Program Support

Academic Advisor: Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist who works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, installation and digital art. His many projects attempt to bridge the gap between painting and conceptual art while remaining attentive to painting’s history and especially to its encounter with new technologies. Recently, Rostovsky has expanded his practice to explore e-books, graphic novels and comics as hybrid forms that integrate writing and visual imagery. His work has been shown widely both in the United States and abroad and has been exhibited at such venues as The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, PS1/MOMA, Artpace, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The ICA Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K., and a host of private galleries. In addition to his artistic practice, Rostovsky also writes art criticism under the pen name David Geers. Focusing on the convergence of art, politics and technology, his writing has appeared in October, Fillip, Bomb, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail and Frieze. He currently teaches at New York University and Parsons New School.

Artist Mentor: Emily Eveleth - website

Documents

Forms:

Collection of Papers:

Group Critiques

Group H: Caroline MacMoran, Kay Myers, Elise Thrasher, Isidro Pentzke, Marc Morin

Small Group Leaders: Deborah Davidson, Peter Rostovsky, Christian Pierce

Individual Meetings: Peter Rostovsky, Shawn Quirk, Jaclyn Poeschl, Stuart Steck, Oliver Wasow

Seminars

Critical Theory I: Dominant Paradigms and Diverse Tactics
This course considers some emergent and dominant paradigms in contemporary cultural
production. Blurring the boundaries between diverse creative disciplines, as well as aesthetic
contemplation and political intervention, it traces a path through some of the key
conversations animating our visual and practical field. Throughout, a focus will be maintained
on how these discourses and debates overlap with popular culture, politics, technology and
social concerns. Through a series of challenging readings and discussions, students will be asked
to articulate complex artistic positions in response to this important cultural and historical
moment.

Instructor: Stuart Steck for the past two decades, has worked as both a curator and academic. Although he was originally trained in the field of decorative arts, his current interests focus on postwar art and critical theory. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the Art Institute of Boston since 1998. In addition to serving on the faculty at AIB, he has also held teaching positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, Boston University, and Suffolk University. Most recently, Steck co-curated the video exhibition Israel from Within and Without. He has also published essays on Ellsworth Kelly and Sung Ho Kim, with whom he collaborated on an architectural project. Steck is currently the producer of the Short Attention Span Digital Video Festival and the founding president of the Visual Culture Consortium, Boston. Over the years, Steck has received research grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Boston University Humanities Foundation. Steck received his BA in History from Cornell University and his PhD in Art History from Boston University.

Elective Seminar: Rethinking Appropriation: Art in the Age of the Digital Archive

This Seminar will explore the many ways in which artists incorporate pre-existing intellectual property into their own artwork. In addition to providing an historical context for understanding appropriative strategies, emphasis will be placed on examining the profound effect the current shift from analog to digital technologies is having on creative practice. Among the many topics to be explored will be the act of mixing and re-contextualizing fragments of digital culture, the related issues of image authorship and copyright, and the increasing importance of the Internet archive and curatorial strategies in visual culture. This seminar is intended to be of interest to artists working in ALL media; photographers, painters, sculptors and time-based artists alike. Students should read the following PDF before the first seminar: https://www.eff.org/pages/selling-wine-without-bottles-economy-mind-global-net

Instructor: Oliver Wasow is a fine art photographer currently living and working in Rhinebeck, NY. He received his BA from Hunter College and his Master’s Degree from the Transart Institute in Austria. His work is currently represented by Theodore:Art Gallery in NYC. Wasow has had a number of one person exhibitions, including shows at Theodore:Art, Josh Baer Gallery, Janet Borden Gallery, Tom Solomon Gallery in Los Angeles, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, and the Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, LA. His work has also been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as ‘Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Image World,’ at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC, and ‘The Photography of Invention,’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His photographs are included in a number of private collections and are also represented in various prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC and The Milwaukee Art Museum. Reviews of his work have been featured in most major art publications, including, among others, Art Forum, ArtNews and The New York Times. He has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 1999 and, in 2000, his second New York State Council on the Arts Grant.