"The Last Physician of Images, of Criticism+Value" is a 2025-2026 fellow at: The Lunder Institute for American Art!

Awarded to scholars, researchers, and artists whose work aligns with The Lunder Institute’s mission of expanding the boundaries of American Art, fellowships foster experimentation, research, and production at all stages of practice by providing space, time, and resources to incubate leading work in the field.

NEW BLACK MEDIA : an exhibition by Ernest Arthur Bryant III that investigates notions of art, labor, and freedom, unveiling images created through a blend of ancient traditions and modern manipulation techniques.

Through deliberate subtraction—excavative-drawing, Bryant questions the essence of media creation and critique within a framework of both erasure and hyper-circulation. By employing sgraffito, Bryant illuminates plaster walls as investigations of ancient myths, histories and the haunting of the contemporary world.

Criticism + Value IV

Criticism + Value is a discussion series about the criticism and value of art through a series of intimate conversations about the work and practice of national and international artists. The series continues with a conversation between host Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., and American artist, Alex Jackson

Alex Jackson currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. His practice involves the development of a continually expanding universe, where recurring characters traverse an entangled ecology of color, shadow, form, flatness, and geography, in an effort to find freedom in the building of a new language. Jackson received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 and received his MFA from Yale University in 2017. He has attended residencies at Yale Norfolk, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and The Royal Drawing School at Dumfries.

Criticism + Value VII

The series continues with a conversation between host Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., and American artist, Caroline Kent.

Caroline Kent is a Chicago based visual artist that explores the relationship between language, translation and abstraction through an expanded painting practice. Developed through an ongoing archive of works on paper, the paintings build out of this context to exist in the multiple forms of drawings, paintings, sculpture and performance. Kent labors to expand the discourse of abstraction to include alternative logics that move beyond surface and frame through each act of translation, from one medium to the next.

Kent received a Bachelor of Science from Illinois State University and a Master of Fine Arts from The University of Minnesota. Kent’s work has been presented at institutions such as The Walker Art Center, MN; The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The California African American Museum, LA; The Flag Art Foundation, NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; and the University Galleries of Illinois State University. Kent has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation, and was selected as a 2020 awardee of the Artadia Foundation Chicago. Kent’s work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, MN, The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, the Dallas Museum of Art, TX, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, among others. Kent is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Criticism + Value VI

The series continues with a conversation between host Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., and American artist, Wayne Hodge.

Wayne Hodge’s work combines elements of collage, performance and photography. His practice explores the relationship between history, media and fantasies of race and desire. His imagery is drawn from media, historical and science fiction sources.

Wayne Hodge is an American artist based in New York. He received his M.F.A. from Rutgers University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been shown nationally at The Bronx Museum, MoMA P.S.1, and internationally in Germany, Brazil and China. He was featured in 'The Radical Presence' at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Walker Arts Center and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Other exhibitions include 'The Shadows Took Shape' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and "(an)other" at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. In 2017, his solo project Skin Like Distant Stars, was shown at Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY. Recent Exhibitions include
Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California, and Ascension of Black Stillness CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Criticism + Value V

This year, the Criticism + Value series continues through a series of intimate discussions about the work and practice of national and international artists, beginning with a conversation between host, Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., and Iranian interdisciplinary artist, Leila Seyedzadeh.

Leila Seyedzadeh’s work addresses "imaginary landscapes and focuses on natural subjects such as mountains extracted from the subconscious. It is as if she is attaching pieces of her memories, and by doing so, she is destroying their meaning, thus creating a landscape immersed in placelessness."

Leila Seyedzadeh is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist based in New York who received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and BA from The University of Science and Culture in 2014. She was a recipient of the H. Lee Hirsche prize and Soma Summer fellowship at Yale School of Art. She has been invited to participate in exhibitions, including shows at ChaShaMa, The border project space, High line nine Gallery, Dubai art fair, and Dastan Gallery. Her work has been represented in institutional exhibitions in the US and Iran, including the Green Hall Gallery at Yale University and the Ahvaz Contemporary Art museum in Iran. Seyedzadeh completed residencies at Nars and NYFA in New York, and at SOMA in Mexico City.