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.
2023 Master Class Faculty
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.
Kris Graves
Kris Graves is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. He creates artwork that deals with societal problems and uses art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, he photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment, exploring how capitalism and power have shaped countries—and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life.
Brent Howard
Brent Howard is a sculptor based out of the Woodlands, Texas. His recent work examines the alchemic notion of environment and materiality, along with their storied past and present state, to transmute the past, within the auratic present. Howard’s most recent work explores the essence of individual materiality and poiesis through alabaster, marble, metal, and fiberglass. He was core faculty in the Sculpture department at the Yale School of Art and taught at Skowhegan Artist Residency as well as longtime assistant to Louise Bourgeois.
Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences at National Geographic. Prior to joining the magazine, she was the Director of Photography at The New Yorker, where her work was widely recognized, earning awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors, Awards of Excellence from the Society of Publication Designers, and a Peabody.
Liz Larner
Liz Larner attended the California Institute of the Arts, where she received her BFA. An inventor of new forms, she explores and extends the conditions and possibilities of sculpture in her work, which has been presented in numerous solo museum exhibitions. Liz was recently the subject of two major exhibitions, Don’t put it back like it was, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Sculpture Center, Long Island City, and below above, at Kunsthalle Zürich.
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.
Judy Pfaff
Judy Pfaff creates work that spans disciplines and eschews definition, and is often cited as a pioneer of installation-art. She has received many awards including the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). Judy lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
Brian Shure
Master Printer and Director, Anderson Ranch Editions
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, Director of Anderson Ranch Editions at Anderson Ranch.
Dr. Deborah Willis
Deborah Willis is a professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University and director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture. She teaches courses on photography and imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, photographic history of slavery and emancipation, contemporary women photographers, and beauty.