Membership
The 21st century artist tool kit for building an art filled life.
TAAS Membership is a global art community that offers resources, events, skill building workshops, peer-peer feedback, and networking opportunities for working artists at any stage in their practice. We have live virtual events and digitally delivered materials to keep you engaged with your practice and motivated towards your creative goals.
MEMBERSHIP BREAKDOWN
- Bi-Weekly Professional and Studio Practice Workshops with Lexa Walsh and Nato Thompson
- Live visionary visiting artist and curator series
- A global community of artists
- A user-friendly app experience that goes at your own pace
- & More!
Try Our 2-week free trial today!
48.99 per month / 499.99 per year (Save 87.89!)
Membership in more details
Visiting Artist/Curator Talks w/ Q&A
Live bi-weekly lectures by top-level visiting artists and curators followed by a Q&A session exclusively for our members. Get an inside look into the movers and shapers of the field of contemporary art. These events are typically recorded and archived for you to enjoy at your own pace.
Artist Discussions
Following the Visiting Artist/Curator Talks, there are peer-peer discussion sessions hosted by a TAAS Team member. This is a chance to dig in and reflect on this knowledge with your global cohort of working artists.
Weekly Quick Art Prompts & Feedback Sessions
For those interested in a weekly pace, there are artist features, prompts, polls, and other content inline with the theme of the month. Bi-weekly a TAAS Team member will host a peer-peer share/Feedback session for you to meet with other members and share the your creative responses to our quick assignments. These sessions are live and participatory.
Tours of local art scenes from around the world
Nato Thompson hosts a bi-weekly live event that takes us around the world to discover different local art scenes exclusive for members! Expand your knowledge of the art world by discovering new art scenes, curators and spaces. This event is live, always recorded and archived to enjoy at your own pace.
Professional Practice workshops
Every month has a different professional practice topic taught by artist Lexa Walsh live. These topics are explored through two different monthly events; a lecture and participatory workshop. At the beginning of the month Lexa will host a lecture on the professional practice topic for that month. This event is recorded and archived for you to watch at your preferred time. Materials will be given so you can apply this advice to your practice. Two weeks later, the workshop event invites you to attend and receive feedback from Lexa and your peers. The workshop portion is not recorded but the lectures are.
TAAS Intro Course (asynchronous)
We offer an introductory course for all new members that both gets you acquainted with how membership works and also gives you a primer on the essential ideas at work at The Alternative Art School. Over the last four years, TAAS has formed what we believe is foundational knowledge about the art world(s) of the 21st century. We have combined our advice for art-fully living in a post-internet era into an intro course. This course is asynchronous, meaning you take it at your own pace, and it will introduce you to how we think about the life of an artist.
Monthly Themed Assignments w/ Feedback Sessions (Live & participatory)
Every month comes with a poetic theme to guide some of the work groups and ideas at work in membership. Of course, the theme is optional for members, but it allows all of the artists to have a poetic touchstone to be inspired by. At the top of every month members are given an optional art assignment to work on throughout the month. At the end of each month, members are invited to share their creative responses with each other in feedback sessions. (example: Assignment: This month, use your breath as one of your materials. How can breath as a medium or subject function in your art?)
A global community of working artists and curators
Most importantly, membership offers access to our global community of working artists and curators. Relationships are facilitated with weekly opportunities to engage and share through our events, platform, and chatrooms. As a Member you get a Member profile which lets you identify yourself, link to your social media and personal art websites, and connect directly to artists and thinkers like you – all over the world! We often say, “the person most likely to give you a show is someone you know, so why not get to know people all over the globe?”
Access to our Archive & Evergreen resources, tips & tricks
Every event that can be recorded, will be recorded; and these are nested in our archive for you to dip into at your own leisure. We also have evergreen resources, tips and tricks for being an artist in the 21st century.
All accessible from your phone through our App
Not at home when an event is happening?! Fear not, TAAS can go anywhere the internet is accessible through our app. This links you directly and seamlessly with a global community of dedicated creatives right in your pocket.
Who Are We?
TAAS is the preeminent online community for working artists featuring the most visionary artists working today. The caliber of our artist and curator community is unparalleled by miles.
Nato Thompson
TAAS Founder
Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as “cultural infrastructure builder”. He is the founder of The Alternative Art School. He has worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Creative Time, and MASS MoCA. Thompson organized major Creative Time projects including The Creative Time Summit, Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety”, Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures”, and Paul Ramírez Jonas’s “Key to the City”, among many others.
