Artist and Author of a book on Public Art Commissions discusses her detailed methodology for winning and executing commissions, and how she makes a living making art.
“One thing I’ve learned is that we’re our own worst enemies because we work for free too much and we give ourselves away. You have to stop doing that because it lowers the bar for all the rest of us. It’s a strange economy we live in as artists.”
Lynn Basa, a professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, received for Master of Public Administration from University of Washington, Seattle. Her past commissions include Indianapolis International Airport; Seattle City Light Collection; AbsolutVodka; Walt Disney Company; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Basa is the author of The Artist’s Guide to Public Art: How to Find and Win Commissions.
70 minutes
World renowned photographer and teacher shares his ingredients for a successful art career and talks about the importance of building authentic relationships.
“You have to have authentic relationships. You have to, even when you’re being persistent, you have to be graceful. No one is going to show your work because you’re a persistent asshole. They might show your work if you’re persistent and graceful. It’s up to you to know the difference.”
Bey’s earliest photographs were in the style of street photography. His 5-year photo series documenting the people of Harlem titled Harlem USA was displayed at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Bey has lived in Chicago since 1997 and currently teaches at Columbia College Chicago. He has had numerous exhibitions worldwide such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his works were also recently included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work in 1995. Bey’s works are included in the permanent collections of museums around the world.
76 minutes
With a meteoric career, the artist, potter, singer and urban renewal visionary discusses his humble beginnings and his relationships to institutions and alternative spaces.
“I started asking questions about my art. Could art be a way that I could start to talk about some of the politics and the forces in the city in the absence of having money? Can I do something gestural that would help people understand some of these things that I see everyday – the lack of education, the lack of food, food resources… How do we activate that?”
Theaster Gates combines his art practice with his background in urban planning and sculpture. Recently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gates has received significant awards from major foundations. In 2010 alone, he performed and exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Armory Show in New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum; Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis; and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.
54 minutes
Prolific, civically involved sculptor Bob Emser shares his experience in the public commission market, discussing his intuitive growth as a business-minded artist, and how to approach a professional career like a work of art.
“I get invited routinely by rotaries and other groups to talk about something that I call ‘sculptural economics’; it’s basically facts about how putting a sculpture in your community will make it livelier and economically stronger.”
Bob Emser received an MFA (1978) from Bradley University. During his 25 year career Emser has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has served as a visiting artist and has taught and at several universities and held a tenure professorship for 14 years. He was the founder the Contemporary Art Center of Peoria and in 2004 he co-founded the Chicago Sculpture International and currently serves as the president. Emser serves on the board of directors of the International Sculpture Center and the prestigious Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park.
He received the prestigious Pollack Krasner Grant in 2010.
Artist, critic, curator and educator Michelle Grabner talks about balancing a regional focus with an international interest, and how she successfully integrated family life with her renowned art career.
“I see too much effort being placed on trying to kind of secure one’s location here in Chicago when one can work here and actually leave a more interesting footprint outside of the city.”
Michelle Grabner is a Professor and the Chair of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Painting and Drawing department. She earned her BFA (1984) and MA (1987) from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA (1990) from Northwestern University, IL. Grabner is the Director of The Suburban, a gallery in Oak Park, IL, and the Poor Farm, Little Wolf, WI. Grabner has exhibited in such venues as Tate St. Ives, England; Leo Koenig, NY; Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; Gallery 16, San Francisco; and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Her writing has been published in Artforum; Xtra and Frieze, in addition to many others. Her work can be found in collections around the world including DaimlerChrysler, Berlin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
A gifted painter and highly opinionated commenter on art today discusses creating art within a century long overview and the art world politics surrounding what has and has not served him well.
“I’m known in the art world as being one of the people that says ‘no.’ I like to say, ‘No, I don’t buy it’ and ‘No, I don’t believe in that.’ I disagree. I like to question authority.”
Chicago-based painter Wesley Kimler’s solo exhibitions include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Struve Gallery, Chicago; LA Louver Gallery, Los Angeles; and Barbara Kornblatt, Washington DC. His work can be found in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Northern Illinois University Art Museum, Dekalb, IL; and the Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL.
From graffiti artist to internationally museum-exhibited artist, Carlos Rolón’s conversation covers integrating a contemporary aesthetic with an art historical language, the artist’s experience at the Venice Biennale, and making work that people will talk about.
“I’ve been able to capture the idea of making something visually stunning and put it onto something that actually has a story and a discussion. That’s been a really important turning point in my life and in my career.”
Chicago-based artist Rolón has developed a unique practice creating his own language in a mixture of sculpture, paintings, and installation. His awards and honors include the Joan Mitchell Foundation award for Painting and Sculpture. Solo Museum exhibitions include: Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands. In 2007 Rolón represented Ukraine as one of five artists in the 52nd Biennale di Venezia.
Renowned painter, Mark Kostabi talks about his path to becoming one of the world’s most prolific and talked about artists, and also outlines his six rules for making it in the art world.
“A mistake that artists frequently make is that they think, ‘If only I could get a gallery to represent my work, then all my problems would be solved.’ The mistake is the singularity. They shouldn’t be saying, ‘If only I could get a gallery’; they should be thinking, ‘If only I could get ten galleries,’ because one is not enough.”
Mark Kostabi has been a significant figure in the contemporary art world since the 1980s, and his paintings are held in permanent collections around the world including Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. Retrospectives of Kostabi’s works have been held in Japan and Estonia, and he has been featured in a wide array of books, art publications, television programs and documentary films. Kostabi also hosts his own television show, The Kostabi Show.
The Chicago-based, multi-media artist talks about his work’s relationship to the history of Conceptual Art, and shares his personal experiences getting started in public art and making art that will get you noticed.
“How do you get noticed? And there’s something about public art that it’s very egalitarian, very democratic. You really have to make art for the people.”
Tasset received his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and his MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently a University Scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago where he is also the Associate Director of Studio Arts. Exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Camerawork, London, among others. Tasset was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. In 2010, the artist’s work entitled, Eye, was exhibited in Chicago’s Pritzker Park as the inaugural installation for Chicago Loop Alliances’ “Art Loop” initiative.
In this webinar, the Chicago-based painter Louise LeBourgeois shares the details of her rigorous studio practice, and discusses the ways in which narrowing her focus has had a profound impact upon her creative process.
“Right around the time I decided to start painting, I was still casting about for subject matter, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, I see the lake everyday, and water’s got to be one of the hardest things to paint.’ I told myself, ‘If I can paint water then I can paint anything.’”
