SVA Mentors Show
By Anyan Wu
I have been graduated from SVA for two years. I started my professional path as a photo artist there. Joseph Maida, an artist I admire, whom I took a couple of classes with, is the chair of the BFA Photography and Video now. He is also the curator of the 2019 and 2020 SVA Mentors exhibition.
MENTORS, SVA CHELSEA GALLERY, 2020
Starting from 1992, SVA BFA Photography and Video have continued this legacy of the Mentors program. The Mentors program is designed to cultivate relationships between established and emerging artists and to introduce new talent to the broader community. I was lucky to be in the 2018 Mentor Show. This program pairs select fourth-year students with key figures in the New York arts community, giving them objective and professional insight into their work during a culminating point in their education.
I was paired with Phil Taylor, the curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. We had our meetings at the photography department of Moma. When I stepped into the photography office, I felt like I was seeing all the photography exhibitions from within. I remember it was the time when Moma was having the big Stephen Shore exhibition. I was experimenting with my print sizes. Phil took me to the Stephen Shore galleries and told me about the thoughts they had on the actual prints. That was a moment for me. We existed from the Photography department office and entered the exhibition. I started to see the contemporary art world and exhibition space from a new perspective. The experience helped me in many ways as an art practitioner.
STEPHEN SHORE, MOMA, 2018
Phil is also part of this year’s Mentor program, paired with senior student Lain McDonald. Many other famed figures also participated in the Mentors program before. The 2019 – 2020 mentors include Mia Fineman, Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Zalika Azim, Artist (whom we had the honor to feature in our Black History Month a couple of weeks ago); Pixy Liao, Photographer (whom I have met a couple of times after graduation and gave me sincere insights on my work); Nadia Vellam, Photo and Video Director, T: The New York Times Style Magazine; Peter Ash Lee, photographer and co-founder of Burdock; Elizabeth Renstrom, Photographer; Senior Photo Editor, The New Yorker and Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem.
When I asked Mia Fineman, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, how she sees the Mentors program helps the students grow. “If I were an art student, I would want to get as much feedback as possible from people who spend their lives looking at pictures – other artists, dealers, editors, curators – and the mentorship program makes that possible. Also, personal connections are incredibly important in terms of building a career as an artist—or any career for that matter.” Mia told me in our interview, “I’ve been fortunate to have many wonderful mentors, beginning with my high school drama teacher who cast me as the lead in a Brecht play and took me to art films and lunch at the Russian Tearoom back in the 1980s. My professors in college and graduate school were also incredibly supportive and generously nurtured my academic interests and aspirations. At the Met, Maria Morris Hambourg, the founding curator of the Department of Photographs, became a great friend and role model, and encouraged me to pursue a curatorial path. I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mentors!”
Mia was in the Mentors program ten years ago, Joseph Maida emailed her a couple of months ago and asked her to be the mentor again. She was between the exhibitions, so she said yes. She is paired with Wang Enze, a young photographer from Zhengzhou, China. “I’m very impressed by Enze’s work, which deals with intimacy, cohabitation, and the power dynamics of a romantic relationship between himself and his partner, who is also an artist.” Enze’s series, Cohabitation, investigate the presence of love in his ongoing romantic relationship.
“I gather evidence and traces of this love from everyday life and using cameras to counter each other with my partner, who is also a photographer, based on rules that we made. “ Enze explained about his series, “I can find love in mutual desire, need, vulnerability, acceptance, satisfaction, and fatigue—in fact, in a wide range of our experience. “ When I asked which artist might be his biggest influence, he mentioned Wolfgang Tillmans’ book, Burg. His work “countering photos“, which will be shown in the Mentors exhibition, was inspired by Paul Sepuya and Barbara Probst. He has learned a lot of things from Mia at the Met. However, he thinks the most valuable thing he gains was confidence. “I felt I was treated as an artist with respect.” Enze’s Cohabitation series appeared in F-Stop Magazine as a cover photo before and was also featured on PDN’s Emerging Photographer Magazine.
During our interview, I asked Mia how she sees younger generations’ photographic work. She mentioned the use of social media and the exhibition Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists she organized at the Met in 2017, “Social media are our culture’s major outlet for photography today, just as magazines were in the twentieth century. “ Wall Street Journal reported this exhibition, “If there is a smarter exhibition in New York about where photography is going than this one, I haven't seen it.”
MENTORS, SVA CHELSEA GALLERY, 2020
Back to the days when I was at SVA, I took a class with Joseph. The class was called Picture Consequence, which explored the use of images on social media and the possibility of visual arts in the social media context. From Amalia Ulman (social media based artist whose work were on view alongside greats like Cindy Sherman and Yves Klein in Tate Modern in 2016) to our most recent feature of artist Molly Soda, an exhibition exist in a white box might not seem intrigue to some of you, but it’s a chance to see the broad-spectrum image art by emerging young artists. Seeing how many ways younger generations can speak of the language of photography&video and getting to know the conversations they have with the art world’s leading roles are what are going to intrigue you.
Mentors
SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, New York, NY, 10001, United States
On view: Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - Wednesday, March 25, 2020
The SVA Chelsea Gallery is now open to visitors by appointment only. To schedule a visit, please use this link svamentors.youcanbook.me to sign up for an available slot. During the visit, you will be kindly asked that you limit your time to 1 hour and that there not be more than 20 people in the gallery at one time. Your appointment will allow you up to 4 guests maximum.
