Brooklyn, New York, United States
I am a visual artist and a Professor of art. My work is exhibited locally and internationally and has been reviewed in publications such as Art News and The Huffington Post. I have also held a long term position for the Kossak Panting Program part of the Hunter College Foundation.
Benjamin King holds an MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. King's work has been exhibited locally and internationally in galleries including Freight+Volume, Laroche/Joncas, White Columns, Longhouse Projects, ACME Los Angeles, Ridgeway Exhibitions, and the Painting Center. King is a fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation and a repeat recipient of the DNA artist in residence award sponsored by Freight+Volume gallery. Between 2009 and 2015, with artist Jay Henderson, King curated a series of exhibitions in NYC and abroad. Their group was included in an Exit Art and MIT press publication called Alternative HIstories in 2010, a compendium documenting New York alternative art since the 1960s.
http://benjamin-king.com/brdrcrssng.html
To provide a top quality intensive and rigorous landscape painting curriculum in a Chautauqua setting that will significantly advance the skills and knowledge of undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate artists and, concurrently, enhance the...
I'm currently teaching ArtLA 101 at Hunter which is an introduction course to visual thinking and the creative process geared toward a broad array of students. It is not a traditional art school foundation but an introduction to visual thinking as both discourse and making. As conceived by Tony Smith, each section of ArtLA101 is split into two classes with two different instructors so that students are simultaneously exposed to the varied approaches of different artists. In my section this class teaches different theories on making visual art and broadens your ability to interpret the code of visual art. Students will learn to read visual language as sensory experience that has been compressed, encoded and transformed into an object, a kind of alchemy. You will be exposed to exercises ranging from the French academy, to the Bauhaus, to writing Chinese pictographic characters that are 4000 years old. Through this kind of studio work, looking at art and looking at nature, we will program the ability to capture spatial complexity of the visual world but also to capture its essence. We will also experiment with different traditional and nontraditional art materials to look at the "how" and the "what" of making visual art.
The Kossak Fund supports the advancement of painting in Hunter’s curriculum. All the component programs have come about through the cooperation of Committee, Department Chair, President Raab, and Hunter Foundation leadership. All the initiatives have been initially discussed, shaped and voted forward by the Kossak Committee of studio faculty, and supported by the President and the Administration without fail. For students and faculty alike, the word “Kossak” signifies excellence, opportunity, and professional ambition in art. For the undergraduate students who have most benefitted from Kossak support, the name signifies the best experience of their time at Hunter. If a very willing thank you to Evelyn Kossak could be summoned from all those grateful for what this fund has come to mean, the sound would be deafening. My role as coordinator is to manage the 4 main programs currently running under the Kossak banner, built over the last few years. The programs target the production of paintings, undergraduate and graduate grants to advance individual work, support for visiting artists in short and longer runs, and MFA and MA travel in pursuit of painting-centric research. We now have a website that will carry a range of documentation as we stock the site and advance the programming. http://www.kossakpainting.org/