Louise LeBourgeois is a Louisiana-born, Chicago-based artist whose paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States and in Italy. LeBourgeois earned her M.F.A. from Northwestern University in 1994, and has been the recipient of such honors as grants from the Illinois Arts Council and Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, and inclusion in Who’s Who of American Women. In 2005, LeBourgeois co-founded the ‘NOLA in Chicago Network’, a group advocating for the needs of New Orleans and New Orleanians. She currently teaches in the Art and Design Department at Columbia College Chicago.
An artist who took part in the very first Klein Artist Works course, René Romero Schuler talks about her career before and after the course, touching on topics like balancing several gallery relationships simultaneously, and arriving at the place where she can articulate her making process to a wider audience.
“What makes something really of interest to people is linking it to something that people can readily access. I realized that my work isn’t totally a personal journey… Relating my work to other things pulled me out of myself.”
René Romero Schuler is a full-time artist living in the Chicago-area, and has received numerous honors and commissions including a New York Public Art Commission, The DAP Fund in Houston, Texas, and Living the Dream- Top in the Arts Recognition, Chicago. Schuler exhibits her work regularly in Chicago and abroad, and she is represented by Chicago’s Jennifer Norback Fine Arts, Miami’s Mac Fine Art, Onessimo Fine Art in Palm Beach Gardens, and Galerie Beckel Odille Boicos, Paris.
Sculptor Josh Garber has been welding and working with a variety of metals for the past twenty years. Represented by the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Garber has had a number of public art works commissions completed, including the Chicago Transit Authority commission of his work, “Hope and Renewal” which was installed in 2007 at the Kimball Brown line station.
“It is too much to ask for a dealer to remember every single piece. I actually made a few sales because I filled in the blanks.”
In 2011, he was the recipient of the highly competitive Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant and is currently represented by a number of galleries beyond Chicago including: Melissa Morgan Fine Art, Winsor Gallery, Holly Johnson Gallery and Anne Reed Gallery. In this studio talk, Garber reviews his trajectory as an artist and the ways that his work has evolved from from installations and ceramics to his recent metal work and welding. Having participated in such prestigious residencies as Banff and the Kohler Industry and Art programs, Garber advocates the power of the artist’s residency and the learning potential behind public art works projects.
Emmett Kerrigan is a prolific Chicago artist whose practice is equal parts painter and woodworker. In the course of this studio visit, Kerrigan covers a number of topics regarding his process, his work and how he established his relationship with Chicago art dealer and gallery owner, Linda Warren. Additionally, he reveals his work as a day trader and its relationship to his art.
“Having someone lay down paint for you – that would drive me nuts.”
Over the last ten years, Kerrigan’s work has been in numerous solo shows in galleries and exhibitions across the Midwest. These include the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Union League Club and the Beverly Art Center. His work has been shown in group shows at ART Chicago, Judy Saslow Gallery and the Morlen Sinoway Atelier.
In this webinar, artist Josh Harker offers his advice for having a successful Kickstarter project and gives his tips for what does and doesn’t work for online fundraising. With his Kickstarter project, Harker joined the ranks of top Kickstarter campaigns and ultimately became the third largest funded arts campaign on the site to date.
Q: “Look at it [KickStarter] for what you can do within your own networks… it is more about breaking some rules and using it as a tool.”
Harker built a wildly successful marketing strategy and business plan for selling his work online. Along with his Etsy store, Harker’s work can be found in over 15 retailers around the world and has been featured in a host of publications including WIRED Magazine, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Huffington Post, PC World, 3D Artist Magazine, National Geographic, Popular Science and the Chicago Tribune.
Artist John Fraser discusses the long road from working in the commercial world to being a full-time artist, his transition from selling work in art fairs to gaining gallery representation, the value of MFA programs, and the logistics of working with galleries.
“You’re not ever going to secure representation by doing anything independent. I think that you can pursue a career and do it in a way that really indicates your talent, but I do think sooner or later you’ve got to commit to a partnership. Because you really cannot get the kind of exposure alone without having a gallery to really legitimize what you’re doing.”
John Fraser has been an exhibiting artist since 1980, having shown work in the United States, Germany, Spain, England, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, and Hungary. His work in drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media, and photography evinces a deep engagement with surface, geometric abstraction, formal relationships, and structural and material concerns. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from Arts Midwest / National Endowment for the Arts and The Illinois Arts Council. For over twenty-four years, he has been represented by Roy Boyd Gallery in Chicago.
Renowned artist Jason Middlebrook discusses the trajectory of building his career in the New York art scene to live solely off his work, balancing commissions with sales in commercial galleries and art fairs, financial planning for an irregular income, and balancing career and family life.
“When my themes got a little more universal––man vs. nature, man vs. debris, urban vs. rural––I think things expanded for me. When you start to address more universal themes, your audience gets bigger. When you stop trying to be so clever, your audience gets bigger, because your audience is always smarter than you are… When I took myself out of the identity of the work and started looking at broader terms, I started to get more success in terms of the way in which my work could be interpreted.”
Jason Middlebrook creates sculpture, paintings, drawings, and site-specific work combining aesthetic precision, a deep engagement with material, and a high level of craftsmanship. He completed an M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994, attended the Whitney Independent Study Program from 1994 to 1995, and was a resident in the IASPIS Residency in Stockholm, Sweden, from 2009 to 2010. Middlebrook is represented by galleries in New York, Chicago, and Stockholm, Sweden, and is based in Hudson, NY.
Artist and writer Joanne Mattera relates her long journey to becoming a fully self-supporting artist, courting New York City galleries, and her blog addressing marketing in the art world.
“My primary objective is to make good art in the studio––that’s 50% of it––and then the other part of it is to get that work from the studio and out into the world. For me, the way I do that is through gallery relationships… Those are my two goals: make it, sell it.”
Joanne Mattera has exhibited her encaustic paintings engaging color and geometric order extensively across the country for over twenty years and is represented by galleries nationwide. She earned an M.A. in Visual Arts from Goddard College in Vermont and a B.F.A. in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Mattera is the author of The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, 2001). She is currently based in Salem, MA, and lives part-time in New York City.
Groundbreaking computational artist Jason Salavon discusses innovating new media while sustaining a lineage from art history. In this studio visit, Salavon gives advice on simultaneously developing creative and business aspects of a career and relates his thoughts on grad school, building relationships with galleries, selling artwork, and teaching in a university.
