The National Academy of Design Presents The 191st Annual: Academy Style

The 191st Annual: Academy Style
20th June, 2024 – 14th September, 2024
The National Academy of Design
519 West 26th Street
Floor Two, New York
NY 10001

The National Academy of Design is pleased to present the 191st Annual Exhibition, the longest-running serial exhibition of contemporary art and architecture in the United States. Dating to 1826, the 191st Annual will feature work by 117 artists and architects, all of whom were elected as National Academicians in recognition of their extraordinary contributions to art and architecture in the United States.

The first in-person Annual in nearly a decade and the first in the Academy’s new home in Chelsea, the 191st Annual: Academy Style will run June 20 – September 14, 2024 at the National Academy’s recently launched exhibition space at 519 West 26th Street in Chelsea. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 20, 2024, 6-8pm.

The 191st Annual: Academy Style encompasses aesthetic and conceptual approaches including abstraction, minimalism, realism, figuration and portraiture in a range of mediums such as drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, video, architectural models, book projects and printmaking. Participation in the Annual is open to the National Academy’s membership of 450 elected artists and architects, of which 117 submitted more than 140 works for exhibition.

Nevertheless, thematic groupings emerge from the submissions, including spirituality, landscape, nature, community, social life, and intimacy, perhaps a reflection on recent years, when the Academy was temporarily without an exhibition space, compounded by the distance imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Opening less than a year after the Academy’s launch of its new home in Chelsea, the exhibition reiterates the institution’s commitment to its members, a community of 420 artists and architects across the United States. Well over one-third of the exhibiting artists and architects have been elected to the Academy since the last in-person Annual Exhibition in 2015.

Founded in 1825, ‘Academy Style’ at the National Academy has undergone many transformations over the years. Today ‘Academy Style’ is diverse in practice, decidedly contemporary (members were invited to submit works made in the last three years) and reflective of an institutional identity and ethos initiated and led by artists and architects. In the earliest years of the National Academy, the artwork produced by the membership followed the English tradition in both style and method, with an emphasis on painting focused on history, landscape and portraiture.

The Academy initially engaged with the ‘arts of design’ as defined in 1825 to include painting, drawing, architecture, sculpture, and engraving. Now, nearly 200 years later, more recently elected Academicians work in mediums that had not yet entered the Western canon when the National Academy was founded: installation, moving image, printmaking, digital art and socially engaged art and architecture, among others – all examples of 21st Century ‘Academy Style.’

The 191st Annual: Academy Style is co-curated by Sara Reisman, Chief Curator, and Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator

Annual Exhibition Awards

Through the generosity of donors and Academicians dating back a century, the National Academy of Design will award up to $47,600 in endowed prizes to artists and architects participating in the 191st Annual Exhibition, selected by an invited jury of seven critics, art historians, and curators (list follows below). Selected artists and architects will be announced at a ceremony for the awardees on September 5, 2024.

Annual Exhibition Awards Jury members:

● José Esparza Chong Cuy, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture
● Kendal Henry, Assistant Commissioner, Public Art at NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
● Nancy Princenthal, Art Historian/Writer
● Martha Schwendener, critic/writer, New York Times, Brooklyn Rail
● Susanna V. Temkin, Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York
● Jovanna Venegas, Curator of SculptureCenter
● Gee Wesley, Ulises

Exhibiting Artists and Architects (Architects denoted with red font)

The 191st Annual: Academy Style opens on the 20th of June, 2024 until the 14th of September, 2024 at The National Academy of Design

©2024 The National Academy of Design