Nato Thompson earned an MA in Arts Administration & Policy in 2001, and also holds a BA in Political Theory from the University of California at Berkeley.
He has written two books, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century. and Culture as Weapon founded the Alternative Art School and ArtW rld in 2020.
Amber Imrie
TAAS Founding Team Member
Amber Imrie (they/she) is an artist, curator, and educator. They were born and raised off-the-grid in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas. Largely homeschooled throughout their childhood, Amber attended school for three years before testing out at age sixteen.
Amber has a BA with honors from UC Berkeley and was awarded Excellence in Sculpture upon graduating. Amber has a MFA from Stanford University and was awarded the Anita Squires Fowler Award in Photography. From 2014 – 2017 Amber founded and was curator of Venison Magazine, an online contemporary art magazine, and Camp Venison, an art micro-residency. Amber has been an artist in residence and exhibited work nationally and internationally. Imrie was awarded the Murphy Cadogan award in 2017 to foster further exploration of her artistic potential in hybrid practice.
Amber became a founding member of The Alternative Art School in 2020. Since 2021, Amber has served on several jury panels for fellowship and exhibition open calls. In 2023, Amber was awarded the Creative Exchange Fund Spectra Grant as a curator/artist, the Artist 360 practicing artist grant, and was invited to speak on a curator panel at the ArtBo International Art fair in Bogota, Columbia and at Expo in Chicago,USA.
Daura Campos
TAAS Team Member
Daura Campos is a visual artist and photographer based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She is a team member at the Alternative Art School. In her practice, she investigates social issues through experimental photographic techniques, pushing against expectations of representation and exploring what is often left unseen. Her process allows analog film to exist as a reactive being beyond a medium of choice and aims to ignite discourse about our relationship with photography and society.
Daura has exhibited at the MK Gallery (England), Rotterdam Photo (Netherlands), Pinakothek der Moderne (Germany), Experimental Photo Festival (Spain), Museum of Art of Pereira (Colombia), Gallery 44 (Canada), and Open Eye Gallery (England). Her awards include the Alternative Art School Fellowship, a FORGE Fellowship, a high commendation from The JUST Art Award, and a special mention from the Art Vue Foundation Yearly Prize.
Daura received her Bachelor of Film and Media from PUC Minas in Belo Horizonte in 2024. Currently, she works as an independent artist and teaches alternative photographic processes internationally and online.
Janine Antoni
TAAS Instructor & Visiting Lecturer
Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Antoni is known for her unusual processes, using her body as both a tool and a source of meaning within the conceptual framework of her practice. Antoni’s early methods involved transforming unique materials such as chocolate and soap through habitual, everyday processes like bathing, eating and sleeping to create sculptural works and installations. By way of her body of work, Antoni carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality is meant to speak directly to the viewer’s body.
Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Irish Museum of Modern Art/Glen Dimplex Artist Award in 1996, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award in 1998, the New Media Award, ICA Boston in 1999, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, an Artes Mundi, Wales International Visual Art Prize nomination in 2004, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a Creative Capital Artist Grant in 2012, and Anonymous Was A Woman Grant in 2014.
Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.
Shirin Neshat
Visiting Lecturer
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works and continues to experiment with the mediums of photography, video, film, and Opera, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between the past and present, East and West, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021).
Neshat directed her first opera Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022, which will be restaged at the Paris Opera House in 2025.
Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006) and in 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo.
She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.
Miguel A. López
TAAS Instructor & Visiting Lecturer
Miguel A. López is a writer and curator. In his practice, he focuses on the role of art in politics and public life, collective work and collaborative dynamics, and queer and feminist rewritings of history. He is a co-curator for the 2024 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art. From 2015 to 2020, he worked as Chief Curator, and later Co-director at TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica. In 2019, he curated the retrospective exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure at the Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Rotterdam, which traveled to Mexico City, Madrid, and Bogota. Between 2023 and 2024, a second retrospective Cecilia Vicuña. Dreaming Water, curated by López, is being presented at the Fine Art Museum (MNBA) in Chile, MALBA in Argentina, and Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil. Recent curatorial projects include Sila Chanto & Belkis Ramírez: Aquí me quedo / Here I Stay en el ICA-VCU, Richmond (2022), Hard to Swallow. Anti-Patriarchal Poetics and New Scene in the Nineties at ICPNA, Lima (2021), and And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers? at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2021). He was a recipient of the ICI’s 2016 Independent Vision Curatorial Award. He lives and works in Toronto.
