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.