"Future Schools" Opening Reception

Future Schools is a bold, three-part project–a dynamic exhibition, a live performance series, and an active curriculum of workshops and talks–that actively enacts alternative models for art education. Grounded in the National Academy of Design’s origins in 1825 as a self-organized, artist-founded school, the exhibition reactivates that legacy through contemporary voices exploring new ways of learning and imagining. Created in partnership with Büro Koray Duman Architects, Future Schools transforms the gallery into an active pedagogical environment that is part working classroom, part symposium space for public dialogue, and part archive of past and present educational experiments. Bringing together artists, educators, and cultural visionaries, the project reimagines how art can teach, challenge, and transform the ways we learn together.

The exhibition features new commissions by Ad Minoliti, Christian Nyampeta, and WAI Think Tank (Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowsky) and a chalkboard drawing by Chloë Bass. In addition to these programs, Future Schools will host LA ESCUELA___, the Strother School of Radical Attention, and the School for Poetic Computation for classes during the exhibition. The show will also include a dedicated archive tracing the history of global alternative schools and experimental pedagogies, from the 20th century to the present.

Future Schools is curated by Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator, and Nato Thompson, Guest Curator, with programmatic support from Frank Dallas, Programs Manager.

Future Schools is on view from February 26, 2026 through August 22, 2026.
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Reservations requested.

Image: The Feminist School of Painting, 2018–ongoing Installation: paintings, video, and furniture activated weekly in the form of classes with guest lecturers. Commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale.

Exhibition Support
This exhibition is supported by the Blue Rider Group at Morgan Stanley and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Generous support for the National Academy of Design's 200th Anniversary is provided by the Anniversary Host Committee: Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman, the Wolf Kahn Foundation, and The Frederic Whitaker and Eileen Monaghan Whitaker Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Veronica Bulgari, The Liman Foundation, and Francis J. Greenburger and Isabelle Autones.

National Academy of Design exhibitions and programs are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.