“Find spaces where there aren’t crowds of people around you. Here’s what I mean by spaces: spaces for making. So if the hip thing to do is make this one kind of abstraction, I would avoid it like the plague… You get to be alone in a space and explore it on your own and figure it out, and hopefully, have the world come to you.”
Jason Salavon designs software processes to manipulate data and images sourced from popular culture and everyday life, resulting in the creation of photographic works, video installations, and software-based artworks. He completed a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin (1993) and an M.F.A. in Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997) and worked as a programmer in the video game industry for several years. He has been awarded a Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2000), and his work is held in many collections nationally, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Currently, Salavon is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Chicago.
In this studio visit, painter Keer Tanchak talks about engaging with art history, the evolution of her work and material processes, fostering relationships with galleries, using resources like the bimonthly publication New American Paintings, and the day-to-day struggle of growing a career.
“It’s about getting that work together and not waiting for it all to happen––because that’s never going to culminate in one moment [when you think] I’m ready––but in the meantime, what’s that step? Apply for that. Who was that person who said something about that? Okay, email them. Just baby steps. That’s how it goes.”
Canadian-born Keer Tanchak works with metal as a base for her irregularly shaped paintings inspired by Rococo imagery and engaging themes of leisure and frivolity. She completed a B.F.A. at Concordia University in Montréal (2000) and an M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2003), where she was awarded an M.F.A. Fellowship upon graduation. In 2009, Tanchak received the Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council. She is represented by DEAN PROJECT in New York City and lives and works in Chicago.
Sculptor Neil Goodman works with metal to create abstract forms linked to a modernist lineage and evocative of the Midwestern industrial landscape. Goodman invites Klein Artist Works into his home and studio to discuss materials and techniques as well as the many facets of a successful career: forming good work habits, maintaining an audience, budgeting for large projects, working with dealers, and his long teaching career.
“If you’re going to be an artist, you also need to be an audience, too. Because you want people to look at your work, and you have to make the effort to look at their work, too, and ask them questions. That goes a long way in terms of just developing those dialogues. And you’ll meet really interesting people, and you’ll learn things that you never thought you needed to know… It allows you to pose the questions to yourself that you need to challenge yourself in terms of your own work.”
Chicago-based sculptor Neil Goodman completed an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1979. Subsequently, he cofounded the art department at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, where he has been a professor ever since. His work has been collected in public and private collections and has appeared in numerous periodicals, including Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, and Sculpture Magazine. His many public commissions include permanent sculptural and wall installations at the Chicago McCormick Place South Pavilion, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and Indiana University Northwest. Goodman is represented by Perimeter Gallery in Chicago.
Pioneering experimental video artist Lincoln Schatz discusses the evolution of his practice from sculpture to new media and the importance of allowing his practice to change to find a unique voice. He addresses working both inside and at the edges of the art world, the ability to monetize his work, and the importance of professionalizing your practice.
“In any genre, in any kind of conceptual or aesthetic inquiry, there’s a conversation that’s going on. And the first thing you’ve got to figure out is, what’s the conversation, and where do I fit into it? What are my ideas? What’s the history of ideas? You have to completely understand that, because if you don’t, you really have no intrinsic way of doing something new, of really adding something to that history, of adding something to that field.”
Chicago native Lincoln Schatz works with non-linear narratives, multiple viewpoints, and random systems in software and video to create “generative video portraiture.” Among his best-known projects are the CUBE project (2008), commissioned by the Hearst Corporation to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Esquire magazine, and The Network (2012), a generative portrait of eighty-nine powerful figures in Washington, D.C., held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Schatz has lectured nationally and exhibited internationally. He completed a B.A. from Bennington College in Vermont (1986) and received a CORE fellowship to the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (1986–1987).
Internationally renowned artist Laura Letinsky invites Klein Artist Works into her studio to discuss her engagement with the still life genre and her choice of photography as a medium to create conceptual pictures, as well as her teaching career, balancing motherhood with being an artist, and gender inequity in the art world.
“My modus operandi is that you can try and make things that will sell––that could be your goal, to try to make things that will sell and to be successful and be like a super-stellar artist––but you might fail. And then, if you fail, you risk the chance of not even having done what you want to do. And so, having a kind of freedom in terms of teaching, to at least do what I want to do, and then, hopefully, having other people be interested in that, seemed to me a better option.”
Canadian-born Laura Letinsky is a tenured Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She completed a B.F.A. at the University of Manitoba in 1986 and an M.F.A. at Yale University in 1991. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is held in many public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Among her numerous grants and awards, Letinsky was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2000. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, and lives and works in Chicago.
Acclaimed artist and Chicago native Buzz Spector candidly addresses the challenges of being a teaching artist while also discussing his artmaking process, collecting artists’ books, and the synergy of his overlapping work as an artist, teacher, writer, and editor.
“I’ve had to wrestle with a problem that all teaching artists face… it puts you in the position of feeling like you need to be successful when you’re in your studio. And this is a terrible problem… A day in the studio when I’m really experimenting is a successful day, but it won’t necessarily result in successful work. Whereas, when I have to succeed, any problems that arise have to be gotten rid of instead of examined and looked over, and I believe that you’re at risk of losing some inspiration in that way, losing ideas that might otherwise take root.”
Buzz Spector is an internationally acclaimed artist who works with drawing, installation, photography, and most notably artists’ books and editions, using text as art and exploring the book as both subject and object. Spector completed a BA in art from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1972) and an MFA University of Chicago (1978). The same year he co-founded WhiteWalls, a magazine of writings by artists, which he edited until 1987. He is also the author of numerous catalog essays, articles, and books, including The Book Maker’s Desire: critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists’ books (Umbrella Editions, 1995). He has exhibited internationally, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Spector is the recipient of numerous awards, among which are an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005) and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1985, and 1982). He taught at Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of at Urbana-Champaign, and Cornell University. Spector is now the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Artist Jason Brammer and Erin Brammer, his wife and business manager, are partners in life and career. They discuss the logistics of their working relationship and strategies they have used to promote and sell Jason’s artwork and grow their career.
“Customer service… from our approach, you want to relieve any fears that they might have about buying your work… We’ll drive it over to your place, I’ll hang it on your wall, I’ll measure it out, it’ll be hung perfectly. You can even live with it for a week, and if you don’t like it in a week, I’ll give you your money back, you can say that. Nobody ever returns your stuff… Make it as easy as possible.”
