Avery Singer

Avery SiingerAvery Singer A'10 is a third-generation native New Yorker. Her parents, the artists Janet Kusmierski and Greg Singer, named her after Milton Avery. Growing up in a creative community, Singer experimented with photography, film and drawing, but in those years never considered working with paint. She was educated in the New York City public school system, including Stuyvesant High School. In 2008, Singer studied at the Stadelschule, Frankfurt am Main and she received her B.F.A. from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2010 with an award for Student Service. During her studies, Singer engaged in performance art, video making and sculpture, utilizing various techniques. After graduating, she discovered her chosen art form from an unanticipated experiment with SketchUp (a program used by her peers to design exhibition spaces) and airbrushed a black and white painting based on a digital illustration. Since then, Singer has employed the binary language of computer programs and industrial materials in order to remove the trace of the artist’s hand, while engaging the tradition of painting and the legacy of modernism. 

Singer has been honored with solo museum presentations at the ICA Miami (2023); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2017); Secession, Vienna (2016); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015–16); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2015); and Kunsthalle Zurich (2014–15). Singer’s work is represented in the permanent collections of: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate, London; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among numerous others. She has an upcoming solo institutional exhibition in Europe slated for early 2025.

Role: Alumni Trustee 
Elected to the Board: June 2024 
Class Term: 2028 
Term Limit: 2028

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.