If you’re familiar with the mission statement here at SAEN, or you’ve spent time in or around the art scene, it’s likely you’ve heard the term ‘starving artist’. Certainly it’s a concept that drives the work we do here at SAEN, but it’s also an exceptionally prevalent idea that generates artistic aesthetics, fuels myths and stereotypes and, most detrimentally, acts as a repellent that keeps aspiring artists from pursuing their dreams. But where did it come from? And why does

Manhattan has produced some of the biggest names in modern art; Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko are amongst the most well known, working alongside infamous figures of the literary world like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. It seems surreal that all of these game-changing artists were, at one point, walking these streets at the same time, let alone working together in their creative practices, and surreal is exactly what it was. The rise of Abstract Expressi