ASL Instructors
Five paintings by James Little are now on view in The Lobby Gallery, 449 Park Avenue, part of the exhibition James Little: Beyond Geometry, Selections. The brochure includes an essay by Mario Naves.
Elizabeth Clement Contemporary is presenting Bruce Dorfman: The Object of Painting, a solo exhibition of the work of instructor Bruce Dorfman, at the Hamptons Virtual Art Fair, September 2–October 13, 2020.
Instructor emeritus Knox Martin is being honored by the Arlington Museum of Art with a solo exhibition of work. Knox Martin: Living Legend is installed over three floors of the museum and includes thirty-eight paintings, one sculpture, one collage, and a series of twenty-five tomato watercolors, work that spans fifty years of his career. The show opened July 18 and continues through October 11, 2020. Take a peek at the first floor of the exhibition in this video.
Scholarship + Shows
Victor Deupi, a lecturer in architectural history at the University of Miami, has published a study of ASL alumnus Emilio Sanchez. Deupi, who spent time researching at the Art Students League, “considers Sanchez in the wider context of mid-century Cuban artists, and cross-cultural exchange between New York, Cuba, and the Caribbean. In his book, Emilio Sanchez in New York and Latin America, he reflects on why Sanchez chose to be a mobile observer of the American and Caribbean vernacular at a time when such an approach seemed at odds with the mainstream avant-garde.” Two hundred of Sanchez’s drawings, that provide an important basis for this study, are part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ongoing: Learn more about how the Art Students League provided fertile ground for the Mexican remake of American art in the Whitney’s online presentation of Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art. This exhibition includes work by ASL alumni Will Barnet, Charles Alston, Harry Sternberg, Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock, Xavier Gonzalez, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, Eitaro Ishigaki, Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish, Fletcher Martin, Edward Millman, Seymour Fogel, Emil Bisttram, Philip Evergood, Marion Greenwood, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Burck. Read more about the exhibition in this LINEA review or watch a presentation with Whitney curator Barbara Haskell.
Community Programs
In partnership with NYC Parks, Seeds of the League is offering two free workshops at the Beach 17th Street Park (Rockaway Beach, Queens), in August. Abstracting Nature is scheduled for Thursday, August 6, at 5 p.m. Abstract Portraiture is scheduled for August 20, at 5 p.m. Both will be led by Seeds instructor Niko Lowery. Find out about upcoming Seeds workshops in NYC Parks this summer, part of their “Arts, Culture & Fun Series,” as well as other Seeds of the League programs.
On View
Joseph Delaney’s painting Lobby of the Art Students League hangs in the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture, in the artist’s hometown of Knoxville, TN. And if you look closely, you will notice it offers more than just a record of life in the lobby at the Art Students League. To the right of the Seated Hermes (an 1893 gift of Andrew Carnegie to the American Fine Arts Society) and flanked by two sets of portrait heads, is instructor Robert Philipp’s Homage to Sargent (1956). The painting is one of many by Philipp in the Art Students League’s permanent collection. In this group portrait, Philipp depicted (standing, from left) former Executive Director Stewart Klonis, artists John Carroll, Sidney Dickinson, and himself, and seated, Louis Kronberg, Ivan G. Olinsky, Robert Brackman, and Shelley Post (Mrs. Robert Phillip). Also notice within the scene a sketchy canvas on the wall from which the painting derives its title. That’s John Singer Sargent’s Self-Portrait of 1892, from the collection of the National Academy of Design.
