Master Classes
Take Your Practice Further
Master Classes at Anderson Ranch Arts Center are highly selective, limited-enrollment workshops which provide advanced students with even greater access to world-renowned artists and educators. These rigorous classes are geared toward professional and committed artists who want to take their work to the next level with mentoring from master teachers, but who may not have the time for a years-long committed mentorship or residency. In the interest of continuity, some Master Classes also offer additional virtual sessions following the in-person summer workshop. Master classes require a portfolio review for admission.
Concentrating on aesthetic, technical and conceptual development, classes specifically address how to improve one’s work through group discussions, individual sessions with the instructor and studio time. Students dive deeply into the dynamics of their art-making and medium. The goal is to unleash a student’s potential with rigor and exploration, direction and critique. Our Master Classes are a dynamic new offering as well as an essential addition to our artistic programs.
2024 Master Class Faculty
John Edmonds
John Edmonds is an American artist and photographer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Edmonds earned his MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the Corcoran School of Arts. His work is in collections worldwide including the Guggenheim, MoMa, The Getty Museum and Yale University Art Gallery. Edmonds has taught at Yale University, Harvard University and School of Visual Arts. In 2019, he was included in the Whitney Biennial.
Linda Geary
Linda Geary is professor/chair of painting at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her permanent mosaic, River, was installed at the San Francisco International Airport in 2021. Linda is a painter who lives and works in Oakland.
Nikolai Haas
Niki Haas of the Haas Brothers explores aesthetic and formal themes related to nature, science fiction, sexuality, psychedelia, and color theory in prolific materials. Since its founding in 2010, the Haas Brothers have evolved from fabricators and collaborators to nimble cross-pollinators in creative disciplines including fashion, film, music, art, and design. They apply their unique approach to a multitude of materials, ranging from brass, bronze, beads, porcelain, and fur to highly technical resins and polyurethane. Often functional in form, their work continues to challenge the slippery divide between art and design.
David MacDonald
In 1971, David MacDonald joined the faculty of the School of Art at Syracuse University; he retired in 2008 at the rank of professor emeritus. His creative work has been featured in several ceramic textbooks and magazines, and he has been featured in nationally televised programs. Since retiring, David has been actively lecturing and working in his studio.
Meleko Mokgosi
Meleko Mokgosi—born in Francistown, Botswana and living and working in Wellesley, MA—is an artist, Associate Professor and director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art, and director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. He received his MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Program at the University of California Los Angeles in 2011. He participated in the Rauschenberg Residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, FL in 2015, and the Artist in Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY in 2012.
Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie is an artist working with photography, film, collage, and ceramics. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including a mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Catherine was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal in 2016, and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and was professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Sheila Pepe
As an artist and educator, Sheila Pepe likes to trespass disciplinary boundaries, and has been working in various sculptural media since 1995. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including venues such as the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; The Bemis Center for the Arts in Omaha, NE; and Art International with PASAJ, Istanbul, Turkey. Her most recent installation, “My Neighbor’s Garden,” was on public view in New York’s Madison Square Park. She has taught at Bard, Columbia, Pratt, RISD, Stanford, VCU, Williams College, and Yale, and was resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and at Dartmouth University in 2024.
Brian Shure
Master Printer-in-Residence
Brian Shure is represented by Planthouse Gallery in New York, where he curated the 2018 show Bathing. He has taught at RISD, Brown and Cornell and conducted classes in China, Japan, Mexico & Germany. He is Master Printer-in-Residence of Anderson Ranch Editions.
Mickalene Thomas
Mickalene Thomas was born and raised in New Jersey and lives and works in New York. One of the most influential artists today, her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Awards nominated co-producer, curator, educator and mentor to many emerging artists. While embarking on her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists. She has been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019); Visionary Award, Pioneer Works (2019); She is the cofounder of the Pratt>FORWARD ‘Artist in the Market’ incubator for post-graduate students, and serves on the Board of the Trustees for the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1. Image: Mickalene Thomas Photographed by Malike Sidibe At Yale Gallery for The New York Times Magazine.
Jasmine Wahi
Jasmine Wahi is the Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space, a nonprofit organization in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. Her multi-faceted curatorial practice predominantly focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. In 2023, Ms. Wahi was honored by The Metropolitan Museum of Art for exemplary social impact work. In 2020, PES, Ms. Wahi became the inaugural Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, while simultaneously Co-Directing Project for Empty Space. While at the museum she curated several renowned exhibitions, including Born In Flames: Feminist Futures and Wardell Milan: AMERIKA. God Bless You If It’s Good To You, which was oriented around the thesis that visibility is the primary tenet of Social Justice. In 2019, Ms. Wahi gave her first TED Talk on intersectionality and visibility, entitled All The Women In Me Are Tired. A lover of learning and sharing, Ms. Wahi has taught at a number of art institutions, including Yale University, and the School of Visual Arts: MFA Fine Arts department. She is currently in the Faculty of Brooklyn College in New York City. Ms. Wahi received her own Art History education from New York University, where she has a BA in Art History from the College of Arts and Sciences, and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts. Jasmine Wahi lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her chihuahua, Momo. You can follow her shenanigans and micro-essays on Instagram at @browngirlcurator. Photo by Dario Calmese