The Last Art School of the Living & Dead

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead

An Inventory of Knowledge and Memory
by Dawn Hunter Art ®

“The teacher is not the one who gives answers, but the one who forms the conditions in which something can be seen.”

~ Dawn Hunter

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead, acrylic, ink, raised paper, and vinyl on paper, 72" x 96"

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead is a biographical meditation on identity, mentorship, and artistic lineage. Developed over nearly two decades, the painting operates as a nonlinear landscape in which past and present coexist—an accumulated record of influence, memory, and transformation.

I began this painting in 2005, after the simultaneous loss of my teacher, mentor and friend Lester Goldman and friend and colleague, Paul Sebban. What started as a response to loss gradually expanded into a broader reflection memories of people, places and events from my studies with other artists emerged in paint. Faculty and fellow students from the Kansas City Art Institute painting programs and the Yale Norfolk program are depicted at various stages and points in the my growth as an artist, in turn creating a ever-changing and dynamic progression of teachers and peers.

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead, detail featuring a portrait of KCAI professor Jim Sajovic.

Many figures are drawn from life, including Lester Goldman, Shirley Schnell, Wilbur Niewald, Jim Sajovic, and Hugh Merrill, alongside artists such as Jill Downen, Margaret Curtis, Karen Rice, and Angie Dufresne. Some appear through portraiture, while others are embedded through references to their work, creating a layered structure of presence and influence. Wilbur Niewald, who anchors the composition, is depicted from drawings I made of him painting in Loose Park—often during air shows, a subtle reference echoed in the airplane that moves through the painting.

The Last Art School is both volumetric and atmospheric. This piece is both filled with cadmium orange that is transformative, and activated by all sorts of marks—dots and areas of purely tactile paint—that reference my history as a student (polka dots were one of the first visual icons I had) and the influence of Yayoi Kusama (who can obliterate the viewer’s understanding of the physical world with polka dots). While a graduate student at UCDavis, the great Roy DeForest once asked me if I had ever begun a painting with polka dots. I replied that I had not. I never forgot that question. This painting did not begin with them either, however it ended with them.

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead, detail featuring Peregrine Honig and her dog Beignet; Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz (on a computer screen); a phthalo blue silhouette of Leigh Tarentino; and Shirley Schnell holding my daughter Darcy.

This work was heavily influenced by the California Funk aesthetic and ideology which I was exposed to as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. The way the figures were treated and identity was perceived was directly influenced by former professors Roy DeForest and Bob Arneson. Their figurative work dealt with issues of the human condition in a physical and humorous way. Within this work I used paint in a very specific way for each figure's identity construction and as a form of storytelling through the environmental shifts in the tableaux.

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead is not a single story, but a space in which teaching and learning is ongoing, a space in which seen, taught, and shared knowledge is in circulation, transacted through relationships, attentive listening and practice. The archive of artistic knowledge is personal and open, never fixed but always in a state of development.

The Last Art School of the Living and the Dead on exhibition at the 2026 ArtFields exhibition.

“The sailor cannot see the north, but knows the needle can,” was written by Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson on June 7, 1862. The line speaks to trust in intuition or an inner guide—the “needle”—to find direction even when the destination is not visible. It was a favorite quote of Kansas City Art Institute professor Carl Kurtz, who incorporated it into many of his calligraphy projects. In this painting, I represent Kurtz through the inclusion of this quote in the upper left corner.