Vashti DuBois
TAAS Instructor & Visiting Lecturer
Vashti DuBois founded The Colored Girls Museum in 2015, to “honor the stories, experiences, and history of Colored Girls throughout the African Diaspora.” It is the first memoir museum of its kind. TCGM initiates the ordinary object, submitted by the colored girl herself, as a representative of an aspect of her story and personal history which she finds meaningful. DuBois’ 30-year career in non-profit and arts administration has focused primarily on issues impacting girls and women of color.
Aaron Gach
TAAS Instructor & Visiting Lecturer
Aaron Gach’s diverse artistic practice consistently addresses public concerns, social politics, and power dynamics. He established the Center for Tactical Magic in 2000, dedicated to the coalescence of art, magic, and creative tactics for encouraging positive social change. His work has been presented by International institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Vigo, Spain; and Deutsches Theater, Berlin.
Mark Dion
TAAS Instructor & Visiting Lecturer
Mark Dion, a prominent American conceptual artist, is widely recognized for incorporating scientific presentations into his installations. His thought-provoking work delves into how dominant ideologies and institutions shape our perception of history, knowledge, and the environment.
Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He received a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate (2003) from the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Dion received the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007), the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucida Art Award (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019)
You can watch Mark’s visiting Artist Talk on our Youtube, and check out Art21’s interview with him.
The Alternative Art School
Frequently Asked Questions —
Do I need to reapply each year?
No, once you are part of TAAS, you are always part of the community. Your membership grants you continuous access to content, workshops, and events throughout the year. It will auto-renew unless you cancel it.
How do I get started?
Simply sign up through our membership page, choose the plan that works best for you, and start exploring the resources available through our app on apple or android.
Can I cancel my membership at any time?
Yes, you can cancel your membership anytime. However, refunds are not available once payment has been made for a given period (monthly or yearly).
What happens if I miss a live session?
Don’t worry! All live lectures are recorded and available for later viewing. You’ll never miss out on the content, even if your schedule doesn’t align with a particular event. This excludes peer-peer discussions and workshops due to the fact they necessitate your involvement in real time.
Is there financial assistance available for TAAS Membership?
We encourage you to follow our newsletter and social media accounts for additional opportunities for funding support. TAAS partners with institutions around the globe to provide scholarships for artists to our courses and membership program. You can see these institutional partners listed at the bottom of our website. If you're a leader of an institution interested in expanding access for your artists to global programming, contact us about our fellowship and scholarship packages. We'd love to speak with you!
What are the benefits of being part of the TAAS Membership community?
As a member, you will be connected to a global network of artists and curators. You’ll have the opportunity to participate in live sessions, receive feedback on your work, and engage in a variety of artistic discussions. The community is a safe space to learn, grow, and exchange ideas with peers from around the world.
Who can join TAAS Membership?
The TAAS Membership is open to all artists, regardless of experience level. Whether you're a seasoned professional or returning to your practice after time away, TAAS provides a supportive and engaging environment for all.
How much does TAAS Membership cost?
Membership is 48.99 USD per month or 499.99 USD annually. Members get exclusive discounts to courses and early access to sign up. Check out our Membership page for any special offers to our program.
What does a TAAS Membership include?
TAAS Membership gives you access to a wide range of live and recorded sessions, including visiting artist and curator talks, art prompts, global art tours, and professional practice workshops. You’ll also have access to a global community of artists and evergreen resources, all accessible via our mobile app.
What is Membership?
Membership is an online global art community for the 21st century working artists interested in enriching and expanding their practice. TAAS has compiled what we've seen lead to artists finding and meeting their goals over the last four years and designed a program to foster peer-peer exchanges under an umbrella of profound and cutting edge creative thinkers. See more about our new program on our Membership Page.
Who is TAAS for?
TAAS is for artists, makers, and doers at every stage of their artistic life. We believe strongly that this mixed-level experience is an incredible opportunity for any artist who wants to participate in a global community and learn from the best artists in the world. We believe in a community structure that is scaled so every artist is known by name. You are not a number, you are an artist that these world-class artists and curators know. Attending students must be eighteen years of age or older but TAAS students tend to be more mature with an average age of 45. Some of our artist have led robust careers in the arts, while others are getting back in-touch with their practice after raising children, or taking a career detour. TAAS is for creative who are never done learning and dream to connect with peers from all over the globe.
Who will be teaching in the next quarter and beyond?
TAAS is unique in that our instructors are often working artists with complex schedules, therefore you’ll see amazing artists come, go, and return from semester to semester. Sign up for our newsletter below so you never miss when we open enrollment and announce our course line-up.
