January 24
Aschely Vaughan Cone
Aschely Vaughan Cone was born in San Antonio Texas and received an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2016), an MA in Art History from Tulane University (2014) and BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (2007), where she studied classics and philosophy and the history of math and science. Her awards include a matching scholarship for study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the SMCM-MICA Artist House Teaching Fellowship, the Hamiltonian Fellowship and The Henry Walters Traveling Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include Doublets, Gotham West, Uprise Art, New York, NY, in 2021 and Pulse Miami Beach, Uprise Art, Miami, FL in 2018. From Cone’s feature in Yale University Radio’s The Museum of Non-Visible Art, “The various types of images in Aschely Cone’s work are unified insofar as they all share a meditation on the idea of ground—as something that underpins or is beneath something else, something that we notice persisting in the face of, or even because of, change, something as simple as the ground we stand on, or something a bit more intangible like what grounds us metaphorically.
Her current project, “The Ground Beneath the Ground”, thinks about ground as earth or dirt. In these small panels the image is often situated within a low-relief, sculptural niche on the ground of the support itself. Images of the land are depicted—often images of volcanoes, or images gathered from a long-distance solo hike in Northern New Mexico.”
February 7
Valerie Hegarty
Valerie Hegarty received an MFA (2002) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA (1995) from San Francisco’s Academy of Art College and a BA (1989) from Middlebury College, VT. She is a Brooklyn-based artist who makes paintings, sculptures and installations that explore issues of memory, place and history. Starting with a personal inspiration, Hegarty seeks out poetic connections between her personal history, art history and current events.
Hegarty relishes the materiality of her process, incorporating a range of materials such as canvas, wood, Foamcore, paper-mache, epoxy and ceramics. Her large-scale installation work incorporates a process she calls “reverse archeology” in which layers of painted paper are adhered to the walls and floors of the gallery and then scraped back to create a material memory of a space. Hegarty's canvases and sculptures that replicate paintings and antiques from early American art history are presented as ruined by devices associated with their historical significance. Although representational, her works contain surprising juxtapositions and uncanny transformations where materials and meanings are constantly shifting.
Solo exhibitions include Malin Gallery, Nicelle Beauchene, NY; Marlborough Gallery Chelsea; Locust Projects, Miami; Museum 52, London; The MCA in Chicago; and Guild & Greyshkul, NY, among others including a commission for a public sculpture on the High Line, NY and a show of site-specific installations in The Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms. Selected group exhibitions in NY include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, D’Amelio Terras Gallery, Derek Eller, White Columns and MoMA PS1. Hegarty has been awarded numerous grants through foundations such as the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2x grantee), The New York Foundation for the Arts (2x grantee), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and Campari NY.
Residencies include LMCC, Marie Walsh Sharpe, PS 122, MacDowell, Yaddo and Smack Mellon. Hegarty was the first Andrew W. Mellon Arts and the Common Good Artist-in-Residence at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey from 2014-2015. Hegarty is represented by Malin Gallery.
February 14
Ann McCoy
Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor and painter who received her BFA in 1969 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her MA in 1972 from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a working artist as well as an educator and art critic who writes frequently for the Brooklyn Rail. She is a lecturer at Yale in the graduate design division of the Yale School of Drama, where she teaches art history, the history of projection, and mythology. She has written about artists working with projection including William Kentridge, Nalini Malini, Lenore Malen, Carolee Schneemann, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
She is known primarily for her large-scale pencil drawings, which are based on her dreams, studies in alchemy, and depth psychology. Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has a background in Jungian psychology, archeology, and philosophy. She has worked on alchemical texts at the Palazzo Corsini, and Vatican Library in Rome. The artist began sculpting in bronze at the Kansas City Art Institute at sixteen, and continues to work in the medium. During her year on the Prix de Rome, she worked on large winged tubs at the Mariani Foundry in Pietrasanta. Her large-scale projection pieces have included “Conversations with Angels” at the Majdanek Museum in Poland. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D., and the New Talent Award of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has shown work in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, and has had one-person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Poland, and Berlin. In 2019 she had a solo show at GRIDSPACE, New York.