Jason Brammer is a Chicago-based artist working in drawing, painting, and mixed media. His aesthetic involves meticulous draftsmanship influenced by steampunk and found and vintage materials. He has exhibited nationally, including at the University Club of Chicago, Firecat Projects (Chicago), and the Harrison Center for the Arts (Indianapolis). His work has appeared in such publications as The Huffington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Art Magazine. He has also been commissioned for several murals, including for LinkedIn and Dark Matter Coffee, as well as album artwork and concert posters. Erin Brammer has a background as a project manager for a financial company but quit the corporate world in 2007 to manage Jason’s art career full-time. They took a Klein Artist Works course in 2010.
Acclaimed sculptor David Middlebrook specializes in large-scale and site-specific work. He candidly speaks about his process and materials, working both with public commissions and private galleries, and the continued growth of his over forty-year career.
“Do the most extraordinary thing you can imagine, that you are personally able to pull off, and you make a noise. Somebody will come along and discover you, and before you know it, things can happen in a really good way.”
David Middlebrook’s sculpture is rooted in his background in ceramics but utilizes such materials as stone, marble, bronze, wood, resin, and more to create fanciful objects that seemingly defy gravity while remaining cognizant of their materials. He studied art as an undergraduate at Albion College (1966) and completed an MA in ceramics (1969) and an MFA in sculpture (1970) at the University of Iowa. In 1974, he accepted a teaching position at San Jose State University, where he continued to teach until 2010. Middlebrook’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally, and he will participate in the Venice Biennale 2013. He is represented by the McLoughlin Gallery in San Francisco.
Internationally renowned sculptor, installation artist, and environmental artist Alice Aycock discusses the relationship of art and ideas, the evolution of her creative process, public commissions, and cutting her artistic teeth in New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s.
“People have to realize if you’re in this, you’re in it for the long haul. You’re not always getting the limelight, but that doesn’t mean you’re not working, that doesn’t mean you’re not doing shows… Having a career in art, it’s the long haul.”
Alice Aycock is known for her large-scale, architectural, and site-specific sculptures bearing the influence of minimalism and conceptualism. Aycock studied at Douglass College, the women’s division of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, from 1964 to 1968, where many Fluxus artists were teaching at the time. She subsequently completed an M.A. under the direction of Robert Morris at Hunter College of the City University of New York (1968–71). As a young artist in New York, Aycock exhibited at 112 Greene Street, an experimental space run by Gordon Matta-Clark. Over the course of her long and prestigious career, Aycock’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII, and the Whitney Biennial. Her work is held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Aycock has taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York since 1991 and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore since 2010.
In this webinar, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave fields questions from Klein Artist Works participants, elaborating on his recent HEARD•NY project at New York’s Grand Central Terminal, as well as how he’s learned to incorporate assistants into his studio and how he was able to achieve major successes before even joining a gallery.
“Maybe you find a warehouse space or that you look into galleries that have downtime. It’s about looking around and seeing what is available, how you can make something happen, and not be waiting for a gallery to pick you up. It’s about continuing to find venues and finding ways to get your work out into the world.”
Nick Cave is a Chicago-based artist known for his iconic “Soundsuits,” his dynamic two-dimensional work and performative events, including HEARD•NY, a choreographed happening involving a herd of thirty colorful life-size horses presented by Creative Time at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Cave is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and has shown his work throughout the world including the Denver Art Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Center for Contemporary Culture at The Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy, and the National Academy Museum in New York, amongst many others. Cave’s work can be found in the holdings of museum and private collections around the country, and he’s also been the recipient of awards such as Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Artadia Award, Creative Capital Grant and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Cave received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
As an artist and educator, Sarah Krepp gives her advice on choosing the right gallery and how to nurture a mutually beneficial relationship with your dealer, while also sharing her story of successfully balancing parenthood, teaching and the studio.
“We’re so lucky to have our work because it takes us away from parts of ourselves, and also into wonderful areas of creativity and hope.”
Chicago-based artist Sarah Krepp has been a staple in the city’s art community since the 1980s, exhibiting in such venues as the California Museum of Art; the Hellenic American Institute, Athens, Greece; Dan Galleria, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Governors State University; and the Chicago Cultural Center amongst many others. Krepp is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Painting Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and for the past 11 years, she has run “Dialogue Chicago,” a post-graduate critique program for professional artists. Krepp is represented by Roy Boyd Gallery in Chicago, and received her Bachelor’s of Science, Art from Skidmore College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist Tom Knechtel talks freely about the dangers of becoming overly-committed to one medium, the ups and downs of working slowly, and why he considers sunny Los Angeles the “production center” of art in the United States.
“One of the only things that the art world can really give you is your peers. When you start becoming an artist you’re not promised you’re going to have a dealer, you’re not promised you’re going to have sales, you’re not promised the world is going to pay any attention to you. But the one thing you can do is, you can build a network of peers. And I’ve been bemused when I find artists who are so jealous of their peers that they can’t be close with them, that they can’t be friends with them. And I think those kind of friendships are very key, they’re very important, and you have to nurture them.”
Tom Knechtel was born in Palo Alto, California in 1952. He graduated with a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, after which he taught at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He also worked at the LA Weekly newspaper for twenty-five years, primarily in advertising design. Currently, he teaches at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Knechtel’s 2002 twenty-five year retrospective, On Wanting to Grow Horns, traveled from the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, North Carolina, to the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design; The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu; and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. His work sits in a number of prestigious collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Berardo Collection, Lisbon, Portugal; and the Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Sintra, Portugal. Knechtel lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art.
Chicago-based multimedia artist Gregory Scott talks about returning to the art world at age fifty, and the important basis of a personal vision in his complex, tromp l’oeil works.
“I think gimmick is a very, very useful tool. If you go to the art shows, you’ll see a lot of gimmick work. The problem is, a lot of it stops at the gimmick. It’s like, “Look what I can do.” One thing I’ve always done and always will do is make work that, even though there may be gimmick on the surface, that’s just to draw the audience in. Once they’re there, what they’re going to see can only be done by me.”
Gregory Scott is a multimedia artist working with photography, painting, installation, and video and is represented primarily by Catherine Edelman Gallery. Scott attended the Illinois Institute of Technology’s now defunct undergraduate Institute of Design school, a program founded by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937 as the New Bauhaus. After graduating with a degree in visual communications, Scott worked for approximately thirty years as a graphic designer, eventually opening his own design firm. Scott turned back to art when he began taking classes at the Evanston Art Center, and at fifty years old he began attending Indiana University for an MFA. Scott’s work has been widely collected, both from art fairs and gallery shows.
