Who doesn’t love dark academia? The malevolent architecture and forced proximity cut with the youth and ambition that sets it all aflame? Ever since chancing upon a marked-up paperback of The Secret History in the late ’90s, I’ve been obsessed with dark academia and all the micro-genres contained within it: gothic mysteries, boarding school thrillers, Neo-Victorian suspense, and my new favorite—what I’m calling art school academia.
There is no better place to find a particular kind of monster than an art school. Imagine hundreds of talented young people sequestered inside a prestigious institution, believing they’re there to master something sacred, only to realize that to be successful, they need to do more than just create. They need to be chosen—lauded by critics, signed by prestigious galleries, hung in museums. To achieve this, to be chosen, they must face public criticism, intense competition, and the ever-increasing pressure of gamesmanship.
My debut thriller, Tell Them You Lied, is partially set in such an art school. When I began writing, I wanted to understand who could succeed in such a pressure cooker—and how? And what happens when all that ambition and talent goes awry? Below is a list of eight of delicious books set in art schools, each with different, and compelling, answers to those questions.
Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress
A lush, literary novel about art, ambition, love, and greed set in the elite world of The Wrynn College of Art, where success is very often a zero-sum game. Louisa is both fascinated by and envious of her new roommate, the brilliant and beautiful campus star, Karina. As their friendship evolves into a love affair, they must contend with the fraught politics and grandiose personalities at Wrynn (and beyond) to find their place in the art world.
Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Irvin Painter
“What counts as art?” Painter asks in her memoir. “Who is an artist? Who decides? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.”
There are so many things to love about this true story about navigating Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of Art at age 63, after giving up a successful career in academics, and only some of it has to do with art criticism. Painter takes on heavy topics—racism, classism, ageism, pretty privilege, and what any of that has to do with ‘making it’ in the art world. With simple clarity, she describes the divide between talent and effort, goes deep into art theory, style, fatness, taboo, as well as run-ins with a bitter male professor (which, incidentally, helped me see my own college years in a new light).
The Masterpiece by Fiona Davis
As in all her books, Davis centers The Masterpiece on a Manhattan landmark—this time it’s Grand Central Terminal—and alternates between two timelines. In the first, it’s 1928, and Clara has rebelled against expectations, landing a teaching job at the prestigious Grand Central School of Art. Overlooked and dismissed as a mere “woman artist,” Clara must fight for every opportunity she has. Still, no amount of tenacity can protect her and her bohemian friends from the consequences of the Great Depression.
Fifty years later, newly divorced and financially devastated Virginia finds the remnants of Clara’s abandoned studio classroom in the now dilapidated Grand Central Terminal, along with an unsigned masterpiece. Virginia embarks on a quest to find the truth about the painting, and to save the masterpiece of a building along the way.
Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment
Consent is not a novel, but reads like one. In the 1970s when the author was a 17-year-old art student, she began an affair with her married, 47-year-old painting teacher whom she later married. After her husband died in 2016, the same year the #MeToo movement took off, Ciment began to understand the genesis of their relationship in a new and critical way. Her memoir is as much about painting and process as it is about power and abuse of that power.
Tell Me I’m an Artist by Chelsea Martin
“Anything could be a self-portrait,” according to Joey, an art student in San Francisco. She doesn’t fit in with her classmates—her family is too working-class, too rough and selfish—and she expends an amazing amount of effort to keep them secret. She tells no one when her sister ditches her baby and takes off, leaving their mother desperate for help. Joey grapples with her familial responsibilities and an assignment that might end her art career before it begins: How to create a self-portrait before you even know who you are?
Wendy, Master of Art by Walter Scott
Scott’s graphic novel takes us to the University of Hell, which is the best name for an art school I’ve ever heard in my life. Wendy is caught in that in-between time of your twenties—half-experienced, half naïve, and trying to navigate through the big stuff. She takes on art and relationships and addiction and ambition in a way that is both distressing and laugh-out-loud funny. Scott’s drawings are amazing, too.
Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel
After Zoe’s best friend at art school is murdered, she moves to Berlin to escape. There she befriends another American exchange student, Hailey, and they find themselves subletting the posh apartment of a famous thriller writer—who may or may not be watching them. The situation oddly suits them, though; these girls want to be seen. They decide to make their lives worthy of intrigue. What follows is a slow burn thriller, set in the captivating, art-filled world of late-00s Berlin.
Radiant Days by Elizabeth Hand
Merle is an art student in at the Corcoran School of Art in 1978, more interested in cave-art and graffiti than getting her work shown in galleries. When she is kicked out of school and suddenly homeless, she wanders the streets of D.C., spray-painting graffiti as proof of her existence. In a secondary timeline, Arthur Rimbaud, a teenager in France a hundred years earlier, is also struggling to find his way—a runaway, jailed for vagrancy, also in need of shelter—until the two young artists meet in a flash of magic that will change both their lives.
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