February 21
Karen Schiff
Karen Schiff received an MFA in in Studio Art from the School of the Museum Fine arts at Tufts University, Boston, 2006 and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (with Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1998.
Schiff’s drawings, paintings, installations and performances play with sensory dimensions of language and haptic experiences of space. They have been exhibited at galleries and museums in New York, around the US and in other countries, and her works are held in public, private and corporate collections. Recent shows include Out of Joint: Small Drawings, Nano Gallery, District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington, DC in 2019 and Drawing Challenge, Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, NY, 2021. Her writings have appeared in Art in America, Hyperallergic, and on the blog she created with another artist from a Yaddo studio residency, Wallscrawler. Her publications tend to focus on issues about art and language, artist Agnes Martin and complexities of identity in art. She has received multiple rewards and residencies, most recently attending the Core Fellowship Program (critic), Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX, 2021-2022.
The artist wrote about her series of drawings, Viral Drawings: Transmission BC (Before Corona)/ QT (Quarantine Time)/ AV (After Vaccines) – “This exposition reflects on the drawings I was making at different stages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially they are compared to my long-term practice of making abstract drawings patterned on language, and then they are used to theorize a "poetics of transmission." This framework is discussed in relation both to how the virus is transmitted and to how ideas are created and circulated. Various analytical interpretations of the drawings are considered. At some moments, I treat dots in the drawings like ideas or virus particles; at other moments, the strategies I use for connecting the dots represent the process of generating ideas. The drawings become tools for the "research" of thinking through physical and intellectual contagion.”
March 7
Bob Nickas and John Miller
Bob Nickas (b. 1957) is a writer and curator based in New York. He has organized over 120 exhibitions since 1984. As Curatorial Advisor at MoMA/PS1, between 2004-07, he mounted monographic exhibitions for Lee Lozano, Stephen Shore, and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as projects with Trisha Donnelly and Torbjørn Rødland. He served on the teams for the 2003 Biennale de Lyon and Greater New York 2005 at MoMA/PS1, contributed a section to Aperto at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and collaborated with Cady Noland on her Documenta IX project in 1992. He was founding editor of Index magazine. His books include Painting Abstraction: New Elements In Abstract Painting, and four collections of writing and interviews: Theft Is Vision, Live Free or Die, The Dept. of Corrections, and Komplaint Dept. He is one of the authors of Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years In 200 Pivotal Artworks, No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989, and Brand New: Art & Commodity in the 1980s. Most recently he has published essays in books on Vija Celmins, Robert Grosvenor, Steven Parrino, and Josh Smith.
John Miller (born 1954, Cleveland, OH) is an artist, writer, and musician based in New York and Berlin. He received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1978, and received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Miller has had several solo museum exhibitions, most recently in 2016 a mid career survey "I Stand, I Fall" at the Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA, Miami curated by Alex Gartenfeld. The exhibition "brings together some 75 works that trace Miller’s use of the figure throughout his career in order to incisively comment on the status of art and life in American culture." Other solo museum exhibitions include one at the Museum Ludwig Cologne (2011) in conjunction with his being awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, a mid career retrospective at the Kunsthalle Zürich (2009), the Kunstverein in Hamburg (1999), Le Magasin in Grenoble (1999), and MoMA PS1 in New York (1998). His work was included in the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2005 and in the 2010 Gwangju Bienniale, 10,000 Lives. In 2014, his artwork was included in the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition, "The Human Factor: the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture." Miller's work is in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, as well as private collections and foundations like the Rubell Museum in Miami, Sammlung Ringier, Switzerland, Sammlung Schürmann, Aachen / Berlin and the Sammlung Falkenberg in Hamburg.
March 21
Ann Craven
Ann Craven was born in 1967, Boston, MA and lives and works in New York. She received her MFA in 1993 from Columbia University, New York and her BFA in 1986 from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.