Brooklyn-based artist Mia Pearlman gives candid advice on a wide range of topics, from the concretes of corporate project design to the abstracts of maintaining a longterm career trajectory. Pearlman also discusses working in Europe, professional success and motherhood, and much more.
“Ultimately, what all artists have to confront is, your life as an artist is completely different from your career. The career is about ego, the career is about making money, the career is about having opportunities to to show your work. And those are all important things, but it has nothing to do with the quality of your work. And you can’t let your success or lack of success in your career affect the way you feel about your work, because the one thing really has nothing to do with the other. When I go to the studio I don’t think about my career, I think about my work. And I think when people let those two things get conflated, that’s when they start having real problems.”
Mia Pearlman was born, raised, and lives in New York City. She attended The High School of Music & Art before going to Cornell University for her BFA. Her work has been shown at such institutions and galleries as the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York), the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Alabama), Plaatsmaken (Arnhem, Netherlands), the Center for Recent Drawing (London, England), and the Manchester Art Gallery (England). Pearlman’s substantial press includes coverage in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Boston Globe, Elle Décor Italia, Grafik, Machina, Computer Arts, and PBS Thirteen’s SundayArts and NY1. She has been the recipient of an Artist Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2011), the Robert Clark Visual Arts Space Award (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2008), and an Established Artist Fellowship from UrbanGlass (2009).
New York-based painter Glenn Goldberg answers questions about the beginning of his career in the 70s and 80s, and his experiences finding the right gallery, including leaving a high-profile gallery to locate a better fit for his work and his goals. The artist also expounds on measuring success, both personally and professionally.
“I have an appetite. I’m always trying to grow and learn and be more courageous. With my last show in New York, I felt rather vulnerable… It wasn’t an easy thing, and that, to me, was a very valuable lesson.”
Born and raised in New York, painter Glenn Goldberg has exhibited widely over the past 30 years including exhibitions at Harvard University, Knoedler & Co. in New York, Pace Editions in New York, Galerie Albrecht in Munich, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Venice, CA. Goldberg’s work can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and he has been the recipient of such prestigious awards as the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Goldberg is represented by Jason McCoy Gallery in New York, Hill Gallery in Birmingham, MI and Linda Warren Projects in Chicago.
Renowned painter Vera Klement shares her energy with Klein Artist Works participants as she tells the story of her life, discusses the evolution of her artwork, and shares the value she places on intuition and the subconscious.
“I think artists are links in a chain. Unlike today, [when] it’s a more Oedipal thing: whatever is going on, you kill it off. And then you replace it with your own short-lived thing. And so it’s stop and start, and stop and start. And I prefer the concept of a chain that’s continuous. I want to be a link in a chain that has Cézanne in it…. Everybody’s in that damn chain.”
Vera Klement was born in 1929 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), an independent German Hanseatic quasi-state, and she immigrated with her family to New York City in 1938. She enrolled at the prestigious High School of Music and Art, where she studied Cubism, and after she attended Cooper Union, graduating in 1950. Klement, with her husband of the time, left New York for Chicago in 1964. She joined Participating Artists of Chicago (PAC) as the group’s Treasurer and in 1969 she began teaching at the University of Chicago, where she remained until 1995. She helped found Artemisia Gallery, an artist-run exhibition space dedicated to showing only women’s work, in the fall of 1973. Klement’s work sits in a number of major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and she has enjoyed retrospective exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and she has been recognized by the Union League Club as a Lifetime Distinguished Artist Member. Klement is the focus of the short 2010 documentary Blunt Edge. She lives in Chicago and shows with Zolla/Lieberman Gallery.
International artist and University of Chicago Department of Visual Art head Jessica Stockholder discusses the “unpredictable” nature of the market, and the importance of both talking about and not talking about one’s own work.
“The art world reflects the rest of the world: there’s a smaller and smaller group of wealthy artists being supported by lots of money, and there’s a smaller and smaller group of wealthy dealers, and there isn’t a lot of middle…. It’s sad that that world has become so difficult for people to enter, that the criteria have become so fashion oriented. You just never know. You just have to do what you really care about and then take stock of what the best way to interest the world with it is.”
Jessica Stockholder is a writer, educator, and artist who works primarily with painting and sculpture. Stockholder was born in Seattle in 1959 and grew up in Vancouver. She attended the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, then lived in Toronto for a year before going to Yale University for her MFA. After graduating, Stockholder moved to New York City. She began showing regularly and eventually accepted a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts. In 1999 Stockholder began teaching at Yale, and in 2010 she received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Emily Carr College of Art. The following year Stockholder moved to Chicago to become the faculty chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Art. Stockholder has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Her work has been collected by such institutions as the The British Museum, London; the Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Le Consortium, Dijon; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Stockholder has shown extensively in galleries, museums, and public locations. Her solo and two-person exhibitions have been at such spaces as Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Madison Square Park, New York; the Palacio de Crisal, Reina Sofia, Madrid; Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto; Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris; and White Cube, London. Stockholder will deliver the Keynote Address at the College Art Association’s 102nd conference in Chicago in February of 2014.
Renowned painter and sculptor Eric Fischl shares with the group the story of his career, from developing his unique voice amongst his peers, to finding and keeping the attention of an audience, and the details of his painting process including the commingling of the intuitive and the premeditated.
“I believe that you don’t choose to be a painter; you just choose to be a better painter. It’s a sensibility in the way a certain person processes information, and it comes through color and shape, and your hand…the way you connect to your feelings, and process and order your experiences.”
Eric Fischl is a New York based sculptor and painter, and the author of the recent book, “Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas,” which tells the story of his career as a renowned American painter. Fischl is best known for his provocative works which use the culture of the suburbs as a means to investigate modern America. Fischl’s work can be found in the holdings of such prestigious collections as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modem Art in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark, and MusÈe Beaubourg in Paris, amongst others. Fischl is also the founder, President and lead curator for “America: Now and Here,” a multi-disciplinary exhibition that addresses American identity through the arts. The artist is represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York, and received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts.
Season One “Work of Art” runner-up Peregrine Honig talks about her career before and after the television show, the inspiration that comes from her global travels, and the intersection of her life as a fine artist and a small business owner. She also engages in an in-depth discussion with the Klein Artist Works group about how a writing practice can help sustain a focused visual practice.
