Mission

The New York Studio School is a unique teaching environment where questions of abstraction, formalism, expressionism and representation are explored in an advanced, highly individualized studio-centric practice, focused on drawing, painting, sculpture and art history. 

History

Our location at 8 West 8th Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village, is one of the most significant sites in American art history, the epicenter of American contemporary art for 120 years. From 1907 to 1929, the School served as a drawing club, studio and gallery founded by artist and patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. With curator Juliana Force, Whitney championed American artists of the ‘Ashcan’ school including Robert Henri, Mabel Dwight and Edward Hopper and early abstract artists Stuart Davis, Beauford Delaney, Georgia O’Keeffe and Arshile Gorky at a time when they were largely overlooked. In 1931, the building opened to the public as  the original Whitney Museum of American Art; hosting solo exhibitions of Pablo Picasso, Gaston Lachaise and George Grosz and the landmark annual and biennial exhibitions that soon established New York as the center of the modern art world. 

In 1964, artist and educator Mercedes Matter founded The New York Studio School, dedicated to rigorous studio practice in drawing, painting, and sculpture. As Matter put it, the primary purpose of the school was to “restore the conditions for working which make the study of art possible,” and to “strip away everything but its basic, serious components: drawing, painting, sculpture, history of art.” For the extraordinarily diverse range of faculty and alumni of The New York Studio School such as Elaine De Kooning, Lee Krasner, Rosemary Beck, Nicholas Carone, Morton Feldman, Philip Guston, Brice Marden, Alex Katz, Robert Storr, Christopher Wool, Jackie Brookner, Joyce Pensato, Rita Ackermann, David Reed, Ross Bleckner, Bruce Gagnier, Graham Nickson, Jilaine Jones, Jessica Rankin and Cecily Brown, visual art, much  like poetry and music, is not focused solely on copying from nature, or on academic techniques, but rather on prioritizing the expression and translation of abstract ideas, formal relationships and perceptual exploration through physical materials. 

Today, students continue this legacy in studios that have hosted more than a century of American art history. Our MFA program and public classes and marathons are open-minded and interdisciplinary, emphasizing formal overlaps and historical continuities between drawing, painting and sculpture, and revealing how they are embedded in a shared history. We are focused on recruiting serious artists of any age or experience who are willing both to learn basic techniques and to push themselves beyond them.When the New York Studio School was founded, New York was a very different place. But even today there is nothing like the School: independent, rigorous, adventurous and prismatic, with a faculty dedicated to training the hand, the eye and the mind to work together, exploring the perimeter of being.

Staff

Front Desk and Support Staff: Richard Allen, Janise Amis, Raymond Franz, Anita Gelman, Francesca Hanson, Silas Jones, and Lydia Mamalis.

Contact Us

Board of Trustees

Maud Bryt, Chair
Steven D. Shaffer, Treasurer
Deanna E. King, Secretary

Dita Amory
Alla Broeksmit
Jessica Chermayeff
Whit Conrad
Katie Cusack
Anne Delaney
Christopher M. Harland
Ian Highet
Paula R. Hornbostel
Philip H. Isles
Yael Meridan Schori
Elisabeth Scharlatt
Susan Sussman
Kejia Wu
F. Anthony Zunino III

New York Studio School is a U.S.-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 13-6167281) and meets all tax-exempt requirements for a charitable organization as stated by the Internal Revenue Service.

The New York Studio School is a W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) certified organization.