WELCOME
The purpose of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation is to meet the urgent need for people throughout America and the world to see each other and reality fairly. The means to that fairness is Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel, American poet, critic, and educator. Located in SoHo, NYC, the foundation is a center for culture and kindness. It offers classes in the visual arts, poetry, music, anthropology, and more. There are public seminars, individual consultations, workshops for teachers, and thrilling dramatic and musical events. People of all ages understand themselves newly through the principles of Aesthetic Realism. Read more
The Civil War, Poetry, & Our Lives!
Special Event
A dramatic presentation of Eli Siegel’s great lecture on Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days & the Civil War:
Hot and Cold Tell of Poetry ♦
What the Civil War Was About by Ellen Reiss ♦ Songs & Poems
Sunday • July 14 • 2:30 PM
Expressing Himself & Being Just to Others—Can A Man Do Both?
Public Seminar
Thursday, June 6 · 6:30 PM
Love & Art—Should They Have the Same Purpose?
Dramatic Presentation
Saturday, June 15 · 8:00 PM
TWEET TICKER
Tweets by TheARFdn BLOG UPDATE
“Man and Nature in New York and Kansas”
Donita Ellison, art educator and sculptor, writes:
I grew up in the Midwest and now live in New York City, and I once felt that I couldn’t care for what I saw as “nature” and love the city too. That changed when I read Martha Baird’s poem “Man and Nature in New York and Kansas.” In musical lines, she tells us that the American land and an American city have a message in common that we need to know.
TERRAIN GALLERY
Terrain Gallery Anniversary Exhibition
Celebrating the Life & Art of
DOROTHY KOPPELMAN
Feb. 24th—September 2019
ANNOUNCEMENTS
REGISTRATION for the Spring-Summer 2019 semester of classes: Monday, Apr 29 – Friday, May 10
Classes in Poetry, Music, Art, Education, Singing, Anthropology, Film Studies & more. For information, click here.
See for yourself why Aesthetic Realism is the means to the justice hoped for and needed today! Read this letter—to you and people everywhere—by Aesthetic Realism associate and science educator Barbara McClung!
“I am writing to you with great pleasure, and with a sense of urgency as well…. Aesthetic Realism is knowledge that can make for logical and accurate happiness and true pride in a person’s life. Further—and this has tremendous national and international meaning—it explains the cause of the huge injustices afflicting people’s lives today, including racism, war, economic brutality, shootings in our schools. I say soberly: it is knowledge that can have these finally end….” more
See this stirring film of Eli Siegel’s Nation prize-winning poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.” Historian Howard Zinn said of it:
“Ken Kimmelman’s reproduction, on film, of Eli Siegel’s magisterial poem, is an extraordinary achievement. It matches, in its visual beauty, the elegance of Siegel’s words, and adds the dimension of stunning imagery to an already profound work of art.”