“Sometimes writing can keep me from making something goofy just because I can. It makes me take myself seriously. It’s important to have that way to be at peace with trying to sound intelligent.”
San Francisco-born, Kansas City-based artist, Peregrine Honig was the runner-up on the first season of Bravo’s “Work of Art” television program. Honig’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox, Buffalo, NY; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Honig’s work has been exhibited in such venues as Dwight Hackett Projects in Santa Fe; Geschiedle Gallery in Chicago; International Print Center, New York; Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. The artist recently produced a magazine titled Widow, in collaboration with Landfall Press, that explores the relationship between fashion and art. Honig studied at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Painter Todd Chilton describes how an apparently steady trajectory can be bumpier than it appears, and how happy coincidence and friendship are fundamental to his success.
“The consistent theme for me for the last eleven years, since I’ve been in Chicago, is to consistently make work—that’s 1—and 2 is to be friendly and make friends with people. I mean, people know if you’re just using them for art purposes, but if you’re genuinely interested as an artist in seeing other artists’ work, inviting other artists over to your studio—these are the things that have worked for me.”
Todd Chilton is a Chicago-based painter represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago) and Feature Inc. (New York City). Chilton was born in Chula Vista, California, near San Diego. Because of his father’s job in the air force, Chilton grew up at various locations across the country before ending up in high school in Maryland, making frequent trips to art museums in the District of Columbia. Chilton attended Brigham Young University where he began to concentrate on making art work, graduating with a BFA in 2002. Chilton moved to Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, where he lived with his in-laws while working as a stonemason and saving money for graduate school. In 2003 he moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), graduating with an MFA two years later. He spent time working as a part time instructor at SAIC and as the Assistant Director of Instructional Resources, and he currently teaches digital imaging and acts as Director of Educational Technology Advancement and Instructional Design. Chilton has participated in a number of prestigious group exhibitions, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago; Gallery of Contemporary Art at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis; Bellstreet Projects, Vienna, Austria; and Bourouina Gallery, Berlin, Germany. He has had solo and two-person shows at The Suburban, Oak Park; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Feature Inc., New York City. Chilton lives with his wife and three daughters
Multi-talented artist, writer, and non-profit director Adrienne Outlaw elaborates on strategies to win grants and engage the public. She and Paul also consider a classic question: what’s in a name?
“I think one of the things I do really well with my proposals—and I encourage all artists, or all business people to do it—is propose a win-win situation. I think a lot of the time artists say, “I want to do this, and you should give me some money because I’m an artist.” And that’s just not a good enough answer. I believe that in any proposal, if you’re going to come to somebody to show your work or sell your work or fund your work, you should say, “This is what I do and this is how it’s going to help your organization.”
Adrienne Outlaw is a Nashville-based interdisciplinary artist, a writer, a curator, an arts advocate, and the Founder and Director of Seed Space, a branch of the Nashville Cultural Arts Project. Outlaw was born in Orlando, Florida and raised in a number of locations across the Southeast. She attended the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) in Chicago to study fashion, and there discovered the Fiber and Material Studies program, developing an intense interest in materiality. Outlaw graduated from SAIC with a BFA in 1993, and from Vanderbilt University with a Masters of Liberal Arts and Science in 2004. She has reported on the arts for National Public Radio and a number of newspapers and magazines. As a curator, Outlaw has created the traveling exhibition TAKE CARE: Biomedical Ethics in the Twenty-first Century and ART MAKE PLACE, “a year-long program commissioning temporary, community and performance-based art for Nashville.” As the Director of Seed Space, Outlaw works to disrupt art world hierarchies by developing projects which pair together emerging and established artists, curators, and writers. Outlaw also runs Insight? Outta Site!, a program that connects nationally respected arts journalists with local artists, as well as a dedicated studio internship program. Outlaw is the recipient for a number of grants, both for Seed Space and for her own practice.
As an artist, Outlaw is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, and her own work belongs in such collections as that of the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria; Cheekwood Museum of Art; Tennessee State Museum; Wang Vision Institute; and WEHS-TV Chicago. She has has solo exhibitions at such spaces as Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, GA; University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC; LaGrange College, LaGrange, GA; Freed-Hardeman University, Henderson, TN; and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MA. She has also shown in group exhibitions in such spaces as the Parthenon Museum, Nashville, TN; the Phippen Museum, Prescott, AZ; the L.A. Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA; Translations Gallery, Denver, CO; and the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign-Urbana, IL. Her work has been widely reviewed, including in Art in America, World Sculpture, Art Papers, Sculpture, USArt, FiberArts, and Number: an independent arts journal.
Sharon Louden, a New York-based painter and animator, joins Klein Artist Works to talk about the power of being a cultural producer, the ways artists can support each other, and her wildly successful new book, “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists.”
“I think the artists who want something else besides staying at home, or painting by an easel, or whatever it is, they’re going to have to do something themselves to make that happen. I think that the artists who are doing more outside their initial practices are the one’s who are getting traction, who are making more inroads… I don’t see it as a division of a career either. Just because I’m doing all these different things—I’m curating, I’m doing a book, I teach—doesn’t mean I have all these careers. I have one career. I don’t see it as any different.”
Sharon Louden is a widely exhibited artist, an academic, and the editor of the book “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists.” Louden was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Olney, Maryland, near Washington D.C. She attended the School of the Art Institute for a BFA (1988) and Yale University, School of Art for an MFA (1991). Louden has participated in numerous group exhibitions and in solo exhibitions at such venues as Dee/Glasoe Gallery, New York City; Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York City; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Numark Gallery, Washington D.C.; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham; and Burnet Art Gallery, Minneapolis. She is represented by Beta Pictoris Gallery in Birmingham, AL; Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York City; and Patrick Heide Contemporary Art in London. Her work is in permanent collections such as that of the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, AT&T, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Corporate Headquarters.
Louden has also taught for over 20 years, including at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Massachusetts College of Art, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of North Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the Tyler School of Art. She is currently a Visiting Artist at the New York Academy of Art, where she teaches and organizes the Professional Practice Lecture Series. Louden sits on the Board of Seed Space and the Advisory Committee for the Cannonball Visiting Residency Program, and she is a founding member of the Arts Advisory Council for the New York Academy of Art. “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” (2013) is published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. It is #1 on Amazon.com’s Bestseller List of Business Art References and is on Hyperallergic’s List of Top Art Books of 2013. As of April 2014, the book is already in its fourth printing and Louden is on a national, 50+ stop book tour. Louden lives in Brooklyn with her husband, jazz musician and composer Vinson Valega.
