The College of Staten Island is celebrating a notable faculty achievement as Professor Michael Mandiberg of the Media Culture Department recently completed a five-year-long project commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Their project, Live Study, is on permanent view as an online exhibition in the museum’s Artport platform, highlighting innovative work at the intersection of digital media and contemporary art.
Spanning from 2019 to 2024, Live Study is not just an exhibition, it’s a living archive of labor, memory, and artistic process. The project began as a continuous livestream from Mandiberg’s studio, documenting hundreds of hours of painting. Today, that footage forms a digital archive alongside a striking collection of portraits that challenge how we think about artistic production and the people behind it.
At the heart of Live Study is a deceptively simple idea: each portrait represents someone who worked for Mandiberg: assistants, collaborators, and contributors whose labor often goes unseen in the art world. The scale of each painting corresponds directly to the number of hours that individual worked, translating time into physical space. A few inches might represent a short-term collaborator. A multi-foot canvas reflects years of contribution.
Among Mandiberg’s collaborators are former students, including Dan Colonna and Daniele Palladino, pictured above with Mandiberg. Working alongside their students, Mandiberg was able to continue their mentorship of developing artists while also curating their work for Live Study.
“Most of the crew I worked with, including my former students, wanted to become designers/developers, but were missing that last scaffold to get them there,” Mandiberg said. “I was doing client design work at the time to fund projects, so I took these semi-obligations and turned them into opportunities for my students to build portfolio material. A lot of this work is represented in Live Study and the portraits depict my work and the amount of time I spent with them.”
In doing so, Mandiberg transforms abstract labor into something tangible, forcing viewers to confront the human effort embedded in creative work. The paintings themselves layer traditional oil techniques with digital references, including pixel-like grids that echo the aesthetics of software and screen culture.
Unlike a traditional gallery exhibition, Live Study is designed to be experienced online through the Whitney’s Artport platform, its portal for digital and internet-based art.
Visitors to the exhibit can dive into archived livestream footage of Mandiberg at work on the individual portraits and studies.
This hybrid format makes the work especially accessible to students, artists, and anyone curious about how art exists in both physical and virtual spaces.
Mandiberg’s work sits at the intersection of art, technology, and social critique. Their presence at one of the nation’s most prestigious contemporary art institutions is more than an individual achievement, it’s a chance to learn from a faculty member whose work is actively shaping national conversations.
