2022 Chubb Fellows Exhibition

Hannah Murray

Wilba Simson

Jed Webster Smith

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to announce the 2022 Chubb Fellow Exhibition. The Chubb Postgraduate Fellowship, now in its 14th year, is the highest honor the New York Academy of Art can bestow on its students. Under the program, Fellows have the opportunity to expand the breadth and depth of their artistic prowess while serving as teaching assistants and mentors to a new crop of talented figurative artists. Chubb Fellows also receive studio accommodations, exhibition opportunities, and a stipend. Hannah Murray, Wilba Simson, and Jed Webster Smith were selected upon their graduation in 2021, and on August 29th, the Academy will exhibit the works each artist created during the past year.

All three fellows enjoyed banner years creatively and professionally. Murray sold out her first solo show at Marinaro Gallery in New York this past Spring. Simson is currently showing work at Guy Regal Gallery in the city and is working on large scale paintings for the Academy show. Smith’s work sold work last year at Art Basel and has been featured editorially in Artsy, Juxtapoz, and The New York Times.

Underscoring the diversity of work which comes from the Chubb Fellows program, this year’s recipients approach their works from diverging directions and interests. Murray, who hails from London, makes paintings that come from her own experiences and ideas of female power and the nuanced implications that surround embodiment, seduction, and control. Simson’s painting hearkens back to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of his native country of Australia, including his bold large scale charcoal drawings of shark life which evoke a sense of the feeling of immediacy in the animal world. For Smith, who grew up in Colorado, the mythology the American West is subject matter to be re-examined and deconstructed in light of contemporary issues and flashpoints.

Founded in 1982 by artists, scholars, and patrons of the arts, including Andy Warhol, the New York Academy of Art is a not-for-profit educational and cultural institution which combines intensive technical training in drawing, painting, and sculpture with active critical discourse. Academy students are taught traditional methods and techniques and encouraged to use these skills to make vital contemporary art. Through major exhibitions, a lively speaker series, and an ambitious educational program, the Academy serves as a creative and intellectual center for all artists dedicated to highly skilled, conceptually aware figurative and representational art.

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