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Category: 60th Anniversary
NYSS Stories: Marjorie Kramer (Years of Study 1964-66)
“And bingo. We had two, three hours of drawing, three hours of painting, and three hours of sculpture and some of the people who were avant garde in New York thought that we were conservative, but we weren’t, because we were looking to the generations of artists behind us, going back all those oceans of wonderful art and we were using them, I would say, as a landing place to push off from.”
August 6, 2025 · 60th Anniversary, Alumni
NYSS Stories: Paula Heisen (Years of Study 1977–78)
“The discipline of the atelier-style of learning at the School – going in every day to work alongside others at the same tasks, seeing lectures of so many interesting artists, historians and critics, and being critiqued by well-known art world figures – worked on me in ways that became apparent only later on. My sophistication and knowledge increased, and I had a new reference for artistic discipline.”
June 29, 2025 · 60th Anniversary, Alumni
NYSS Stories: Daniel Licht (MFA 2023)
“It seems to me that the Studio School has been kept alive by its sense of life. Different artists with different visions have come and have gone, but an overwhelming sense of the importance of vitality, of lifelikeness of the deepest kind, has kept the school grounded from the start.”
May 28, 2025 · 60th Anniversary, Alumni
NYSS Stories: Elena Sisto (Years of study 1975-1977)
“The thing about art is that in learning to paint and draw you learn to think for yourself and be your own best critic. It teaches you that you can always come up with something new, which is very revolutionary. That gives you agency. That’s why it’s challenging. The more commercial it gets, the less that is true. The School was a kind of crucible where one felt protected and freedom if you wanted it. I realize all of this sounds contradictory—it was kind of a glorious mess. Everyone was all in.”
April 25, 2025 · 60th Anniversary, Alumni
NYSS Stories: Guy Yanai (Years of study 1996-1997)
“So that’s it, the eight hours of drawing and painting every day is a gift. Because if you don’t have a studio practice you don’t have anything. No other place teaches that discipline.”
March 3, 2025 · 60th Anniversary, Alumni
![[RSVP FULL] We are currently at capacity for Bob Nickas' lecture, "Has Contemporary Art Run Its Course?", happening tonight on October 14th, 2026. There will be overflow space open in the downstairs gallery.
A critic and curator based in New York, Bob Nickas has organized more than 130 exhibitions since 1984. He was on the teams responsible for Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1993, the 7th Bienal d’Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2003, and Greater New York 2005, at MoMA/PS1, where he served as Curatorial Advisor between 2004-07. Along with Peter Halley, he was founding Editor of Index magazine, which he helmed between 1996-2000. His writing has been widely published and translated, and five collections of essays and interviews have been published to date: Live Free Or Die (2000), Theft Is Vision (2008), The Dept. of Corrections (2016), Komplaint Dept. (2018), and Corrected Proofs (2023). He also published a yearlong daily diary, Yesterworld, (2022). In 2024, he founded the New York Art Critics Association.
At MoMA/PS1, Nickas organized the first U.S. museum survey exhibitions for Lee Lozano, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom Sandberg, and Peter Hujar, as well as curated projects with Mike Cloud, Trisha Donnelly and Torbjorn Rodland. A prolific writer, he has authored and contributed to numerous monographs and books, among them for On Kawara, Olivier Mosset, Cady Noland, Steven Parrino, Yayoi Kusama, Dan Walsh, Stephen Shore, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anne Collier, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Tomma Abts, Robert Grosvenor, Vija Celmins, Salvo, Peter Bradley, and Kathleen Ryan.
Nickas has lectured at many museums, art schools, and universities over the past forty years, and taught at Columbia University and New York University.
#newyorkstudioschool #nyss #arteducation #lecture](https://nyss.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)