Graduates from the New York Academy of Art detail a day on Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, where he promised to give one of them a lucrative commission. The summer of 1995 was poised to be a dream come true for one group of recent graduates from the New York Academy of Art. They were the select few who’d been chosen from their class to go on an all expenses paid trip to New Mexico to study under the prestigious painter Eric Fischl, to attend the debut of the newly launched Site Santa Fe biennial, and to meet with a wealthy benefactor who wanted to buy emerging artists’ work. The patron was said to be building a vast mansion on his ranch in New Mexico and, at the end of the trip, would commission one of the students to paint a mural at the completed house. “There was a feeling that someone was going to come out of this an art star,” Ursula Ruedenberg, one of the alumnae on the trip, told Artnet News. There was just one problem: The patron was Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender and pedophile who died in a New York City jail in August. The encounter … Meer lezen over Rachel Corbett – ‘It Was a Question of ‘How Far Will They Go?”: Former Art Students Remember How Jeffrey Epstein Tested Their Boundaries