Artist Yashua Klos speaks on Tuesday, September 13th, 2022, 3-4:30pm, in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre, 27th Street and 7th Avenue.

In his multi-media practice, Yashua Klos explores themes of identity, memory, and African Americans’ relationship to American labor, His large-scale works are created from the intricate formation of woodblock prints, representing ideas of Blackness through multi-dimensional , fragmented portraits. Unlike traditional collage arranged from ready=made source material, Klos creates all his collage material through woodblock printing and monotypes. His work reimagines the Black body as an alchemical being, surviving and existing with intertwined networks of history, myth and lived reality.

Yashua Klos was born in 1977 in Chicago, IL, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown in museums and galleries across the U.S. and abroad, including the Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; What If The World Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; Tilton Gallery, NY; and UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA. He has been awarded artist residences at Skowhegan, The Vermont Studio Center, and Bemis and was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Fellowship and a NYFA grant.

Artist Doron Langberg speaks about his work in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre, 27th Street and 7th Avenue, on Wednesday, May 4th, 2022, 3-4:30pm.

Doron Langberg’s vibrantly colored, sensual paintings celebrate queer pleasure, friendship, and intimacy. The artist blurs distinctions between abstraction and figuration, subject and setting in his work as he depicts his friends and lovers in translucent layers of oil paint. Since graduation with an MFA from Yale in 2012, Langberg has exhibited extensively in galleries in London, New York, Milan, Shanghai, and Berlin. In 2019, he was awarded the John Koch Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

On Wednesday, April 7th 2021, 5-6:30pm, artist and historian Nell Painter talks about her work virtually.

Nell Painter is a distinguished and award-winning scholar, historian, writer and visual artist. Author of seven books, her most recent, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (2018), recounts her experiences as an art student at Rutgers University (BFA 2009) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 2011) after retiring as a professor from Princeton University. A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, her highly acclaimed book, The History of White People (2010), is a myth-destroying exploration of “whiteness.” Her most recent solo exhibition Freedom from Truth: Self-Portraits of Nell Painter was featured at the Smith Center, Harvard University, 2019.

Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn talks on his artwork and life on Tuesday, April 30th, 2019, at FIT in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre, located in the Fred P. Pomerantz Center on the northwest corner of 27th Street and 7th Avenue.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn (b. 1977) creates hybrid, fractured portraits on paper and linen
using charcoal, gouache, pastel, paint stick, and oil paint. His works are replete with art
historical references to Cubism, Surrealism, Francis Bacon, and others, yet his process is
also very personal, drawing from his memories, experiences, traumas, and family history
growing up in Chicago’s Robert Taylor housing project. Nathaniel Mary Quinn balances
the beautiful with the grotesque, the sinister with the benevolent, capturing the
complexity of human emotion in a way that is individual and also representative of the
human condition.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn has exhibited at galleries and institutions internationally. Recent
solo exhibitions include Half Gallery, New York; Luce Gallery, Torino, Italy; M + B Gallery,
Los Angeles; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Bunker 259 Gallery, Brooklyn; Pace
Gallery, London, England; and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
(MoCADA), Brooklyn, New York. He has also been featured in the group exhibitions at
Artist Space, New York; The Bronx Museum of Arts; Albertz Benda, New York; Satori
Gallery, New York; Susan-Inglett Gallery, New York; and Driscoll Babcock Gallery, New
York; and in A Process Series | Here He Come: Black Jesus, curated by Jessamyn Fiore,
Rawson Projects, New York. His work has been reviewed in numerous publications,
including the New York Times, The Independent (London), AFROPUNK, the Chicago
Reader, The Daily News, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Time Out New York.
He is the recipient of the Lorraine Hansberry Artistic, Performance, and Fine Arts Award
and a two-time winner of the National Arts Club Prize. Quinn is included in the public
collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Whitney
Museum of American Art, among others. Nathaniel Mary Quinn, a native of Chicago,
received his BFA from Wabash College and his MFA from New York University. He
currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s page on his gallery’s website is here.

On Thursday, February 21st, 2019, 6 – 7:30pm, artist Ellen Altfest speaks about her work in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre, in the Fred P. Pomerantz (formerly D Building) of Fashion Institute of Technology, as part of the ARTSpeak 2018-2019 series, Artists and the New Muse. 

After receiving her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1997, Ellen Altfest has developed her own distinctive and devoted approach to figurative and representational painting.  The artist and writer David Humphrey observed that “Altfest’s paintings celebrate the way objects become engulfed by their surroundings and simple acts of identification multiply and transform.”  Altfest was born in 1970 in New York, where she currently lives and works.  In addition to graduating from Cornell University and from Yale, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.  She was awarded a studio space at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, New York, and she has held residencies at the Zabludowicz Collection, Finland, and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.  She led an artist workshop at the Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan.  Since her first solo exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery, New York, in 2002 and 2005, Altfest has had solo exhibitions at White Cube, London, and her work has been featured in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, the Venice Biennale, and at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, U.K.  Her current exhibition, Green Spot, is on view at White Cube, Hong Kong, China.

On Wednesday, January 30th, 2019, 5 – 6pm, critic/poet/novelist/performer/visual artist/academic Wayne Koestenbaum gives a talk on his work in The Art and Design Gallery in the Fred P. Pomerantz Art and Design Center, 227 West 27th Street.

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of 19 books, most recently Camp Marmalade (Nightboat, 2018), Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations (Cabinet Books, 2016), and My 1980s & Other Essays (FSG, 2013). He contributes regularly to The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, Artforum, and other periodicals and has participated in panels at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, he was a visiting professor in the painting department of Yale’s school of art from 2002-2011.

The 2018 – 2019 ARTSpeak Series has been made possible in part through funding by the FIT Student-Faculty Corporation with support from the School of Art and Design and the School of Liberal Arts.

On April 27th, 2017, FIT Fine Arts students visit the studios of artists Todd Bienvenu, Derek Fordjour, and Brandi Twilley all located in the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY.