Adjunct Faculty
Benjamin Degen (b. 1976 Brooklyn, NY) uses image-making as a process for learning/teaching, connection, vision, realization, and transformation. Degen
received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 from The Cooper Union. He founded and runs the Drawing Practice program, and has taught at Cooper Union, The
Rhode Island School of Design, The State University of New York at Purchase, Brooklyn College, Vassar College, Pioneer Works, The Brooklyn Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally, as well as in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, The Collezione Maramotti, The William Benton Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. His artwork is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Collezione Maramotti, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Tang Museum.
Raffaele Bedarida is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. Since he joined The Cooper Union full-time faculty in 2016, he has coordinated the History and Theory of Art program. Bedarida holds a Ph.D. from the Art History Department of the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees in Art History from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. His research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. He has also worked on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War, from Futurism to Arte Povera. Since 2008, when he founded and curated the residency program Harlem Studio Fellowship in New York, Bedarida has actively promoted programs of international exchange for emerging artists. In addition to his academic and curatorial activities, Bedarida has regularly lectured on modern and contemporary art topics at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA.
His research has been supported by the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Max Planck Institute of Art History, and the Italian Ministry of Research and University (MIUR). He was invited as Visiting Professor at the following universities: Università Statale, Milan; Università La Sapienza, Rome; Università degli Studi, Genoa.
Bedarida has authored three monographs: Bepi Romagnoni: Il Nuovo Racconto (Milan: Silvana, 2005); Corrado Cagli: la pittura, l'esilio, l'America (Rome: Donzelli, 2018; English edition: CPL Editions, in press); Exhibiting Italian Art in the US. Futurism to Arte Povera (London-New York: Routledge, 2022). He has also edited many volumes, among which: Methodologies of Exchange: Twentieth Century Italian Art at MoMA, 1949, with Davide Colombo and Silvia Bignami, special issue of Italian Modern Art, January 2020; Gianfranco Baruchello: Painters Ain't Butterflies (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2021); Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, with Sharon Hecker (London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).
His academic articles and essays have been published extensively in periodicals, such as Oxford Art Journal, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Italian Modern Art, and Artforum; in exhibition catalogues, among which, Afro: The American Years (Milan: Electa, 2012), Fortunato Depero Futurista (Madrid: Juan March Foundation, 2014), New York New York: La riscoperta dell'America (Milan: Electa, 2017); and in edited volumes, including Postwar Italian Art History Today (London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), Frederick Kiesler: Face to Face with the Avant-garde, (Basel: Birkäuser, 2019), Republics and Empires (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), Reassessing Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Their Material History (Sao Paulo: Universidade de Sao Paulo, 2021).
Recent Publications:
Co-editor with Davide Colombo and Silvia Bignami, Methodologies of Exchange: MoMA’s Twentieth-Century Italian Art (1949), special issue of the journal, Italian Modern Art, n. 3 (January 2020), winner of a Terra Foundation grant.
“Out of the Rubble: Cagli, Fontana, and the Construction of Memory in Postwar Italy,” in ed. Alessandro Cassin, Exile and Creativity (New York: Centro Primo Levi Editions, 2020), pp. 263-298.
“Per una Storia Orale dell’Arte in Italia ai Tempi del Covid. Radici Storiche e Questioni di Metodo,” in 900 Transnazionale, 5 (2021), pp. 56-67.
“Eterna Primavera: Catherine Viviano, Irene Brin and Italian Art’s Conquest of Hollywood,” article in eds. Melissa Dabakis and Paul Kaplan, Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840-1970, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 204-222.
“Out of the Chart: Boccioni-centrism and Alfred Barr’s Struggle with Italian Modernism,” article published in English and in Portuguese translation, in ed. Ana Gonçalves Magalhaes and Rosalind McKever, Boccioni in Brazil. Reassessing "Unique forms of continuity in space" and Its Material History (Sao Paulo: Universidade de Sao Paulo, 2021).
Editor, Enrico Crispolti and Gianfranco Baruchello: Painters Ain’t Butterflies (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2021).
Co-editor with Sharon Hecker, Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).
Author, Exhibiting Italian Art in the US, Futurism to Arte Povera: Like a Giant Screen, monograph (London, New York: Routledge, 2022).
Upcoming Publications:
Author, Corrado Cagli: Exile, Painting, America 1938-1947, monograph (New York: Primo Levi Center Editions, in press).
Iman Raad works across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, embroidery, and graphic design. His work has been featured in several design books including The Phaidon archive of five hundred designs that matter and his art practice acknowledged in a variety of media including The New York Times, Artspace and art21. Recent exhibitions include A Third Language at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2023), the 58th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2022), Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa at the British Museum, London, UK (2021), Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific at the Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago, Chile (2019), the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contem-porary Art at QAGOMA, Brisbane, Australia (2018), Standing Still, Lying Down, As If at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) (2018), and The Flag Art Foundation in New York (2018).
Raad (b. 1979, Mashhad, Iran) holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University (2017) has taught at The Cooper Union School of Art, The Parsons School of Design, and Fordham University, and has been invited to deliver artist talks and visit students at institutions including Yale University School of Art, Princeton University, Northwestern University’s Department of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Pratt Institute.
Dionisio Cortes Ortega is an architect, artist and educator. He is an adjunct instructor for
Representation I as well as Co-founder and Principal of Reform Architecture, a full service and multidisciplinary architecture and design practice based in the Bronx. Reform Architecture is committed to conscientious design through the following process: questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting, re-examining, rejecting the status quo, creatively obsessing, and visualizing the invisible. Reform Architecture's current ongoing projects include a dance school in Michoacán, Mexico; a community center in a repurposed church in Brooklyn; and several historic restoration projects in lower manhattan.
Dionisio graduated from The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in 2009. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Bronx Chapter. Before co-founding Reform Architecture, Dionisio worked on a number of institutional and residential projects while at Selldorf Architects and more than a dozen restaurants projects while at HapstakDemetriou+ in Washington DC.
Dionisio has been invited as guest critic to a number of studio and drawing reviews at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, and at the National University of Singapore.
Concurrent with his architectural practice, Dionisio designs outdoor interactive sculptures. His two latest installation are:
- Sitting Together, built by Reform Architecture, was on view at the Joyce Kilmer Park in The Bronx in 2019.
- Croton Arch of Triumph, a sculpture/monument that was on view from August 2020 to May 2021 at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens.
Dionisio's CV is available here. His work can also be viewed here.
