School of Visual Arts' MFA Fine Arts program is adding 16 artists and curators to its faculty, including Stephanie Cunningham, Matthew Deleget , Tsibi Geva, Mark Thomas Gibson, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Kalup Linzy, Omar López-Chahoud , Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Sheila Pepe, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Dread Scott, Accra Shepp, Lumi Tan, Jasmine Wahi and Caroline Woolard. The new faculty will expand the offerings of the program under the leadership of its chair, Mark Tribe.
L to R: Caroline Woolard, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Accra Shepp, Stephanie Cunningham, Mark Thomas Gibson, Omar López-Chahoud, Jasmine Wahi, Dread Scott, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Lumi Tan, Kalup Linzy, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Tsibi Geva, Sheila Pepe and Mathew Deleget.
“We are thrilled that our students will have the opportunity to work with these remarkable artists and curators,” said Tribe. “The addition of these new faculty will further broaden the range of our already-diverse program. They were chosen for their expertise in fields and frameworks that are relevant to our students, including activism, African American art, craft traditions, feminism, inclusive curatorial practices, Latinx art, museum education, performance, photographic documentation, queer art, representational painting, sculpture, socially engaged art and social media.”
The new faculty include:
Stephanie Cunningham, co-founder and creative director of Museum Hue, works to advance the visibility and viability of people of color, utilizing museums, the arts and cultural institutions, as a medium for discussion.
Matthew Deleget is an artist, curator, and arts worker. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Bass Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a co-founder and co-director of Minus Space.
Tsibi Geva is one of Israel’s most prominent and influential artists. He represented Israel in the 2015 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Anina Nosei Gallery, MACRO Testaccio in Rome, the Haifa Museum of Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Orangerie Herrenhausen in Hannover, Palazzo Reale Milan, Martin-Gropius-Bau and El Espacio Aglutinador.
Mark Thomas Gibson is a painter whose work has been exhibited at Anahita Art Gallery in Tehran, Fredericks and Freiser, Motus Fort Gallery in Tokyo, Salon 94 and Susan Inglett Gallery.
Genevieve Hyacinthe teaches art history with particular focus on art since 1945, West African art and its Diaspora, performance art and ritual, and issues of globalism. Her current manuscript in development reconsiders the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ana Mendieta and their political activism in paint and performance in 1980s New York.
Kalup Linzy is a video and performance artist who was born in Stuckey, Florida and is now based in Brooklyn. His best-known work is a series of politically charged videos that satirize the conventions of the television soap opera. In summer 2010, Linzy appeared on the long running ABC soap opera General Hospital alongside James Franco in a story line that incorporated performance art. His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Prospect.1 New Orleans, the Rubell Family Collection, MoMA PS1, and the Hessel Museum of Art. His work is in the collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, Art Matters and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is releasing on a new comedy short series with James Franco later this year.
Omar López-Chahoud is an independent curator. He has been the artistic director and curator of the Untitled art fair since its founding in 2012.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects the paradoxes of growing up in the Caribbean. Her work combines performance and social practice to address a critical analysis of desire, cultural ideologies, and environmental degradation. She has performed and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, You You Contemporary Art Center in Guangzhou, The National Gallery of Jamaica and Exit Art.
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento is an artist, writer, teacher, and arts lawyer interested in the analysis of property and structures, in both tangible and intangible forms, through legal and cultural discourses and practices. His is the founding director of the Art & Law Program, a semester-long seminar series with a philosophical focus on the effects of law on cultural production and reception. He received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts, participated in Whitney Independent Study Program, and received a J.D. from Cornell Law School, which some believe was a conceptual art project.
Sheila Pepe is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures made from domestic and industrial materials. She uses feminist and craft traditions to investigate received notions concerning the production of canonical artwork as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Smith College Museum of Art, Susan Inglett Gallery, Participant, Inc, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art. She has received awards from Art Matters, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a conceptual artist and writer whose work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, BRIC Art Gallery, the Weeksville Heritage Center, Smack Mellon Gallery, Vox Populi Gallery in Philadephia, TOPAZ Arts and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is the arts editor for SPOOK Magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry.
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His art has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jack Shainman Gallery and Winkleman Gallery. He has received awards from Creative Capital, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Accra Shepp is a photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Steven Kasher Gallery, Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Art Institute of Chicago and Apex Art. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Victoria and Albert Museum. He is currently working on a survey of the more than 40 islands that make up New York City. He is also completing an artist’s book for a public art commission in Luxembourg.
Lumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen, where she organizes exhibitions and performances with artists across disciplines and generations. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan held positions at the FRAC Nord Pas-de-Calais, Zach Feuer Gallery and MoMA PS1. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, The New York Times, and in numerous exhibition catalogues.
Jasmine Wahi is a co-director of Gateway Project Spaces and the co-founder and director of Project For Empty Space in New Jersey. In addition to running these organizations, she curates exhibitions that deal with issues of cultural identity, intersectional feminism and race.
Caroline Woolard is an artist and organizer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, and political economy. She is currently working with BFAMFAPhD.com to raise awareness about the impact of rent, debt, and precarity on culture and with the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative to create and support truly affordable commercial space for cultural resilience and economic justice in New York City. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships at MoMA, the Queens Museum, Judson Church, the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, Eyebeam, and the MacDowell Colony. In 2016-2017, she will premiere her second documentary with Art21's New York Close Up, complete major commissions from Cornell University, Cooper Union, and Williams College, and will represent the United States in the Community Economies Research Network's international initiative, (Re)Drawing the Economy.
The program’s current faculty includes Perry Bard, Dara Birnbaum, Jim Clark, Media Farzin, Kenji Fujita, Rico Gatson, Thyrza Goodeve, Johan Grimonprez, Gianni Jetzer, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Leigh Ledare, Miguel Luciano, Stephen Maine, Eva & Franco Mattes, Suzanne McClelland, Dave McKenzie, Marilyn Minter, Laurel Nakadate, Angel Nevarez, Alix Pearlstein, Paul Pfeiffer, David Row, James Siena, Lisa Sigal, Gary Stephan, Julianne Swartz, Mickalene Thomas, Hakan Topal, Mark Tribe and Fred Wilson.
The MFA Fine Arts Program reflects the diversity of New York’s many art worlds. Together, the faculty and students form an inclusive community that welcomes artists from many backgrounds who work across disciplines and modes of practice. The program seeks to provide a stimulating and supportive environment in which students can thrive and develop as artists, and to foster a rigorous conversation, through work as much as through words, about contemporary art and other cultural forms. In their commitment to art, and to one another, the program’s students provide a foundation for artistic growth that extends beyond graduation and forms an ongoing platform of professional support.