The Brooklyn Rail

The New York Studio School’s evening lecture series is indispensable not just to the school but to New York City. For years, despite the overwhelming demands on his time, Graham Nickson made a point of attending pretty much all the lectures—two a week—after which he presided over dinners in the Whitney room. He fretted over seating arrangements, toasted the speakers—always with grace—and, I believe, chose the students who prepared and served the meals, whose labor and cheer were essential to the sense of festive animation. The food could hardly have been simpler, but there was always wine, and the overall feeling was one of abundance. At these dinners, in that room, we were all somehow still students.

In December 2018, a show of Jonathan Silver’s drawings and heads opened in the school’s gallery. Jonathan, who died in 1992, had first exhibited at the school in the seventies and was an influential teacher there in the eighties, overlapping with the start of Graham’s tenure as Dean. Well after that semester’s evening lecture series had been determined, Marion Smit, a student of Jonathan’s and the curator of the show, asked Graham if it would be possible to do a panel in conjunction with it, which I would organize. Graham said yes. Although the panel was carefully planned, it came together quickly, and was a bit off the school grid: it took place at the end of or just after the semester—and almost seemed to come out of the blue. It filled the drawing studio and remains an essential discussion of Silver’s work.

In 2023 the painter Eyal Danieli died suddenly, shockingly, at sixty-one. After returning to the States from Israel in the mid-eighties, Eyal enrolled at the school. While a student, he was also the school’s custodian, living in the basement. He later made it clear that the school was fundamental to his education as an artist. Graham knew that Eyal had been an influential student. Amanda Guest, an artist and Eyal’s wife—she and Eyal met as students at the School—hoped to hold his memorial there. Graham said yes. We found a time, early fall. And a room, the sculpture studio. Like the panel, the memorial, while carefully planned, had a sudden, infectious energy. It, too, was packed with people. At the back of the room, by the railing at the top of the stairs, was Graham, who had willed himself to be there despite his increasingly debilitating illness.

We had other requests of Graham. Would the school host a Danieli show, curated by Robert Storr, who, with Jackie Brookner, was acting Dean of the School before Graham’s appointment? Graham agreed to this, too. It opened last June, in summer heat, and is by far the most important Danieli exhibition to date; it is an exhibition of which, with all his curatorial achievements, Rob feels particularly proud. And could we do a Danieli panel in conjunction with the show? Yes, Graham said. The drawing studio, the usual site for panels, was unavailable. We spoke in the gallery, surrounded by Eyal’s work. This panel, too, drew a crowd, and it, too, felt to me both institutional and non-institutional, entirely of the Studio School and yet its own thing—available online to anyone interested, but belonging first of all to the artist, and to the people who were physically present.

I think of the Studio School building, home almost a century ago to the emergent Whitney Museum of American Art, at a moment when American artists needed a place to be shown and seen, as themselves, in a country to which modern artists did not know if they belonged. Graham knew that this history was built into the school, and that it carried within it irreplaceable knowledge and energy, which he struggled to keep alive—and protect—against the onslaught of corporatization and triumph of the corporate museum. For me, Graham is best remembered as someone who made it possible to imagine a now in which it is possible to live.