What is the
Alternative Art School?
The Alternative Art School provides online Membership program and art courses with the world’s most visionary artists. We are entirely online and cater to working artists from every part of the globe, which allows us to provide an active, invigorating, and non-traditional art-making experience. Learn more about TAAS below.
About TAAS
Our Masterclasses are intimate. Our instructors know your name and your work. Our workshops offer affordable in depth and expansive education that is further enriched by your globally diverse cohort and supportive TAs. Our Membership program offers continuous programming with visiting lecturers and weekly participatory online sessions. Membership is your toolkit for being an artist in the 21st century.
Our community of international artists ranges in a variety of ways: gender, age, race, geography, class, and experience. We are constantly working to make this a dynamic, engaging community where artists can inspire one another to make great art.
Want to learn more About TAAS? Reach out at: admin@thealternativeartschool.net to set up a 1-1 advisory meeting.
Watch our Video to learn more about The Alternative Art School
Our Community
What our students have to say
“I’m Rebecca McGee Tuck, I’m a student at TAAS…and I’m here to say… How much I love it and what a great experience it is for me to be apart of this global art community”
Rebecca McGee Tuck
“After I got my MFA it became harder to find opportunities to study in community with people, which is ANOTHER thing I found at TAAS”
Sandrine Schaefer
“The Alternative Art School for me is a place where I expanded my knowledge and network in an international environment”
Ozan Atalan
“I would definitely recommend TAAS to anyone looking for a boost of inspiration or a way to connect with other artists around the world…”
Clark Stoeckley
“This is utopia, where everybody learns from each other and can share their work with artists around the world.”
Quynh Lam
“[Few Online events let you] interact and engage over several weeks with some of the most exciting artists and curators.”
Heidi Voet
TAAS at a Glance
Live online classes with the world’s best artists and curators
Small Masterclass sizes
Your Masterclass instructors are live with you to teach & facilitate discussions. Our small intimate classes, provide opportunities for personal feedback.
Visionary Instructors
Our Instructors are established, visionary and widely respected working artists. Our TA’s are incredible emerging pioneers and the whole team at TAAS are artists and curators.
Membership
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.
Real-time education
All of our classes and programming facilitate opportunities for you to get personal real-time feedback on your art work, proposals, and/or applications – you name it we’ve helped an artist workshop it.
In membership we offer peer-peer feedback bi-weekly with additional options for 1-1 coaching with our core team and select instructors.
Student intiated opportunities
We support our life-long learners to build the art world they want to live in. This includes offering digital support whenever possible to help facilitate collaborations, online exhibitions, and experimental projects our students think up!
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.
When do classes happen?
While TAAS used to run on a quarter system, we now release Masterclasses and workshop classes throughout the year. If you think of Membership like the train-station, our courses and workshops are like the trains, arriving and departing with cohorts of globally diverse learners. Check back regularly to see what course offerings we have, join Membership for early access and special discounts, or join our newsletter to never miss an announcement.
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).
How much do courses cost?
Our fee structure at TAAS is based on careful consideration of two basic economic factors: affordable art education and paying faculty well. A percentage of your tuition goes directly to support our partial-scholarships and full fellowships. We often say, "we take money from the global north and apply it to the global south to create globally diverse classrooms." Each course specifies its price on its individual course page. Our workshops are priced to be affordable and structured to provide intimacy at scale. Our workshops range between 400-500 dollars. Our Masterclasses are small and intimate cohorts and prices range from 1250 - 2000 depending on the instructor. All prices are in USD.
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.
Is there financial assistance available?
We are a new school and it is our goal to make TAAS as affordable as possible and every student who pays tuition helps support our fellowship and scholarship program! Our financial model is simple, we pay our instructors a livable wage, keep a small admin team and apply the remaining portion of tuition dollars to support our TAAS Fellowships and Partial-scholarships. Every session we take your tuition dollars to support our partial-scholarships, which you can submit to with your application on our Apply page. During our Spring and Fall sessions, we partner with organizations and individuals to host full fellowships open calls. These calls expand our own support capabilities and we are always looking for institutions and individuals interested in partnering. You can find our full fellowships open calls on our website and sign up for our newsletter for keeping up to date. Our Full-fellowship open calls are always location based, and the locations are decided through conversations with our partnered organizations and individuals. Contact us via our contact page if you would like to know more about scholarship and fellowship opportunities!
Are refunds available?
There are no refunds once you have been accepted, signed your contract, and paid. Courses need to be paid in advance before your first class begins. Our instructors are giving their time no matter how many students are signed up, so our costs are fixed and as a new school, our flexibility on this front is limited.
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.
Is TAAS accredited?
TAAS is not accredited. We do not believe an education at TAAS should replace a basic holistic liberal arts education. We instead offer this as an opportunity for artists of any age to gain a solid foundation in an art practice that engages the world. We stand by the education we offer and are doing it to make the world a better place.
How can I support TAAS?
While TAAS is not a non-profit, we certainly encourage those with means and a big heart to support this initiative, its students, and instructors. We offer sponsorship opportunities at all levels.
Our Team
Nato Thompson
Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as “cultural infrastructure builder”. He has worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Creative Time as Artistic Director and as Curator at MASS MoCA.
Thompson organized major Creative Time projects including The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others.
Nato Thompson has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (2017).
Amber Imrie
Amber Imrie is a queer artist and educator with a passion for cultivating communities with creative, holistic learning environments built on compassion and equity. Imrie’s art practice draws from her personal experience as a queer person interacting with the culture of the rural American South.
Born and raised off-the-grid in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, and educated outside the formal school system, Imrie entered community college at sixteen. Amber Imrie received their BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from Stanford University. They’ve been the recipient of many awards, fellowships, and residencies including the Murphy Cadogan Award and Anita Squires Fowler Award in Photography. Imrie ran an art magazine called Venison Magazine from 2014-2017, a pop-up residency called Camp Venison, and has facilitated artistic dialogue in and outside of formal education. Imrie has taught at a variety of institutions, including UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Imrie is currently a founding team member of The Alternative Art School. She lives between Åland Islands, Finland and the Ozark Mountains in NW Arkansas.
You can see Amber’s art on her personal website here: www.amberimrie.com