Artists’ websites have replaced, to a great extent, the traditional art portfolio. Their advantages are significant. Anyone with an Internet connection can see your site at any time. With a website, you can combine unlimited amounts of text, images, and video seamlessly. A site can add a dimension to your creativity, showing others how you…
The Art Students League began awarding major grants to students in 1930. The Edward G. McDowell Travel Grant, earmarked for travel in Europe by unmarried students, was the first and continued to be the only cash award until 1995, when the Phyllis H. Mason Grant—for “traditional” painters—was established. In 1998, the Nessa Cohen Grants were…
The Art Students League’s annual Red Dot Exhibition consists of the best student work judged in weekly student concours during the past year. Now on view in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery is a group of over ninety paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media works, and installations that reflects the talent and diversity of the school’s…
Connections is a departure from my past student concours. We wanted to show how the class work is cohesive and how it interrelates. We are many things, after all, not just sculpture students working in one way. Connections offers a whole new way to see the sculptures. It is a single piece of art: a…
When I describe the invitation I received from Ogilvy & Mather to create a sculpture for the lobby of their worldwide headquarters two words come to mind — authenticity & serendipity. It was 2009 and the global advertising agency was moving their worldwide headquarters to 636 Eleventh Avenue on the far west side of midtown…
In 2005, while installing a show of my sculpture at the University of Maine at Machias, I encountered an intriguing object. Flanking the entry to Powers Hall, home of the art department and gallery, was a bronze statue of heroic-scale: a masterful female figure, nude from the hips up, posed on one knee. While it…
One night in 2001, on a visit to New York, I discovered the Art Students League. I was a tourist from Argentina—I had no plans to live in the city. Yet, as soon as I walked in the building, my hands warmed and I felt I belonged there. As I left 57th Street that first…
How to paint the city: Wander around a lot. The more aimless, the better. Buy a good camera and always carry it with you. Take many, many photos. When wandering look for the common, the unexciting, the ordinary. Take note of these scenes knowing that you will make them extraordinary. Look for the contrasts: bright…
His name was Jameson and I kept calling him Jason. His aunt had brought him to work that day, and I met him in one of my multiple trips to the kitchen to get coffee. He was playing with a Gameboy on the floor, while his aunt hustled between her desk phone and her computer….
