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.