September 5, 7:00 pm - Julie Heffernan
New York City based painter, represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery, will discuss her work.

September 12 - Tony Scherman
Canadian artist Tony Scherman, born in Toronto in 1950, received an M.A. from the Royal College of Art in London, England, in 1974. Since then he has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe. He has also been a visiting critic and lecturer at universities, art colleges and art galleries in North America and Europe. He will discuss his work.

September 19 - Whitfield Lovell
A collector of anonymous photographs and domestic artifacts, Lovell’s masterful, life-size charcoal renderings of African-American figures on wood panels are based upon the early twentieth century professional studio photographs he has picked up at flea markets and antique stores. Lovell’s tableaux, which are emblematic and theatrical in nature, also incorporate everyday artifacts. His installations exercise a range of senses—including sight and texture, and in some cases, smell and sound.

September 26, *7:00 pm - Judith Shea
Judith Shea is an eminent American sculptor who lives and works in New York. The simplified forms in works such as Enduring Charms (1986) synthesize figurative art and Minimalism. The use of clothing forms allowed her to represent the human figure using the most economical of means. In the mid-1980s, Shea began juxtaposing figures with forms and then pairing figures to give her work added psychological complexity.
The inclusion of the pyramid in Enduring Charms underscores the formal links between the hollow skirt form and early Egyptian figures of pharaohs and queens.

October 3 - William Beckman
Beckman creates his figurative art using a unique method. He applies paint, then shaves off layer after layer from the surface with a razor, repainting and polishing the canvas to create lustrous, absorbing images. His realism is stripped of sentiment, his un-idealized portraits scrupulously rendered and his expansive tracts of farmland theatrically scaled. Each painting is epic in significance and matter-of-fact at the same time.

October 10 - Nicola Verlato
New York City based painter will discuss his work.

Tuesday October 16, *12:45-1:30 pm- Patrick Conners
Academy adjunct faculty member will give a lecture on the topic of pictorial space in western illusionistic art.

October 17 - Judith Schaecter
Judith Schaechter is a Philedelphia - based artist who works in a variety of media including stained glass. She is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, where she will have a solo show in October of 2007. [click here for more info]

October 24 - Aaron Spangler
Aaron Spangler had his first show with Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) in February 2005. Carving scenes from suburban and rural destruction zones in maple, the works reflect emptiness, war, or despair. From Minnesota in the American Midwest, Spangler paints each sculpture and bas-relief black, emphasizing the lonliness present in the work.

October 31 - Eric Fischl
Artist Eric Fischl will deliver a lecture entitled Death of Painting.
He will discuss the body and its removal from Modernist art, a theme developed in conjunction with the catalogue essay for the exhibition All the More Real.

For more information on the exhibition click here.
To read about it in the New York Times, click here.

November 7 - Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin
The two figurative painters will discuss their work.

**Lani Irwin Exhibition opens November 6 at Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery!
Click here to view invitation.

November 28 - Mia Fineman
Our Lady of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Other Artful Apparitions

Three years ago, a grilled cheese sandwich bearing an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. In this lecture, art writer and curator Mia Fineman will discuss the deep-seated human tendency to see faces in inanimate objects – rocks, clouds, inkblots, sandwiches – and what this might tell us about the origins of art and the sources of creative inspiration.

Mia Fineman is senior research associate in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has organized numerous exhibitions. Her writing on art appears regularly in the New York Times and Slate.

December 5 - "You Can't go Home Again"
A Round-table discussion with Fellows of the Academy, from the Homecoming Exhibition, moderated by Catherine Howe.

These 19 young artists have returned to the Academy to investigate their artistic journeys thus far, perhaps to see how far they have traveled.