Matthew Deleget hosts a conversation with Kay Takeda, Vice President, Grants & Services, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Heather Pontonio, Director, Art Program, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation
Matthew Deleget is an abstract painter, curator, and arts worker. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in the US, Europe, and Australasia. Matthew has received awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Golden Rule Foundation, and his work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Flash Art, Artnet Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Basler Zeitung, among others. He is a member of American Abstract Artists, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Artist Advisory Committee, and the board of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.
In 2003, Matthew founded MINUS SPACE, a platform for reductive art on the international level based in Brooklyn, NY. Since 2006, Matthew has organized more than 40 solo and group exhibitions at both MINUS SPACE’s gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as well as other collaborating venues on the national and international levels. MINUS SPACE exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America, Artcritical, Artforum, Artnet Magazine, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Houston Public Radio, Huffington Post, The New Criterion, New York Magazine, NYFA Current, New York Sun, Time Out New York, Village Voice, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Matthew holds an MFA in Painting and an MS in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BA in Art and German from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN. He lives with his wife, artist Rossana Martinez, and son in Brooklyn, NY.
Kay Takeda has worked for over 20 years to advance artists and the arts sector in the areas of grantmaking, programming and capacity-building. She is currently the Vice President of Grants & Services at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council where she develops and oversees its grantmaking, career development programs and community initiatives. She joined LMCC in 2005 to design and guide the implementation of a $5 million Downtown Cultural Grants Initiative supported by the September 11th Fund, and to oversee LMCC’s longstanding Manhattan Arts Grants which support local artists and organizations in the creative engagement of audiences and communities. Since that time, she has developed new regranting programs, community-based arts initiatives, service partnerships and professional development programs for artists and arts groups. Prior to joining the staff, she oversaw a roster of national-level grantmaking programs at Arts International, providing support for international exchanges and tours in the visual and performing artists. Previously, she worked at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor, managing exhibitions, international residencies, public programming and a studio program for visual artists in a 15,000 sq ft historic space. She has served on the boards of the artist-centered Goliath Visual Space and Tickle the Sleeping Giant, Inc./Trajal Harrell, has served on numerous funding and award panels and lectures widely on professional issues affecting artists.
Heather Pontonio is the Art Program Director at the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation (EHTF) where she has worked since April 2012. Heather oversees the national Art program portfolio focused on professional practices for both artists and contemporary art curators. EHTF’s signature grant programs include Marketplace Empowerment for Artists (MEA) and the prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. She has been instrumental in launching Artists Thrive, a field-wide tool to assesses and improve conditions for artists across the country, and Exhibitions on the Cusp, a year-long online periodical that features stories from the Exhibition Award archive as a discussion platform for the progressive advancement of contemporary art.
Prior to the Tremaine Foundation she was the Associate Vice President of Grants at the Arts & Science Council, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and began her career in New York City at the Little Orchestra Society, Irish Repertory Theatre and Cherry Lane Theatre. Heather currently serves on the Grantmakers in the Arts’ Support for Individual Artists Committee and is Board President for the Bethel Education Foundation. She was a 2015 P.L.A.C.E.S. fellow with The Funders’ Network. Heather has a master’s degree in Public Administration from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in Arts Administration from the State University of New York at Fredonia.