“On the Basis of Art” celebrates the achievements of generations of Yale-trained women artists. The show, postponed for a year due to the pandemic, marks the recent 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the university’s first women students, who studied at the Yale School of the Fine Arts (now the Yale School of Art) …

Painter Jordan Casteel ’14 M.F.A is one of three Yale affiliates to be awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, informally known as the “genius grant.” Casteel was recognized for “capturing everyday encounters with people and places in works that invite recognition of our shared humanity.” Her paintings feature the people and environments she encounters on the streets of Harlem, in New York …

The first women to study at Yale weren’t the undergraduates who turned up in the fall of 1969. They arrived a full century earlier as graduate students in the Yale School of Art when it opened in 1869. The Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, on view through January 9, exhibits the …

In October, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented an exhibition dedicated to the late Yale School of Art Dean Richard Benson, who is most often celebrated as a virtuoso printer and gifted teacher and is perhaps best known for helping produce some of the most significant photography books of the past fifty years.  The World Is Smarter Than You Are is the …

In August 2021, Jennifer Packer MFA ’12 debuted her first West Coast solo exhibition Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep, Packer’s debut West Coast solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The exhibition gathers 25 new and recent works that explore the limits of painting and representation through portraits, still lifes, and charcoal drawings. Packer created most of the …

The artist and architect Maya Lin ’81 MArch ’86 began her career with a response to a war. Her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a blade of black granite slashed into American soil, commemorates a “foreign” war that became an internal one and divided the nation. Her installation, “Ghost Forest,” which was on view in Madison Square Park in Manhattan through …

Kymberly Pinder ’95 Ph.D., an internationally recognized scholar of race, representation, and murals, has been appointed the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, President Peter Salovey announced in June 2021. Her term began July 1. Pinder has distinguished herself throughout an academic and curatorial career that has involved a series of major leadership positions. Her scholarly work, which …

On June 12, Sarah Sze ’91 unveiled two sculptures at Storm King Art Center: “Fallen Sky” and “Fifth Season.” “Fallen Sky” is the first major, permanent, site-specific commission for the influential 500-acre art park since Maya Lin’s 11-acre earthwork project “Wave Field” premiered in 2009. “The relationship of the human to landscape is this age-old exploration of artists,” Ms. Sze said, …

Dawoud Bey’s work is both a documentation and an excavation. The photographer is preoccupied with history and its effects on our contemporary experience, chronicling the America that resides largely in the shadows and bringing it closer to the center. Often depicting Black subjects, Bey understands that the collective aches we feel today are the remnants of yesterday’s agony, attesting to poet …

Discussions about young artists on the rise frequently employ the passive voice. He “was chosen” for a competitive residency or solo exhibition; she “was accepted” to an elite art school. But the trajectory of newly minted art star Vaughn Spann, who opened a sold-out solo show at Almine Rech gallery in New York, is no accident. Instead, it is the …