Kossak Painting Supplies

This program spends up to $35,000 a year to subsidize all undergraduate painting students with limited quantities of canvas, gesso, oil, and solvent. These are basic necessities used in making paintings, and Kossak funding supplies them in quantities that course fees alone cannot accomplish. 150 students in as many as 10 sections of beginning and advanced painting per semester receive these supplies. Over recent years, Kossak funding has replaced and expanded a departmental library of stretchers used by students for their semester’s work at no cost to them. At semester’s end, students return them to the rack room in the painting studios on the 11th floor of Hunter North. These materials cast the widest net in the spectrum of Kossak support. They greatly aid a proper introduction of the medium to the full diversity of Hunter students interested in learning about painting, from their first painting course forward. Those who rise in the department’s painting program to the Kossak Painting Fellowship or to the BFA Program or other honors are often given an initial boost from this source. The stretchers purchased for student use, now numbering 700 plus, are retained by the department, and are managed by the Kossak Stretcher Librarian. This position makes it possible for faculty and students to adjust to the different needs of different course projects, ones that may require small, medium or large sizes per project / per course across the term. A huge number of paintings are made each semester by Hunter undergraduates, at a level of pursuit impossible without the Kossak Painting Supplies program.