THE ALTERNATIVE ART SCHOOL - Key Persons
Aaron Gach's diverse artistic practice consistently addresses public concerns, social politics, and power dynamics. He established the Center for Tactical Magic in 2000, dedicated to the coalescence of art, magic, and creative tactics for encouraging positive social change. His work has been presented by International institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Vigo, Spain; and Deutsches Theater, Berlin.
Ahmet Öğüt lives and works in Amsterdam and Istanbul. An internationally renowned conceptual artist, Öğüt consistently seeks out collaborators from outside of the art world, finding unique ways to grapple with complex social issues. He works across different media and has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Wei-Ling Contemporary, Van Abbemuseum, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery; Berkeley Art Museum; and Kunsthalle Basel.
Amber Imrie is a queer artist, art educator, and founding team member of The Alternative Art School. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from Stanford University. She's been the recipient of many awards, fellowships, and residencies including the Murphy Cadogan Award and Anita Squires Fowler Award in Photography. Imrie has taught at a variety of institutions, and, Since 2020, has worked alongside Nato Thompson building the Alternative Art School.
Amber Imrie is a queer artist and educator with a passion for cultivating communities with creative, holistic learning environments built on compassion and equity. Imrie's art practice draws from her personal experience as a queer person interacting with the culture of the rural American South.
Born and raised off-the-grid in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, and educated outside the formal school system, Imrie entered community college at sixteen. She then received her BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from Stanford University. She's been the recipient of many awards, fellowships, and residencies including the Murphy Cadogan Award and Anita Squires Fowler Award in Photography. Imrie ran an art magazine called Venison Magazine from 2014-2017, a pop-up residency called Camp Venison, and has facilitated artistic dialogue in and outside of formal education. Imrie has taught at a variety of institutions, including UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Imrie is currently a founding team member of The Alternative Art School. She lives in Åland Islands, Finland with her partner.
Carlos Motta is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws upon political history in an attempt to create counter-narratives that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities. Motta's work has been presented internationally at venues such as The New Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, and many more.
Daniel Meir is a Tel Aviv-based sound designer and artist, specializing in sound design and original music for video art, documentaries, film, and theater. He has worked with critically acclaimed video artists, filmmakers, and musicians from around the world. He has collaborated on works that have been featured in the Venice Biennale, Academy Awards nominated films, and a Cannes Festival-winning film. His work can be heard daily in cinemas, museums, and exhibitions worldwide.
Guadalupe Maravilla is a visual artist, choreographer, and healer. As an acknowledgment of his own migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and pioneer of the essay documentary. Her prolific filmmaking and writing occupies a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy, and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism's social, cultural, and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals.
Janine Antoni is a visual artist who was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Antoni has been featured in numerous international biennials including documenta14, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the Kwangju Biennial, the Prospect.1 Biennial in New Orleans and the SITE Santa Fe Biennial.
London-based artist Jeremy Deller studied Art History at both the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. He has been producing projects over the past two decades and has exhibited extensively worldwide with selected solo exhibitions including: ‘The Infinitely Variable Ideal of the Popular', 55th Venice Biennale, Venice; ‘It Is What It Is: New Museum, New York; ‘Procession', Cornerhouse, Manchester; ‘Unconvention', Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff, and many more.
Trained in music, fine arts, and film, Marinella Senatore's practice is characterized by public participation, initiating a dialogue between history, culture, and social structures. Senatore's work merges forms of protest, theatre, oral histories, dance, music, public ceremonies, civil rituals, and mass events, reflecting on the political nature of collective formations and their impact on the social history of places and communities. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Italy and abroad.
Mario Ybarra Jr. (1973), a Mexican-American conceptual artist, was born and raised in Los Angeles. His artwork examines and investigates environments, histories, and narratives. He received an MFA from the University of California Irvine and a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. He has been featured in many national and international exhibitions and has spoken at worldwide venues including the Creative Summit in New York and Art Pace San Antonio.
Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He received a BFA and an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Dion's work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history and the natural world, questioning the distinctions between ‘objective' scientific methods and ‘subjective' influences.
From 1995-1998, Mel Chin spearheaded the Gala Committee, a collective that produced the public art project "In the Name of the Place", conducted on American prime-time television. In 2018 he filled New York's Times Square with "Wake", on the ground, and "Unmoored" in the air; two pieces that transported viewers into a past maritime industry and a future of rising waters. He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees including a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship.
