The Academy Blog

Alice Gray Stites is Museum Director and Chief Curator of 21c Museum Hotels. A multi-venue museum located in Louisville, Cincinnati, Bentonville, Durham, Lexington, Oklahoma City, and Nashville, 21c was founded by Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, collectors and preservationists who are committed to expanding the audience for contemporary art. Stites curates exhibitions, site-specific installations, and a range of cultural programming at all 21c Museum Hotels. 21c also collaborates on arts initiatives with artists and other cultural organizations worldwide, including Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, North Carolina Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum, Barnes Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, FotoFocus, Creative Time, and others. Since opening in Louisville in 2006, 21c has presented over 100 exhibitions. Recently, Stites has curated Hybridity: The New Frontier; Aftermath: Witnessing War, Countenancing Compassion; Seeing Now; Wild Card: The Art of Michael Combs; Dis-semblance: Projecting and Perceiving Identity; Albano Alfonso: Self-Portrait as Light; Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art; Labor&Materials, Fallen Fruit: The Practices of Everyday Life; The Future is Female; Truth or Dare: A Reality Show; and The SuperNatural.

Prior to joining 21c as Chief Curator in 2012, Stites was director of artwithoutwalls, a non-profit, non-collecting public arts organization, and from 1995-2006 was adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum. Stites has lectured at universities and conferences such as Art Basel Conversations, Leaders in Software and Art, TEDx Stockholm, Moving Image Spotlight, PULSE Perspectives, the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, NewInc at the New Museum, and has served on juries including ArtPrize, PULSE Prize, and Moving Image New York. She has been active on advisory boards at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design and at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and is an adjunct member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Louisville. Stites graduated magna cum laude from the University of Virginia, and holds an M.A. from Columbia University.

Artist Lecture: Alfred Leslie in conversation with Alexi Worth

Photo credit Peter Bellamy

Alfred Leslie is an American artist and filmmaker. He first achieved international success as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but changed course in the early 1960s and became a painter of realistic figurative paintings.

Leslie’s solo exhibitions include those at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1976); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1976–77); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1977); Wichita Art Museum, Kansas (1984); Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida (1989); and St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri (1991).

How do you insure artwork made of melting wax, or frozen blood?

How should collectors care for taxidermied animals or artwork incorporating insects? Fine art insurance specialist Laura Murphy Doyle will discuss how to protect artwork and manage the risks that come with creating and collecting contemporary art.

Lecture by Richard Vine, Managing Editor of Art in America

Throughout history, art and crime have been deeply intertwined. Not only have artworks been the target of criminal behavior—vandalism, theft, and forgery—they have also frequently taken crimes as their subject matter: Andy Warhol’s “13 Most Wanted Men,” Weegee’s murder-victim photographs, Mike Kelley’s installation in response to serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Equally disturbing, artworks themselves have often been regarded as criminal acts, accused of sacrilege (Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ), obscenity (Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio”), treason (Dread Scott’s What Is the Proper Way to Display US Flag?), and other malfeasance.

Finally, such recent events as the fraud charges brought against Knoedler Gallery personnel, and the release of the Panama Papers, confirming financial chicanery among top dealers and collectors, prompt one to ask if the contemporary art world is itself, in many respects, a criminal environment.

Is the flow of stupendous wealth through a largely unregulated global art system a ready prescription for legal (to say nothing of moral) wrongdoing? Is there some deep link between hardcore crime and the aesthetic rule-breaking and “outlaw” imaginative freedom that we routinely associate with artistic creativity?

In conjunction with the release of his art world crime novel SoHo Sins, Richard Vine, the longtime managing editor of Art in America, will analyze these and other related issues, drawing equally from art history, the news, and his own noir fiction.

Julia Kunin lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.F.A. from The Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Julia Kunin’s work is represented by Sandra Gering Inc. Gallery where she had a solo show entitled “Les Guerilleres”, in 2015.  Kunin has exhibited nationally and internationally.  Solo exhibitions include: Golden Grove at Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas, TX in 2013, Nightwood at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NY, NY in 20012, as well as Crimson Blossom at the Deutches Leder Museum in Offenbach, Germany in 2002. Recent group Exhibitions include: “Coming to Power” at Macarrone GalleryNY, NY. 2016 “Postcards from the Edge”, fundraiser for Visual Aids, NY, NY.  2017 and “Post-Election” at September, Hudson, NY 2017.. Kunin was a Fulbright Scholar to Hungary in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2010 Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant to Hungary. In 2008 she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and had a residency at Art Omi. In 2007 she received the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Artist Residency. Fellowships have included: The MacDowel Colony, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, A CEC Artslink grant to The Republic of Georgia, The Bellevuesaal residency in Wiesbaden, Germany, Yaddo, The Millay Colony, The Vermont Studio Center, The Core Program in Houston, TX and Skowhegan. Kunin was a member of the Women’s Action Coalition, and is a founding member of the activist group “We Make America”.

Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These intimate objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

Her work has been widely exhibited in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona and Crow Collection in Dallas. Her works have been on view at the New Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Fine Art Boston, Asia Society Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Barnes Foundation, among other prestigious museums.

As an accomplished artist practicing in the public realm, she also realizes large-scale, permanent installations commissioned by major public agencies on the federal level as well as city and arts for transit programs. She recently completed a landmark commission for the MTA’s Second Ave Subway at the 63^rd Street Station in New York City.

In recognition of excellence, she has received numerous awards including the two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008) and Sculpture (2003), Korea Arts Foundation of America, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Asian Cultural Council, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award.  Her works and interviews have been featured in many publications, including Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Hyperallergic, Artsy, Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times.  She is represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York and Mark Moore Gallery in LA.

Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is tenured Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at Pratt Institute and recipient of Pratt’s 2017 Alumni Achievement Award.  She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

This upcoming spring 2018, she will have a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Born in Manchester, United Kingdom, Jane South worked in experimental theater before moving to the United States in 1989. She has a BFA in Theater from Central St. Martins, London, UK, and an MFA in Painting & Sculpture from UNC Greensboro.

South’s work will be included in the upcoming 2018 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include: Raked (2014), Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Floor/Ceiling (2013), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Box (2011), Knoxville Museum of Art, TN and Shifting Structures: Stacks (2010), the New York Public Library, NY.

Selected group exhibitions include: SLASH: Paper Under the Knife, Museum of Arts & Design (MAD), NY; Burgeoning Geometries: Constructed Abstractions, Whitney Museum of American Art, Altria; The Drawing Center, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD.

Southʼs work has been reviewed in The New York Times, the LA Times, ArtForum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, New York Magazine, Frieze, ArtNews, NY Arts Magazine, and The New Yorker. She is a contributor to the recently published book “The Artist as Cultural Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” (editor: Sharon Louden).

Grants and residencies include: Brown/RISD Mellon Foundation Fellowship (2015); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2009); Dora Maar House, Menérbes, France (2010); Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France (2010); Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001 & 2008); New York Foundation for the Arts (2007); Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy (2008); MacDowell Colony, NH (2002 & 2004); Yaddo, NY (2001 & 2002).

Jane South is currently Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute.

Lise Soskolne is an artist and core organizer of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), a New York-based activist organization whose mission is to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract their labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy. An organizer within W.A.G.E. since its founding in 2008 and its core organizer since 2012, she began working in arts presenting and development at downtown New York City nonprofits in 1998. Venues have included Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Diapason Gallery for Sound, Meredith Monk/The House Foundation for the Arts, Participant Inc, and Roulette Intermedium.

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.

“The Artist-Gallery Relationship” a talk with Kristen Becker, Marianne Boesky Gallery

Kristen Becker works for Marianne Boesky Gallery as the Director of Museum Engagement, a position she created to help bridge the gap between the commercial and non-profit worlds. She travels domestically and internationally to arts organizations, art fairs, and related events to facilitate more transparency amongst her peers and promote the gallery¹s mission and program. Kristen is dedicated to the long-term goals of the gallery and its roster, and communicates this approach through open dialogue, collaboration, accessibility, and a sincere desire to connect. She brings over 18 years of gallery experience to the role.

Previous to her current position, Kristen spent seven years as Director at Luhring Augustine where she worked with such artists as Ragnar Kjartansson, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, and Glenn Ligon. She has also worked for Robert Mnuchin and Dominique Levy at L&M Arts, SLP Art Culture Commerce, Arts Management

Services, Gorney Bravin + Lee, and David Adamson Gallery. Kristen received her master’s degree in

Museum Studies from George Washington University in Washington, DC and she holds a BA in Anthropology from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts, a non-profit that champions the professional lives of women in the art world.

DUNCAN HANNAH was born in Minneapolis in 1952. He attended Bard College from 1971 to 1973 and Parsons School of Design from 1973 to 1975. In the seventies, he became associated with New York’s avant-garde and glam and punk rock scenes, acted in a number of underground movies, and showed several of his figurative portraits in 1980’s infamous Times Square Show. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Minneapolis Art Institute. He lives in New York with the designer Megan Wilson.

Twentieth-Century Boy
Notebooks of the Seventies

Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. He also happened to be outrageously, androgynously beautiful, attracting the attention of the city’s most prominent gay scenemeisters, who found his adamant heterosexuality a source of immense frustration. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the seventies, Twentieth-Century Boy is a louche, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place, full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, gender-bending celebrities, fantastically good music and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum. At its center: a young man in the mix and on the make, determined to forge an identity for himself as an artist while being at risk from his own heedless appetites. A time capsule from a scary, seedy, but irresistible time and place.