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Our Teaching Artists
Drawing & Painting
Marta Blair
Marta Blair is a Colombian artist based in NYC since1997. She has a Fine Arts degree from the National University of Colombia and a BFA in Graphic Design. She has worked in visual arts and textile design for over 15 years. Blair has been a member of Cornerstone Studios since 2015, a collective of artists from northern Manhattan who are based in Washington Heights. She enjoys large format painting. Marta has had several shows in NY and a few commissions for public art installations.
Michele Brody
Michele Brody has been working with BRAC since 2010. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. Utilizing her strong background in the liberal arts, Michele creates site-specific, mixed-media installations and works of public art that are generated by the history, culture, environment, and architecture of a wide range of exhibition spaces. While living and working in such places as France, Costa Rica, California, the Midwest, Germany, and her home of New York, her art career has developed into a process of working in collaboration with each new community as a means towards developing an interpretation of the sense of a place as an outsider looking in. Michele has recently had exhibitions of her work at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Julio Valdez Project Space in Harlem, and she also recently worked as as an artist in residence at the Wave Hill Winter Workspace.
Jaron Newton
Jaron Newton is a Kansas City-born artist who has been creating and inspiring in New York for the past 14 years. After getting his BFA in animation, he moved to New York and interned with Bill Plympton's animation studio, Plymptoons. One evening in 2008 he was walking by the Art students league, and it was here that he was moved by a painting of an Abu Ghraib prisoner, being crucified on a cross, surrounded by soldiers. This inspired him to push himself to create great works of art and he enrolled in some open drawing classes at the Art Students League. By 2014 and for the next 4 years he would make a complete commitment to being a better painter. In 2015 he worked as a painter for Jeff Koons on the highly successful exhibition Masterpiece Theatre. Since then, Jaron has been appointed to the board of the Art Students League and has been involved in programming, professional development and diversity amongst the teaching artists. His work has been displayed in group shows at Frost Gallery in Brooklyn, Greenpoint Gallery, and Chelsea White Space in Manhattan, and was featured in 2020 on After Hours Magazine. When he's not creating his own art or teaching, Jaron can be found repairing homes or entertaining with paint parties and caricatures.
Jennifer Tomaiolo
Jennifer Tomaiolo has earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College and an Associates in Chemistry from New York City College of Technology. She is a four-time BRIO award winner and has created commissions and exhibited in galleries around the Tri-State area.
From her studio in The Bronx, Jennifer Tomaiolo studies and experiments with the interposition of patterns and the landscape, natural rhythms that have been perceived and explored by artists in cultural patterns throughout art history that are now also being described through science and math. Her work explores the interrelation of the chaotic, but discernible fractal nature of life, and investigates the way artists have perceived and represented this nature in art throughout time and space, and how the enduring unearthing and investigation by artists and scientists into the nature of life relates to and inspires the artist personally.
Outside her studio, Jennifer travels to ancient, cultural, and natural places and museums of the Mediterranean, Near East, and America to research art history and uncover patterns in the cultural and natural landscape. Through her work, she engages in the conversation between compassion, memory, continuity, and connectedness on the one hand, and the looming shadow of an ominous future.