Mia Yu is a Beijing-based art historian, curator, and educator. She was the winner of the Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Art (2018), the recipient of the Tate Asia Research Travel Fellowship (2017), and the CCAA Art Critic Award (2015). She is on the jury committee for the Hyundai Blue Prize For Emerging Curators. As an adjunct professor, she has lectured at China Art Academy, China Central Art Academy, Xi'an Art Academy, and Peking University.
Michael Clemmons is the curator at The Colored Girls Museum and the director of Temple University's Center for Community Partnerships and Development. With 30 years of experience in community engagement and project development, Clemmons builds and coordinates strategic partnerships. In his art practice, Clemmons creates mix-media paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations, referencing timeless landscapes, West African, and personal iconography.
Job Titles:
- Writer, Researcher, and Chief
Miguel A. López is a writer, researcher, and Chief curator of TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica. He is co-founder of the independent art space Bisagra, active in Peru since 2014. In 2016, he received the Independent Vision Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. His work focuses on queer re-articulations of history from a Southern perspective. He has published in periodicals such as Art in America, Art Journal, and The Exhibitionist, among others.
Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as "cultural infrastructure builder". He has worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Creative Time, and MASS MoCA. Thompson organized major Creative Time projects including The Creative Time Summit, Kara Walker's "A Subtlety", Trevor Paglen's "The Last Pictures", and Paul Ramírez Jonas's "Key to the City", among many others. He has written two books, and founded the Alternative Art School in 2020.
Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as "cultural infrastructure builder". He has worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Creative Time as Artistic Director and as Curator at MASS MoCA.
Job Titles:
- Senior Advisor to the OECD Center for Entrepreneurship
Pier Luigi Sacco, Ph.D., is Senior Advisor to the OECD Center for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions, and Cities, Associate Researcher at CNR-ISPC Naples, and Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Chieti-Pescara. He works and consults internationally in cultural planning, community-based projects, and culture-led local and national development strategies, and is often invited as the keynote speaker for major cultural policy conferences worldwide.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, born in Buenos Aires in 1961, is best known for his intimate, participatory installations that revolve around communal traditions. He has continually challenged the social dimension of art, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the special and personal spaces that he constructs. Through his real-time experiences, Tiravanija often addresses broader social and political concerns that go largely unaddressed in Western media.
Tania Bruguera (1968, Cuba) is an artist and activist whose performances and installations examine power structures and their effect on society's most vulnerable people. Her long-term projects scrutinize the institutional structures of collective memory, education, and politics. Bruguera has received many honors such as the Robert Rauschenberg Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Prince Claus Fund Laureate. Her work has been extensively exhibited worldwide.
Theresa Rose lives and works in her beloved hometown, Philadelphia, PA, as an artist, educator, and arts organizer. Rose's mixed-media works on paper pay tribute to the complex beauty found in the urban environment. Her curatorial work equally uses the urban landscape as a site for play and social possibility. Rose earned a BA in Art Education from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Tiago Gualberto is an Afro-Brazilian visual artist and researcher whose work surrounds themes such as the relationship between memory and history, the social uses of language, and narrative erasure. He has focused his artwork on questioning his place and identity as a visual artist, reflecting on the historical perpetuation of exclusion and violence forced upon people with whom he relates. He maintains a deep interest in the politics of overcoming barriers in Brazil for artists.
Vashti DuBois founded The Colored Girls Museum in 2015, to "honor the stories, experiences, and history of Colored Girls throughout the African Diaspora." It is the first memoir museum of its kind. TCGM initiates the ordinary object, submitted by the colored girl herself, as a representative of an aspect of her story and personal history which she finds meaningful. DuBois' 30-year career in non-profit and arts administration has focused primarily on issues impacting girls and women of color.
Visiting Artist Talks: Weekly Artist Talks with visiting artists and hosted by various instructors.
Our 7-week courses have weekly Office Hours for students. Here you can meet one-to-one with your visionary instructor. These classes meet once a week for 2.5 hours. Our 2-Week Intensives meet three times a week for 2.5 hours. Both class options include a social and technical Orientation, an End-of-Semester Event, and student life offerings during the whole semester period.
Zoe Butt is a curator and writer based in Vietnam. Her curatorial practice centers on building critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among countries of the global south. She is currently Artistic Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's first purpose-built space for contemporary art. She is also a member of the Asian Art Council for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.