The Spring 2026 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky and Jason Smith.

The Salon of 2026: A Roundtable on Art Writing

Jason Farago, Isabelle Graw, Alexi Worth & Diva Corp

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are not required.

Jason Farago is a critic at large at The New York Times, where he reviews exhibitions, conducts interviews and reports features across the United States and internationally. He has reported on intertwined cultural and political disputes from Ukraine, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, and Japan, and he is the co-creator of Close Read, a digital criticism column that delves into a single work of art detail by detail. Previously he edited Even, a magazine he co-founded, whose ten-issue run is collected in the anthology Out of Practice (Motto Books, 2018). He served as the first US art critic of The Guardian, and his criticism has also appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Artforum, and many other publications. Farago is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Rabkin Prize for arts writing (2017), the Silvers-Dudley Prize for criticism (2022), and the Edward R. Murrow Award for his reporting on Ukrainian cultural destruction and preservation. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Isabelle Graw is a professor of art history and art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste (Städelschule) Frankfurt am Main, who is currently based in Berlin. She founded the journal, Texte zur Kunst, in 1990 with Stefan Germer (†) and has both conceived and co-edited 119 issues to date. In 2003 she co-founded the Institut für Kunstkritik at the Städelschule with Daniel Birnbaum.

Graw is the author of High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Sternberg Press, 2009), The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (MIT Press, 2018), In Another World: Notes 2014-2017 (MIT Press, 2020), Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (MIT Press, 2021), and On the Benefits of Friendship (MIT Press, 2023). She has coedited publications including (with Daniel Birnbaum): Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and Its Markets (Sternberg Press, 2008), Thinking Through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas (MIT Press, 2012), Kim Gordon’s Is It My Body? Selected Texts (MIT Press, 2014); and Jutta Koether: f (Sternberg Press, 2015); (with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth): Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition (MIT Press, 2015); and (with Christoph Menke), The Value of Critique: Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour (University of Chicago Press, 2019)

Alexi Worth is a New York-based painter whose work explores what it means, in our digitally supersaturated environment, for pictures to be “mindmade and handmade.” In his own distinctively precise and compressed style, Worth offers puzzling, reinvented versions of ordinary things, among them wineglasses, doorways, hands, and leaves. With unusual surfaces and viewpoints, Worth’s art differs from much recent figuration in its economy and simplicity, suggesting an effort to return the contemplative power of abstraction to figurative art.

The New York Times’ Roberta Smith has praised Worth’s work as representing the continued vitality of painting today, wryly labeling it “Realism With Benefits.” And in New York Magazine, Jerry Salz singled Worth out for depictions that “resist naming and stay titillating to the eye.” Worth has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the New England Foundation for the Arts, and is represented by the DC Moore gallery in New York, NY.

In addition to his painting, Worth is a noted writer about art, reviewing exhibitions for The New Yorker, Artforum, T magazine, Art in America, ARTnews, among others. He has written catalog texts for artists including Jasper Johns, Carroll Dunham, Jackie Saccoccio, and Jim Nutt. Worth has taught at various art schools, including Pratt Institute, Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale University School of Art. Later this spring, his first museum show will open at the Gallerie D’Italia,Naples, Italy.

Diva Corp is an LA-based criticism project, just over a year old. In addition to publishing work on their own platforms, they’ve written recently for Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Cultured, and Artillery, and have been covered by Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Frieze, Spike Art Magazine, artnet, The Art Newspaper, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Rabkin Foundation. In addition to criticism, they’ve contributed work to projects at The Box, O-Town House, Other Places Art Fair, and Montez Press Radio. Their quarterly, print-only publication, Diva Corp Magazine, uses art -- rather than traditional written criticism -- as the vehicle to respond to exhibitions, and has featured work from dozens of LA-based artists.

Image: The Critics (1862), Honoré Daumier.

See the full Spring 2026 Seminar schedule here.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, David Kordansky, and Jeffrey Deitch.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.