity through an organizational strategic plan, a capital campaign, and a multi-year Master Facilities Plan. Previously Sonnenborn was Director of External Affairs at Dia Art Foundation where her responsibilities included spearheading land preservation efforts for iconic artworks in the American West, among them Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, and Michael Heizer’s City. She is on the Board of Advisors of The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College and the Oysterponds Historical Society, Orient, NY, and has served as a panelist for the NEA Artists Communities and other contemporary art awards. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Frieze and the Brooklyn Rail and she holds honors degrees from Dartmouth College (BA) and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (MA).
Moderator:
Julia Halperin is an arts and culture journalist, editor, and co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report, the largest report of its kind tracking equity and representation in the art world. She is a contributor to the New York Times, W magazine, and the Financial Times, among other publications. She also serves as editor at large of CULTURED magazine and a contributing editor to The Art Newspaper, where she writes a monthly column about changes and challenges in American art museums. From 2017 to 2022, she was executive editor of Artnet News.
Description:
Speakers will highlight their programs that provide artists with opportunities to develop their practice, network with curators and collections, as well as enrich their standards as professionals – many of the practical skills not acquired through curricula in fine art.
Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti, raised in the Bahamas) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with the relationship between materiality and larger cultural and social phenomenon. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing, Meris’s work considers ecology, embodiment, and various lived experiences, while healing deeply personal and historical wounds. Meris earned an AA in arts and crafts from the University of the Bahamas in 2012, a BFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in 2015, and an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2019. Meris has exhibited at Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts (2024); MoMA PS1, New York (2023); the Amon Carter Museum, Texas (2023); Lehmann Maupin, New York (2022); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2021); White Columns, New York (2021); the Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (2020); Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany (2017); and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, the D'Aguilar Art Foundation, and Mestre Projects, all in Nassau, Bahamas (2012, 2017, 2021). Meris is a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum (2019); a NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven (2020); and a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program artist in residence, Brooklyn (2021); and a Studio Museum in Harlem artist in residence 2022-2023. Always Jeffrey never "Jeff."
Moderator:
Christian Viveros-Fauné (Santiago, Chile, 1965) has worked as a gallerist, art fair director, art critic, and curator since 1994. He was awarded Bucknell University’s Ekard Visiting Fellowship in 2023, the University of South Florida’s Kennedy Family Visiting Fellowship in 2018, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Grant in 2009 and named Critic in Residence at the Bronx Museum in 2011. He co-founded The Brooklyn Rail in 1999, wrote art criticism for the Village Voice from 2008 to 2016, and was the Art and Culture Critic for artnet news from 2016 to 2018. He has lectured widely at institutions such as Yale University, Pratt University and Holland’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and curated exhibitions at leading museums in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. He was the Guest Curator of the 2023 Converge 45 biennial (Portland, OR) and currently serves as Curator-at-Large at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. He is the author of several books. His most recent, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, was published by David Zwirner Books in 2019.
Description:
A graduate of the University of the Bahamas, Tyler School of Art, and Columbia University, Meris is also an alum of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019); a NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven (2020); and a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program artist in residence, Brooklyn (2021); and a Studio Museum in Harlem artist in residence (2022-2023). His talk will address his experience in these programs and their impact on his studio practice.
Know Before You Go:
Classes are in session all day. The event will take place in Studios 15/16, Studio 13, and in the Gallery. Please do not enter any of our other studios; photography of our other studios is not permitted. Studios that are part of our event will be marked.
Bathrooms are available on the 1st floor, basement, and 3rd floor.
We have a cafe on the 3rd floor where you may purchase coffee, tea, pastries, and sandwiches.
We also have a drinking fountain and an art supply store on the 1st floor.
Enjoy free wifi throughout the building. Connect to ASLNY-Guest with the password guestbook
If you are unable to attend all panels in-person, each will be streamed online via our YouTube channel.
The sessions will be recorded and available for viewing on YouTube following the event.
Have questions? Email us at media@artstudentsleague.org
Featured Speakers
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Gallery
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Frequently Asked Questions
See below for frequently asked questions, or contact our clerks at 212-247-4510, ext. 6 or clerks@artstudentsleague.org.
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