Live at The New York Studio School: Alla Broeksmit and Stella Hayes

Live at The New York Studio school with Ukrainian born artist, Alla Broeksmit, and sister and poet, Stella Hayes.

“The New York Studio School was founded in 1964 by Mercedes Matter, in collaboration with a group of students and faculty, during a time of cultural ferment. To this day, it is bound by a sense of mission, one that has often stood in counterpoint to the prevailing tastes of the art world. During the heyday of Pop, conceptual art, and minimalism, the School emphasized drawing, working from life, and a sustained studio practice. To delve into the history, however, is to become aware of the contradictions inherent in a school run by some of the most passionate minds of the New York art world.“ Jennifer Sachs Samet

Closely held memories of childhood in Kyiv and deeply rooted remembrances of family and beloved places fuel the dreamlike imagery of Alla Broeksmit’s art. Gestural brushwork and the tactility of hand-mixed pigments in the muted palette of faded frescoes lend texture and atmosphere to her expressively rendered paintings, evoking a sense of time past, recalled to the present. Broeksmit has pursued painting since the 1990s, studying at Parsons School of Design in New York City, then co-founding the Lots Road Group with fellow artists from the Heatherly School of Fine Art after moving to London in 1997. During this period, her paintings were primarily figurative and focused on portraiture, taking inspiration from the heavily impastoed, psychological portraits of Lucian Freud. In 2017, Broeksmit received her MFA from the New York Studio School, where Dean Graham Nickson encouraged her to work on a larger scale and to take “a more instinctual, visceral approach” to painting. Instructors Judy Glantzman, Kyle Staver, and Elisa Jensen were also instrumental in her development of an individualized visual language and in exposing her to the descriptive and emotional expression of color, as seen in her work.

Stella Hayes is the author of a poetry collection, One Strange Country (What Books Press, November 2020). Hayes earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and for the Pushcart Prize, as well as appeared in Prelude, The Poetry Project’s The Recluse, The Lake and Spillway, among others, and is forthcoming from Stanford’s Mantis and Poet Lore. She began her life in a book-filled home in an agricultural town an hour outside of Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union. In 1977, her family of five — her father excluded — left for the U.S., settling first in Chicago. At USC, she studied creative writing with a focus on poetry with celebrated poet David St. John, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. More recently, she has taken advanced classes in poetry and fiction at 92Y and was asked to do a reading there in the spring of 2018. She is a graduate student at NYU M.F.A in poetry and is assistant fiction editor at Washington Square Review.

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Jane South: ⁠⁠@janesouth⁠

New York Studio School: @ny_studioschool

Alla Broeksmit: @artallastudio

Stella Hayes: stellahayes.com

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