The Beaux-Arts veneer of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in uptown Manhattan conjures dusty “don’t-touch-this” vibes. But inside, dancers are crawling on furniture and artists are knocking out walls. Over the last several years, a revamped mandate has quietly turned the 120-year-old private club and honor society into one of New York’s most playful and inviting art spaces.
“The Game,” a new exquisite corpse-style show opening on Sept. 26 as part of Arts and Letters’s fall program, is the latest example of its increasingly adventurous program. The rules are simple: Each of the four players, or participating artists, is given a modest budget (at least in museum terms: around $30,000) and a three-day installation period to build a presentation that retains at least two objects from the previous installment. Christopher Williams, a conceptual photographer, will set the stage off which the others—artists Monika Baer, Aria Dean, and Abraham Cruzvillegas—will iterate and riff. The exhibition will unfold across a succession of two-month installations, likely closing in a very different state than it started.
The show speaks to Arts and Letters’s appetite for experimentation as the organization parlays its unique model into multidisciplinary exhibitions, performances, and other projects. “We often think of artists as one of our most important audiences,” says Jenny Jaskey, the institution’s chief curator and program director. “Not just the artists that we’re working with, but literally artists coming as our visitors. What might be inspiring for [them] to see and to experience?”
The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898—then under the name the National Institute of Arts and Letters—and has, over the years, counted a staggering collection of famed architects, artists, musicians, and writers as members: Duke Ellington, Georgia O’Keeffe, Toni Morrison, and Frank Lloyd Wright, to name a few. The organization is run entirely by members (the current lineup includes Jonathan Franzen, Arthur Jafa, and Meredith Monk) who pay no dues, are elected for life, and only introduce new people when one of the 300 membership slots is vacated (usually by death).
In recent years, particularly during the pandemic, when space and opportunities for artists dwindled, the rigidity of these and other policies had come to feel out of step with the times. After the site’s previous curator, Souhad Rafey, retired in 2021, a small group of members—mostly visual artists—initiated a dialogue about reimagining its program, which at that point was built around the same two month-long exhibitions every year: one for artists being considered for Arts and Letters awards, the other for new members to display their work.
“My perspective at the time was the [buildings] were being massively underutilized,” says the artist Ann Hamilton, an Arts and Letters member since 2014 and the secretary of its board since 2022. She recognized that the space and exhibition opportunities Arts and Letters provided were being misspent on the one group of creatives who didn’t truly need them. “It wasn’t like we had a big meeting and said, ‘we want to go another direction.'” The pivot, Hamilton explains, came about incrementally—and not without resistance. “I don’t think everyone in the membership is 100 percent behind it. People don’t like change.”
Jaskey has won over at least some skeptics since being hired to lead programming in 2022. Formerly the director and curator of the Artist’s Institute at Hunter College, she arrived with an experimental pedigree and a gift for making the most out of limited resources. “She has more capacity than most people I know,” Hamilton adds. (To date, the organization’s budget comes largely from its endowment, but executive director Cody Upton, in conjunction with the board, also recently hired its first dedicated development staff member.)
“Jenny is very adventurous in her ideas,” says Raven Chacon, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a MacArthur “genius” grantee who was among Arts and Letters’s first commissions under Jaskey in 2024. The Diné artist and composer filled the building’s North Gallery with the sounds of birdsong, inviting reflection on the site’s history, both as the ancestral homeland of the Lenape and then, later, the property of The Birds of America author John James Audubon, an enslaver who also collected the skulls of Indigenous people.
At a moment when many arts institutions are considering how to do more with less, Arts and Letters models a new recipe: mount fewer shows, but richer programs. Chacon appreciated the opportunity to stage live musical performances in the space several times during its 10-month run. “As a musician and performer myself, this is important for me. It makes the room into a gathering space,” he says.
Staged just after the opening of Chacon’s show was Spectral Dances, a 2024 piece by choreographer and then-resident Jonathan González. The work featured six Black performers worming through the building’s library, Members’ Room, and interstitial passages in intimate, improvised ways. The work, a literal rejoinder to the institution’s historic exclusivity, “was, experientially and programmatically, a huge risk for them in their first season,” González says.
Shortly after being hired by Arts and Letters, Jaskey convened a small advisory committee that included Hamilton, Charles Gaines, Mel Chin, Joan Jonas, and Amy Sillman. All five remain a steady source of support for Jaskey today, and you can feel their fingers all over experiments like “The Game.”
“There’s a real spirit of wanting to trust artists and give opportunities that are meaningful and at the right times in people’s careers,” Jaskey says. “Maybe these artists … will become members one day.”
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