ARTSpeak: Ellen Altfest

ARTSpeak: Ellen Altfest

Artist Ellen Altfest speaks about her work as part of the ARTSpeak 2018-2019 series, Artists and the New Muse.

After receiving her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1997, Ellen Altfest has developed her own distinctive and devoted approach to figurative and representational painting. The artist and writer David Humphrey observed that “Altfest’s paintings celebrate the way objects become engulfed by their surroundings and simple acts of identification multiply and transform.” Altfest was born in 1970 in New York, where she currently lives and works. In addition to graduating from Cornell University and from Yale, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She was awarded a studio space at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, New York, and she has held residencies at the Zabludowicz Collection, Finland, and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. She led an artist workshop at the Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan. Since her first solo exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery, New York, in 2002 and 2005, Altfest has had solo exhibitions at White Cube, London, and her work has been featured in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, the Venice Biennale, and at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, U.K. Her current exhibition, Green Spot, is on view at White Cube, Hong Kong, China.

This event is part of the ARTSpeak 2018–2019 lecture series, Artists and the New Muse, an interdisciplinary program presented by the departments of Fine Arts, History of Art, and English and Communication Studies.

ARTSpeak is made possible in part through funding by the FIT Student-Faculty Committee, the School of Art and Design, and the School of Liberal Arts.

School of Art and Design

2019-02-21

1:24:53

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