What is the
Alternative Art School?

The Alternative Art School provides online 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 classes are intimate. Our instructors know your name and your work. You are a voice in conversation with other artists.

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.

In Addition, every course includes weekly Campus Programming:


Weekly visiting artist talks
Weekly small group feedback session with your fellow TAAS artists
Weekly social hour with your fellow global artists
Mid-Session Mixer
An Orientation and End-of-Session Event with Instructors and More

All these opportunities are optional and designed to nurture lasting community between attending artists

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 class sizes

Your 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.

Student life offerings

Share Sessions: Critiques but with an emphasis on supportive listening wherein you can share proposals, ideas, finished or work in progress, or even practice giving an artist talk.

Tea Time: Unstructured social get-togethers after Visiting Artist Talks wherein we can digest the talk together.

Visiting Artist Talks: Weekly Artist Talks with visiting artists and hosted by various instructors.

Real-time education

Our 7-week courses have weekly Office Hours for students. Here you can meet one-to-one with your visionary instructor. These classes meet once a week for 2.5 hours. Our 2-Week Intensives meet three times a week for 2.5 hours. Both class options include a social and technical Orientation, an End-of-Semester Event, and student life offerings during the whole semester period.

Student intiated opportunities

Create or Join a Crew: Crews are like Clubs, Students have a group messaging board and the ability to schedule group video meetings with each other, share opportunities, and carry on conversations around specific topics.

Host an Event: We encourage all our attending artists to build community through hosting student-initiated events.

Frequently Asked Questions —

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