She is known for her lush, serial portraits of the moon, birds, and flowers, as well as her painted bands of color. After completing each work, she dates and titles each palette, rendering it a unique and isolated index of her process. Craven’s predilection for the copy—both from referent photographs and from her own plein air paintings—is both an homage to Pop Art and an exploration of remembrance. As she explains, “My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that is constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.” Craven presented her first retrospective, titled TIME and curated by Yann Chevalier, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, Flowers (Watercolors) (2022); Karma, New York (2021); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine (2019); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2019); Karma, New York (2018); Southard Reid, London (2017); Maccarone, New York (2016). Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, among others.
April 4
Jarrett Earnest
Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018); editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988- 2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, 2019), The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955 (David Zwirner 2020), Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980-1993(Soberscove Press, 2021) and Devotion: today's future becomes tomorrow archive (PUBLIC books, 2022); curator of "Closer as Love: Polaroids 1993-2007: Breyer P-Orridge" at Nina Johnson, Miami (2019) "The Young and Evil" (2019), "Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP" (2021), and "Jesse Murry: Rising" (with Lisa Yuskavage) (2021) (all at David Zwirner, New York) as well as "Ways of Seeing: Three Takes of the Jack Shear Drawing Collection" (The Drawing Center, New York 2022) and "The Formless Body" (Olga Korper, Toronto 2022).
He was faculty liaison at the free experimental art school BHQFU (2014-2017) running the MFU:NYC (Fall 2016) and MFU: MIAMI (Spring 2017). Earnest was Critic-in-Residence at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (spring 2016; fall 2017; spring 2020) and the Kennedy Family Artist and Scholar in residence at the University of South Florida (fall 2022). He has been a fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Fall 2014) and the Key West Literary Seminar (Summer 2017) residencies, a Director's Guest at Civitella Ranieri (Fall 2019), and critic in residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency (Summer 2022). In 2012-13 he ran the collaborative exhibition space 1:1 (pronounced "one to one") with artists Leigha Mason, Alex Sloane and Whitney Vangrin at 121 Essex Street, NYC. In 2021 Earnest was awarded a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin prize for visual arts journalism.
April 11
Jason Stopa
Jason Stopa (USA, b. 1983) is a painter and writer living in Brooklyn. He received his BFA from Indiana University Bloomington and his MFA from Pratt Institute in NYC. Stopa paints works that engage with the potential of gestural abstraction in the digital age. Although he attributes techniques and forms from the history of painting, his paintings are situated in contemporary culture, where the analog and digital are intertwined. Carrying the notion that painting is “about color as light and light as space,” Stopa creates works such as Green Window (2018) that have arranged colorful forms over a simplified layout of defined lines and opaque colors obscuring the viewer’s perception of foreground and background. His works convey happiness and positivity, praising the color’s powerful capabilities. Created with immediacy, Stopa quickly applies layers of oil paint with large strokes that call into question the urgency of creating and viewing when viewers are spammed in virtual imagery. His inclusion of impastoed areas reminds the viewer of the painting’s physical existence and materiality and not a momentary digital creation.
Recent solo shows include Joy Labyrinth at Morgan Lehman in NYC (2021) and Hanging Gardens at Atelier W Pantin in France (2019). Group exhibitions include Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation, at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, CA (2021), Light (curated by Rico Gatson) at Miles McEnery Gallery in NYC (2021), What's It All About at Jenkins Johnson Projects in Brooklyn (2021), and The New New at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2015). Stopa teaches at Pratt Institute and is a contributing writer to Hyperallergic, Momus, and artcritical, among other art journals. Hyperallergic writes “Stopa’s desire for joy and the belief that painting can deliver this state is sincere. What is interesting about his ambition is that he has been able to mix sophistication and innocence without privileging either one. Living in a world of disillusionment, a society of failed and false promises, and an art world periodically punctuated by declarations of the death of painting — all evidence of our embittered state — it is difficult to believe that painting is capable of transporting us to a state of bliss, however brief, much less attaining it. But this is exactly what Stopa achieves in Jason Stopa: Joy Labyrinth, at Morgan Lehman (May 13–July 31, 2021), his debut exhibition with this gallery.”