Every Artist’s Voice Counts
We’re running to preserve the League’s founding spirit: independence, creativity, and mutual respect. These are the elements of a true community, just as the League’s founders intended.
Vote Kamerman, Greenfield, and Tan to join our movement of artists leading artists.
The Right Experience for a Stronger League
The League needs Board members with real experience in fundraising, fiscal oversight, nonprofit management and community-centered governance. Our team brings the professional skill required to protect the League’s future, strengthen its finances, and support its artistic community for years to come. Below are some of our key policy proposals for the next board term:
More opportunities to sell art
The chance to sell work and gain greater exposure is the dream of so many artists at the League. The next board should help make this dream a reality by ensuring that our gallery spaces are more accessible to members and students. We pledge to pass a board resolution mandating an additional student art sale to the 2026 calendar, giving students an additional opportunity to get their work out into the world.
Strengthening the League’s future
The League’s endowment is the foundation of our long-term stability, ensuring that future generations of artists will always have a place to learn and create. Protecting it requires careful planning, disciplined budgeting, and a commitment to growing the League in sustainable ways. As enrollment has declined and costs have risen, there can be a temptation to rely on endowment drawdowns - putting pressure on both our financial health and affordability, and ultimately accessibility. We believe the better path is to expand revenue, not deplete reserves. By strengthening fundraising, increasing public support, and building enrollment through thoughtful programming, we can reduce reliance on the endowment for day-to-day operations. And through transparent oversight of major projects and contracts, we can ensure that every dollar is used wisely and in service of the League’s mission. Our goal is simple: a financially strong, accessible League with an endowment that grows over time and remains a safeguard for the artists who will follow us.
Turning the tide on enrollment
We’ve seen enrollment on the decline in recent years. We need to change this and it all comes down to attracting new students. By leveraging and expanding existing youth programming and outreach, we can create a pipeline of League students who grow up in our institution, encouraging them to become loyal lifelong League members.
Giving instructors a voice
The League’s greatest resource is our instructors. As we chart a course for our future, we ought to provide them with a seat at the table. That’s why we’re committed to creating an instructors’ council intended to open direct channels between instructors and the board and administration. This idea isn’t new or unique - colleges and universities around the country use faculty councils to govern institutions and give voice to the ideas and concerns of professors. And like these faculty councils, we should seek donors to endow these appointments to provide stipends to compensate volunteering instructors for their work. As a school with so many talented and accomplished instructors, this is a model that we should be partnering with our instructors to develop and implement.
Encouraging peer critique sessions
The League is a school and a community. Few activities combine these two characteristics better than the peer critique, which allows students to share their work with, and learn from, their fellow members through constructive criticism. We intend to elevate the peer critique to a social gathering worthy of the League’s community spirit, with modest funds for food and drink, so that we can make critiques the can’t-miss member event.
Recruiting international students
One of the lessons we learned in the COVID-19 pandemic was the value that online education can bring to the League. Perhaps the best example of this is the international students who first discovered us through our online classes and later decided to join the certificate program in-person. We can strengthen this programming by increasing advertising and recruiting for online classes in international markets. We should also work to improve technical and administrative resources for our online instructors to ensure the best possible teaching experience for them. By taking these steps, we can use online classes as a recruitment tool and means of digital outreach that will help bring more students through our doors on 57th Street.