Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), has named artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty as the inaugural Ruth Stanton Chair of the Department of Art & Art History and artists A.K. Burns and Steve Locke as Co-Directors of its MFA in Studio Art program. 

Sara Greenberger Rafferty assumed the Chair at Hunter in fall 2024. Her previous academic appointments include Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Hampshire College, and Suffolk County Community College (SUNY). Rafferty’s work spans painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance and is included in the collections of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Yale University Art Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Rafferty is one of very few women to lead the Art & Art History department at Hunter, particularly in the past half century, and the first artist to do so in over a decade.

A.K. Burns joined the Hunter faculty in 2015 and will advance to the title of full Professor in fall 2025. Burns’ interdisciplinary work at the nexus of language and materiality has been recently shown in a traveling solo survey exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts and at the Henry Art Gallery. Burns was a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art, a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award recipient. 

Steve Locke comes to Hunter from Pratt Institute and will begin as Professor and MFA Co-Director in Studio Art in fall 2025. He was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and has also received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and Art Matters. Locke’s solo exhibition, the fire next time, is on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams through November 8, 2025. Locke has also held solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, among others. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker, and his writing has been published in Artforum and several museum catalogues.

The Hunter Art & Art History department is a union of three distinct areas—Art History, Studio Art, and the Galleries—each with a strong faculty and staff. Students work across all artistic mediums, study art history and theory, and curate exhibitions, all while gaining practical experience and knowledge. This holistic approach, which sees the department as a manifold of activities and study opportunities that students can selectively engage, is a distinctive aspect of studying at Hunter. 

Hunter’s Art & Art History department is the largest and most comprehensive art program in the City University of New York system; with an internationally recognized faculty whose dynamic classes take full advantage of the extraordinary resources and research opportunities the city provides. Hunter prides itself as New York City’s public university for the arts and is committed to maintaining tuition affordability and offering a flexible schedule for working professionals. An overview of the department can be found here.

About Ruth Stanton 
A child refugee from Nazi Germany, the late Ruth Schloss Stanton was a noted art collector whose philanthropy centered on those affected by war or economic hardship. At Hunter, her foundation has generously supported scholarships for students from disadvantaged and/or immigrant backgrounds who aspire to careers in the arts.