Celebrated painted April Gornik delves into her work methods and the importance of maintaining a personal vision in this intimate and relaxed webinar.
“I’ve tried many time to imitate other artists whose work I admire…. But just trying to let myself do what I do—it’s not so easy for any artist—to accept that you have a certain kind of sensibility. I won’t even say style, because I think style comes from sensibility. It takes a lot to admit that and then let yourself do it, but I think that’s your best chance of becoming a real artist.“
April Gornik is a landscape painter based in New York and primarily represented by Danese/Corey gallery. Born in Cleveland in 1953, Gornik studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art as an undergraduate before transferring to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. At NSCAD she focused on conceptual art before discovering her love of painting. She graduated in 1976 and briefly taught painting as NSCAD and spent time traveling in Europe before eventually settling in New York. In the 1980s she became represented by Edward Thorp Gallery, where she remained until the late 1990s. Gornik began working with Danese gallery (now Danese/Corey gallery) in the early 2000s. Gornik’s extensive exhibition record includes nearly thirty-five years of solo shows at venues such as Edward Thorpe Gallery, New York; Danese, New York; Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York; Harley Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado; The University of the Arts, Philadelphia; Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto; The Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto; and Galerie Springer, Berlin. Selected group exhibitions included “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; “Mixed Greens” at Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; “Drawn to Cleveland” at Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; “New Old Masters” at the National Museum of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland; “The 237th Summer Exhibition, 2005” at the Royal Academy, London, England; “The Tree” at James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai; and the American Pavilion at the 1984 Venice Biennale. Selected public collections in which Gornik’s work belongs include the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the United States Embassy, Beijing; the United States Embassy, Moscow; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
In this extra-length webinar, candid teaching artist Dannielle Tegeder gives advice on a plethora of topics, from speaker’s fees and free studio spaces to the difficulties of parenthood for artists.
“When artists are showing 10, 20, 30, 40 years there’s a lot of things that happen in your career, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of different relationships, and maybe a lot of different types of work you make. For me, it’s about really pushing and evolving your work and making good work. Because, when I’m (hopefully) 80, or 90, or 100 years old, I want to be able to look back and say to myself, ‘I made authentic work.’
Dannielle Tegeder is a Brooklyn-based artist working with painting, drawing, installation, animation, and sound-based art. Born in Peekskille, New York, Tegeder received her BFA, with a focus on painting, from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1994. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, and she remained in Chicago for approximately ten years before moving to New York City for a studio space courtesy of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. She has since participated in a number of residencies, including ones in New York City organized by SmackMellon, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Wave Hill, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Henry Street Settlement, as well as ones outside New York organized by the Yaddo Foundation (Saratoga Springs, NY), Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff, Canada), the Triangle Foundation (Durham, NC), and Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL). She has been a visiting artist at over forty institutions, including the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brandeis University, Princeton University, Rice University, and California College of the Arts. Tegeder has held full-time teaching positions at Cornell University and SUNY Purchase. She currently serves as Associate Professor of Art at the City University of New York at Lehman College.
Tegeder has had solo shows at such venues as the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY), the Knoxville Downtown Gallery at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN), Gregory Lind Gallery (San Francisco, CA), the Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery at SUNY Purchase (Purchase, NY), Herter Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA), Müller De Chiara (Berlin, Germany), Galerie Xiappas (Paris, France), and Arrónis Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including ones at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Beta Pictoris Gallery (Birmingham, AL), Islip Art Museum (Islip, NY), Lombard Fried Gallery (New York City, NY), PS1/MoMA (New York City, NY), the Brooklyn Museum of Art (Brooklyn, NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland), De Hallen Haarlem (Haarlem, The Netherlands), and Galerie Baer (Dresden, Germany). Tegeder currently maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation, and she is married to Mexican conceptual artist Pablo Helgeura and has a young daughter. She also operates the website MOMTRA for art parents.
Experimental artist and entrepreneurial brainiac Lincoln Schatz explains how working with corporations can lead to great creative freedom that working with galleries. Schatz also makes a case for how the art world has yet to catch up with today’s artists.
“We’re all small business owners, and as a small business owner you’ve got to hustle, you’ve got to look for those opportunities. I think that the former model that used to exist, which I refer to as the fairy tale—that, you know, the gallery provides, the gallery takes care [of everything]—I just don’t buy that.”
Lincoln Schatz is an interdisciplinary contemporary artist based in Chicago, where he lives, works, and hosts conversations at The Arts Club. Born in 1963, Schatz graduated from Bennington College with a Bachelor of Arts. In 1986-1987 he received a CORE fellowship to the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Schatz eventually turned from a sculptural practice to one that integrates video, performance, architecture, and new media technology. He is especially known for CUBE (2008), a series of video portraits commissioned by Hearst Corporation for the 75th anniversary of Esquire magazine and THE NETWORK (2012), a new media portraits of influential individuals in Washington D.C. Both projects belong to the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Schatz has also had work commissioned by Qualcomm Corporate Headquarters in San Diego, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, and the major Shanghai art collector Pearl Lam. Schartz is also a creative consultant for a number of corporations.
Holistic artist and educator Roberto Rivera inspires in this webinar about personal voice and creativity as approached through music, collaboration, and education.
“We all have needs of living, and loving, and learning, and leaving a legacy. What I’m trying to do is figure out how do I meet my needs, and how do I meet the needs of my community. And some people embody meeting these needs in an artistic and amazing way.”
Roberto Rivera is an artist, educator, and the President and Lead Change Agent of The Good Life Organization. As a teenager Rivera was labelled as an “at-risk” and “disadvantaged” youth, but several key educators and youth workers helped him to change his life. He earned his undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he created his own major, “Social Change, Youth Culture, and the Arts.” He continued his education with a masters degree at University of Illinois at Chicago in Youth Development with a focus on Social Justice, Urban Education, and Hip-hop. Currently he runs The Good Life Organization, a group that publishes multi-media educational tools and trains educators, youth workers, and parents in connecting positive youth development to community development. Rivera is a Ph.D. student in Educational Philosophy, a husband, and a father.
Inspirational photographer and speaker Camille Seaman insists that artists can build their own path to success through a mindful awareness of true goals. She also speaks about parenthood, our connection to nature, and the importance of being able to slow down and truly look at the world.
