The Alternative Art School (TAAS)

The Alternative Art School is a global, artist-run learning community dedicated to expanding how art education can look and feel today. Founded by working artists and curators, TAAS brings together practitioners from over sixty countries to think, make, and exchange ideas across cultures, disciplines, and time zones.

We offer live courses, Independent Study Programs, crit clubs, visiting lectures, and asynchronous prompts designed to support artists at every stage of their practice. Our approach prioritizes depth over speed, process over product, and sustained inquiry over the pressures of traditional academic models. At TAAS, artists learn from one another as much as from faculty, building networks of mutual support that extend well beyond any single class.

We believe artists shape the world we share. Our programs are built to nurture that work: creating spaces for rigorous dialogue, cross-cultural connection, and experimentation grounded in the realities of contemporary practice. TAAS is more than a school; it is a long-term community of artists committed to showing up for each other, expanding their practices, and imagining new possibilities for art and life. https://thealternativeartschool.net/taas-fellowship-fundraiser/

TAAS Residency Represenative

Amber Imrie (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator whose work and teaching grow out of the Ozark landscape where they were raised off-the-grid in a queer, rural community. Their practice explores place-based mythologies, ecological transformation, and the quiet architectures of belonging through photography, textiles, installation, and poetic language. This sensibility carries into their educational work, where they build learning environments rooted in curiosity, embodiment, and cross-cultural dialogue.

Imrie holds an MFA from Stanford University—where they received the Anita Squires Fowler Award in Photography—and a BA with honors from UC Berkeley, where they were awarded Excellence in Sculpture. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Bates Museum of Art, 21C Museum Hotel Bentonville, and the San Francisco Art Fair, and is held in multiple permanent collections.

As an educator and community-builder, Imrie has taught and mentored artists across universities, artist-run initiatives, and global programs, including UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and The Alternative Art School (TAAS), where they are a founding team member leading curriculum, pedagogy, and international programming. Their teaching emphasizes embodied practice, sustainable creative rhythms, and collective learning as a form of artistic research.

Imrie has received numerous awards—including the Artist 360 Practicing Artist Grant, the Creative Exchange Fund Spectra Grant, and the Murphy Cadogan Award—and has been an artist-in-residence with ACRE, ChaNorth, Elsewhere Studios, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. They have also contributed to curatorial and editorial ecosystems as founder of Venison Magazine (2014–2017), co-director of the micro-residency Camp Venison, and through jury and panel work with Independent Curators International, ArtBo International Art Fair in Bogotá, EXPO Chicago, and other regional and international platforms.

At the TAAS × Mount Sequoyah Residency, Imrie leads the educational vision and programming, drawing from fifteen years of interdisciplinary practice to guide artists through processes of grounding, reflection, dialogue, and experimentation within the unique ecology of Northwest Arkansas.