Five artists have signed on to teaching positions at the troubled USC Roski School of Art and Design, in Los Angeles.
Edgar Arceneaux, Patty Chang, Suzanne Lacy, Keith Mayerson, and Kori Newkirk will join as senior faculty beginning in the 2016-2017 academic year, the school has announced. They will replace the faculty members who left amid controversy roiling the school, including A.L. Steiner and Frances Stark.
Edgar Arceneaux, Until, Until, Until… Courtesy Performa.
The news comes just weeks after HaeAhn Kwon, the sole student in what was to be the class of 2018, dropped out, complaining about the program in a searing open letter. A year ago, an entire class of MFA students dropped out of the school, saying that the institution had reneged on previous financial offers. They pointed out that USC tuition has increased 92% in the past 14 years, and that executive pay at the school tripled during this period.
Arceneaux is a veteran of the Whitney Biennial and other major shows, and won the 2015 Malcolm McLaren Award at the Performa biennial. Chang has exhibited and performed at institutions from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Lacy, since participating in Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program in the 1970s, has shown at museums from London’s Tate Modern to the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Mayerson, a painter, is included in collections at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Newkirk has mounted solo shows at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.