SYMPOSIA! WITH JOHN YAU
Meeting Day: Mondays at 12 pm -2:30 pm EST
Dates: September 2025 - April 2026
We’re thrilled to announce a new Symposia! with John Yau, launching this fall, designed in collaboration with Astrid Dick, and Michael David. Blending poetry, critique, contemporary art history, and storytelling, this eight-month program (Sept 2025–April 2026) offers a unique format for deep artistic engagement and community building. Sessions will feature storytelling and discussion led by John, open Q&As, individual critiques, and a closing poetry reading.
The program culminates in an exhibition curated by John Yau.
We are excited to announce a brand new Symposia! with John Yau this fall, designed together with Astrid Dick and Michael David.
Embracing a dynamic collaboration cum critique design, this program will combine elements of poetry, critique, contemporary art history and storytelling to create an extraordinary new format for art education and community building. Each session will incorporate abundant time for in-depth discussion facilitated by John as well as an open Q&A segment for group participation, and close with a poetry reading.
Through his writing, John Yau has reviewed and formed friendships with artists such as Suzan Frecon, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Sylvia Plimack-Mangold, Thomas Nozkowski, and David Reed. John makes the contemporary practices of these masters come alive for us with a new light by sharing how his understanding of their work grew and evolved, following their careers through both his writing and personal interactions.
We are thrilled to announce that John will be joined by one of the greatest living painters, David Reed, for a conversation centered around reviews that John has written of David’s work. Their discussion will identify common ground and explore disagreements, as well as the complex relationship between critic and artist, and the beauty and importance of friendships that last for decades.
This unique opportunity builds on the best of what we have learned from previous Symposia! including multiple one-on-one critiques with John, which will provide opportunities for deeper dialogue and allow him to get to know you and your practice over an extended period. These sessions will be recorded to preserve the historic and ephemeral nature of John’s storytelling and poetry reading.
The program will run for eight months between September 2025 and April 2026, culminating in an exhibition curated by John Yau!
Course Tuition: $5500
Partial scholarships and payment plans are available.
Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. Since his first book of poetry, Crossing Canal Street (1976), he has won acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. His poems frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, anchored in the legacy of his dual heritages as Chinese, American, poet, and artist, and his work often explores, and exploits, the boundaries between poetry and prose.
A noted art critic and curator, Yau has also published an immense amount of works of art criticism and artists’ books. He was the Arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail until 2011 and has since then contributed regularly to Hyperallergic.
Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley.
He has received honors, awards and fellowships for his work such as the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, to name a few, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France.
In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism.
