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.