EPSTEIN'S ETCHINGS
Check 'em out
As the lurid details about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of crimes against women and girls continue to trickle out, one unexplained recurring character in the saga has been the New York Academy of Art a private graduate school known for its emphasis on preserving the tradition of figurative art. It is where he met the young woman who became one of his earliest known alleged victims.
It crops up, decades later, in connection with a strange painting of Bill Clinton wearing a dress purchased from an academy fundraiser in 2012.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/epstein-ranch-art-students-1760265
‘It Was a Question of ‘How Far Will They Go?”: Former Art Students Remember How Jeffrey Epstein Tested Their Boundaries
Graduates from the New York Academy of Art detail a day on Epstein's Zorro Ranch, where he promised to give one of them a lucrative commission.
pedovore doing, to-ing and fro-ing
The summer of 1995 was poised to be a dream come true for one group of recent graduates from the New York Academy of Art. They were the select few who’d been chosen from their class to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to New Mexico to study under the prestigious painter Eric Fischl, to attend the debut of the newly launched Site Santa Fe biennial, and to meet with a wealthy benefactor who wanted to buy emerging artists’ work.
The patron was said to be building a vast mansion on his ranch in New Mexico and, at the end of the trip, would commission one of the students to paint a mural at the completed house.
“There was a feeling that someone was going to come out of this an art star,” Ursula Ruedenberg, one of the alumnae on the trip, told Artnet News.
There was just one problem: The patron was Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender and pedophile who died in a New York City jail in August. The encounter with Epstein on his ranch, detailed to Artnet News by three of the alumnae (one of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity), sheds fresh light on how Epstein exploited the ambitions of aspiring artists by promising sales and connections, all while testing their boundaries and, ultimately, allegedly assaulting one of them, Maria Farmer, Epstein’s first accuser
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/epstein-ranch-art-students-1760265