“I find so many artists not only undersell themselves but they don’t believe in themselves. I have to tell you, each one of you, that what we are is we are special. We alter reality so that it is different. We offer a vision that doesn’t exist. That’s not only a gift, it’s mystical. You have to own that. Own it as a calling. Own it as a passion.”
Camille Seaman, a member of the Shinnecock Tribe, is a documentary/fine art photographer whose work focuses on the “fragile environment of the Polar Regions.” Currently based in California, Seaman was born in Huntington, Long Island in 1969. She attended the prestigious High School of the Performing Arts in New York City, where she was introduced to a number of museum and private collections and began making photographs. Seaman then attended the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase College, graduating in 1992. At age 32 she began to focus on a photography career, leading her to study with such renowned professionals as Steve McCurry, Sebastião Salgado, and Paul Fusco. Seaman has now worked within over 30 countries, and has been published in numerous sources, including National Geographic, Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times Magazine, Camera Arts, and PDN. She has self-published several books, including My China and Melting Away: Polar Images, through Fastback Creative Books, a company she co-founded. In 2011 she became a TED conference Fellow, and in 2013 a TED conference Senior Fellow and a Stanford University Knight Fellow. Her awards include the Critical Mass Top Monograph Book Award (2006), National Geographic Award (2006), Nikon.Net Editor’s Choice Award (2006), and an artist’s residency onboard M/V Orlov in Antartica (2007). In 2008 she received a solo exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. for her project The Last Iceberg.
International artist Markus Linnenbrink talks with Klein Artist Work participants about the value of having a balanced life, being driven by one’s own passion, and getting away from the siren song of stardom.
“Early in my career things were a little frustrating. You know, I was like, ‘Damn! I’m never getting this grant or that grant… I’m not showing here, I’m not showing there…. So I thought, ‘You know what? I’m just going to cancel all my Art Forum subscriptions and I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh, god, my show wasn’t reviewed,’ or whatever. I let go of all of that. It was a very personal decision, but for me a very healthy decision because it freed me to focus on what I do and not get too tight. Because desperation—you know, you can smell desperation. You can smell it on the dealer’s side, and the dealer can smell it on the artist’s side, or the curator’s or whatever. And it’s not a good odor.”
Markus Linnenbrink is an international artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Linnenbrink was born in the industrial city of Dortmund, Germany in 1961. He studied for three years at the University of Kassel before moving to Berlin, where he completed his degree at the Academy of Arts. For the past twenty-five he has been able to work as a full-time artist. Linnenbrink’s extensive exhibition history includes shows at such venues as the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Kong Tomlinson Contemporary, New York; number35, New York; Roy Boyd Gallery, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Galerie Fiedler Contemporary, Cologne; Märkisches Museum, Witten, Germany; Museum Neue Galerie, Kassel; The Columns, Seoul; and Ana Serratosa Gallery, Valencia. Linnenbrink is represented by Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gallery in New York, Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, taubert contemporary in Berlin, and Galeria Max Estrella in Madrid. Prints of Linnenbrink’s work are available through Center Street Studio in Milton Village, Massachusetts, as are editions through the online-based Maharam Digital Projects.
Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson speaks about the politics of art reception, what it’s like to live and work between different countries, and how her love of making motivates her.
“My passion for making is what drives everything else because fame is fleeting. And all these other things, like having a show right now—nobody may even be interested in showing my work in twenty years! I have to make sure that the work is what really gives me gratification.”
Ebony Patterson is a Jamaican artist represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and an Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Ebony Patterson was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She began drawing, painting, and experimenting with craft-oriented art works in high school. Patterson earned an Honors Diploma in Painting from the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking and Drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Huffington Post, Art Papers, Art Nexus and The International Review of African American Art. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues such as Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Frost Art Museum, Miami; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), Brooklyn; Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C.; the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston; and Kunsthale KAde Amsersfoot, The Netherlands. Her work has also been featured in solo exhibitions at such venues as Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; See Line Gallery, Los Angeles; the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville; the National Gallery of Bermuda, Hamilton, Bermuda; and Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago.
Respected Chicago painter Judy Ledgerwood generously shares her formalist, feminist convictions in this webinar, explaining her efforts to shock the phallocentric art world by painting with pink.
“I’m really interested in instability. I’m interested in instability formally—because I think it’s more exciting, because the paintings aren’t as static—but I’m also interested in instability because it seems like a more appropriate form for what’s going on in the world right now.”
Judy Ledgerwood is a painter, as well as the Alice Welsh Skilling Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Born in the small town of Brazil, Indiana, Ledgerwood was brought up by public school teacher parents who placed an emphasis on creativity. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1982 and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. Ledgerwood is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; 1201PE, Los Angeles; Concept Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; Tracy Williams Ltd., New York; and Häusler Contemporary, Munich and Zurich. Her works belongs to the collections of such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles; and the Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee. Ledgerwood has been exhibiting in group shows since at least 1987, and in solo shows since at least 1989, including at such locations as Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston; the Graham Foundation, Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago; Feigen Contemporary, New York; The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago; Richard Green Gallery, Santa Monica; and Scott Hanson Gallery, New York. Ledgerwood is married to successful artist and University of Illinois at Chicago professor Tony Tasset.
Cuban activist, artist, and frequent detainee Tania Bruguera describes the importance of using art to destabilize systems of power.
“It’s extremely complicated [in Cuba] but that’s why, more than ever, artists should be working there.… I like the idea that art can create a different order of things so people can think differently about what’s happening.”
Tania Bruguera is a performance artist who prefers the term “initiator.” Born in Havana, Cuba in 1968, Bruguera attended the Instituto Superior de Arte art school from 1987-1992. She then moved to Chicago where she earned a Master in Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001. Since then Bruguera has taught at The University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she is the founder/director of Catédra Arte de Conducta, a performance art school located in Cuba. She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (1998), and has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan (2002); Headlands Centers for the Arts (1998); Fundación Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Maracay (1998); Art in General (1997); and ART/OMI (1995). Major exhibitions of her work have appeared at the Van Abbemuseum (2014); Queens Museum (2013); National Museum Wales (2012); Havana Biennial (2010, 2003, 2000); Neuberger Museum of Art (2010); Venice Biennale (2009, 2001); Tate Modern (2008); Moscow Biennial (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006); Shanghai Biennial (2004); Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta (2002); San Francisco Art Institute (2002); SITE Santa Fe Biennial (1999) and the São Paulo Bienal (1996). Tania Bruguera lives and work between New York City and Havana.