Salon Des RefusÉs: An Idea Seeking a Home

What is SDR?

Art isn’t random. It doesn’t just happen spontaneously. It’s the product of a rich discourse stretching back centuries and requires deep consideration and careful study. Not everyone is an artist. Not everyone wants to be. But too many people who want to be artists are barred from doing so because art education is effectively reserved for the wealthy.

We propose a different kind of art school, one that strips away all the institutional baggage and focuses simply and solely on making people better artists at low or no cost. Art education isn’t all that complicated: artists grow by looking, making, thinking and repeating. Our unaccredited school provides a curriculum and cohort in which talented young artists can grow without the baggage of exploitative tuition.

Because art can’t exist in a bubble, SDR also offers exhibition opportunities to student artists, introducing them to the wider New York art world.

Named in honor of the 1863 Salon de Refusés, in which artists rejected by the official Salon staged their own exhibition, SDR takes a similar attitude toward the established institutions of art education: we may just be better off without them.

What do we Have to Offer?

SDR provides a low- or no-cost alternative to an MFA in New York City, opening the door to careers in the arts for talented individuals who might otherwise be excluded from our field. While we do not offer an accredited Masters of Fine Arts degree, we offer the professional and personal benefits of an MFA without the pricetag: a strong humanities curriculum, rigorous studio feedback, and community-building among artists. For artists whose primary goal is to make and exhibit art and are less concerned with qualifications to teach at the collegiate level, this program is the perfect launch pad.

Who are we?

We are an artist and a critic with nearly 20 years combined experience working as MFA program administrators and educators. It’s become clear to us that an alternative is needed, and we’re prepared to put all of our skills and experience toward creating it.

Curriculum

SDR is a one-year art school for post-graduate artists seeking an alternative to an MFA. Classes meet in the evenings or weekends to accommodate the busy lives of working artists. Students will be selected from qualified applicants, and will be asked to make a commitment to the year long course of study.

SDR’s curriculum is built on two pillars: the critique, both one-on-one and in a group setting, and the salon, which offers students a comprehensive study of art and human history. Students are expected to actively produce artwork and engaging with contemporary art outside of class time.

The Critique

The critique is the nexus of artistic development. Making and looking are the foundation of an arts education. The artist displaying work gets feedback through immediate and unbiased critique. The students giving the critique learn one of an artist’s most important skills: how to talk about art. Students will become confident speaking about the fundamental principles of design, composition, balance, pictorial rhythm and tonality/ contrast, as well as a basic art historical references.

SDR runs on a critique model in which the presenting artist offers no context for the artwork on display, and participants respond to what they see. We teach students to begin by looking at the formal aspects of a piece. Speaking about line, color, value, and space, then leads one to the issues of subject, content and context.

When artists learn what viewers experience in their work without any guidance, they learn to shift their focus or hone their forms and techniques to engender the viewer experience they desire. Our aim is to cultivate artists whose sense of form and content coexist and bolster each other.

SDR will use its network of artists, critics and curators to arrange studio visits for students in their own studios.

The Salon

Artists don’t have to be critics or scientists or historians or philosophers. But they do have to be informed. We believe that a rich understanding of history is critical to grasping the present. We also believe that the history of art cannot be taught or learned in isolation; it is an integral part of complex social forms, political shifts and technological development.

The salon offers a comprehensive humanities education specifically tailored to artists. Starting with the earliest known pre-history of human production, students will study human history in thought, politics, the arts and the sciences. Following a relatively brief survey of the ancient world, our focus will turn towards the history and art of the modern era. Students will study the rise and fall of modernity with the aim of building a critical perspective on the present.

The aim of the salon is not to build mastery in any one of these fields, but to cultivate historical and critical thinking. Rather than reading texts or past phenomena as isolated or thematic incidents, students will develop a deeper understanding of these objects as they emerge in history and as they shape, and are shaped by artistic production.

The salon is built to support artists in their primary task: making art. Students are not asked to write papers or become experts, but simply to read closely and participate heartily in group discussions.

Our primary texts will be Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art and Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of… series. These foundational readings will be supplemented by primary texts carefully selected to give working artists the most bang for their buck.