Join Professor Neill Slaughter to learn why William M. Chase became not only a well-renowned artist, but also the foremost art teacher in America during the Gilded Age, whose many students include Irving Ramsey Wiles, Howard Chandler Christy, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Artist and educator Neill Slaughter graduated with a BFA from the University of Georgia in 1975 and received his MFA from Indiana University Bloomington in 1978. Until his retirement in 2016, Professor Slaughter taught fine arts and art history at the university level for nearly four decades, beginning at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia before teaching and lecturing internationally in England, California, and New York. In 1993, he joined Long Island University in Southampton, where he taught for nearly twenty-five years before being awarded Professor Emeritus status in 2017.

A practicing artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, Slaughter’s extensive travels have deeply informed his paintings and lectures. Among his honors are a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Scottish Arts Council Grant, a Loyola Marymount University research grant to Africa, and a Fulbright Fellowship to India. In 2003 he received Long Island University’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in both 2008 and 2022 he mounted major retrospective exhibitions celebrating over fifty years of artistic achievement.