Join artists Arcmanoro Niles and Eric Fischl for a moderated discussion with J. Cabelle Ahn, Ph.D. Taking Niles’s Guild Hall exhibition Forgotten Words I Never Got to Say as its point of departure, the conversation will consider the evolution of his practice through early and recent works and mark the 10-year anniversary of his 2016 residency as the inaugural participant in Guild Hall’s Artist-in-Residence initiative, while reflecting on the role of the history of painting in contemporary practice.
Come early from 5:30-7:30 PM to enjoy extended gallery hours and live music in the garden as part of our Third Thursdays programming.
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Arcmanoro Niles
Arcmanoro Niles (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.; lives and works in New York, NY) received his B.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2013 and his M.F.A. from the New York Academy of Art in 2015.
Niles has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; The MAC, Belfast; and Lehmann Maupin, with solo shows in New York, London, and Los Angeles.
His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Miami; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); The Studio Museum in Harlem; Dallas Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and the Yuz Museum and Pond Society, both in Shanghai.
Photo: Frank Rothenberg
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Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums throughout the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents had moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. He then spent some time in Chicago, where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1974, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Fischl had his first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City with his future wife, April Gornik, in 1978.
Fischl's suburban upbringing painfully provided him with the complex themes enmeshed in a world of segregated privilege, alcoholism, narcissism, dysfunction, madness and country club culture obsessed with image over content. His early work thus became focused on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. His first New York City solo show was at Edward Thorp Gallery in 1979, during a time when suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. He first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of upper-middleclass American life.
Fischl's paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints have been the subject of numerous solo and major group exhibitions and his work is represented in many museums, as well as prestigious private and corporate collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modem Art in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, St. Louis Art Museum, Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark, MusÈe Beaubourg in Paris, to name a few.
Throughout his artistic life, Fischl has had the good fortune to collaborate on various book projects with E.L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz and Frederic Tuten. He co-authored with Michael Stone, a memoir titled Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas that was published in 2013.
Among his passion for art education and community building through creativity, he has created scholarships and internships for young artists and art students.
In 2021, along with his wife April, he co-founded The Church, a community art center and artist residency in Sag Harbor. To date, it is their most ambitious project and one they are most proud of.
Opening at the Phoenix Art Museum in November 2025, there will be a survey of Fischl’s 50 year art career.
Eric Fischl is a Fellow at both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Science, and is the president of Guild Hall's Academy of the Arts. He lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY with his wife, the painter April Gornik.
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J. Cabelle Ahn
J. Cabelle Ahn is a New York–based art historian and writer. Trained as a specialist in Old Masters, she holds a PhD from Harvard University. Her writing focuses on in-depth artist interviews, the history of drawing, and contemporary artists whose practices revisit or reframe the European Old Masters. She has held curatorial and research positions at the Harvard Art Museums, the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and her byline has appeared in The Art Newspaper, Artnet News, Observer, and Master Drawings, as well as in exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. She is currently President of the Association of Print Scholars, where she has served as an officer since 2019.
Sponsors
EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Principal Sponsor: The Tessler Family
Lead Sponsors: Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi
Additional Support: Phyllis Hollis
Visual Arts programs are supported by lead funding from Lucio and Joan Noto, with additional support provided by Barbara and Richard S. Lane, The Michael Lynne Museum Endowment, The Melville Straus Family Endowment, The Giuppy Nantista Fund, and The Hoie Fund.
Additional support provided by Friends of the Museum: Shari and Jeff Aronson, The Artist Profile Archive, William L. Bernhard, Elizabeth Gordon and Woody Heller, The Hayden Family Foundation, Robert Longo and Sophie Chahinian, Elin and Michael Nierenberg, Onna House, Lori and John Reinsberg, Jeff and Audrey Spiegel, Hillary and Jeff Suchman, Jane Wesman and Don Savelson, and Yurman Family Foundation.