Nene Humphrey has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries since coming to New York in 1979. Recent venues include Lesley Heller Gallery, NYC, Mead Museum Amherst, Mass, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Ga. and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC. Awards include the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, Brown Foundation, and Anonymous was a Woman among others. Her work has been written about in numerous publications including the New York Times, Art in America and ArtNews and Sculpture Magazine. Since 2005 she has been artist in residence at the Joseph LeDoux neuroscience lab at NYU. Humphrey’s lecture will include a brief survey of her work over the past 30 years and highlight a recent collaborative project, Circling the Center, which explores the brain mechanisms underlying our most intense emotions, the craft of Victorian mourning braiding, and communal art making through sound, film, and live performance.
Alan Michelson was born in Buffalo, New York and now lives in New York City. He studied at Columbia College in New York and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and earned his BFA from Tufts University in 1981. A Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, Michelson addresses North American geography, history, and identity in his multi-layered, multimedia installations. His work has also been exhibited in several museums, including the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the Tang Museum, the New Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship. Most recently, he was named the 2011 Invited Artist/Fellow of the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art. His work is in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Smithsonian Institution. Michelson teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
Barry Markowitz received his BA and MFA from California State University, Los Angeles. Additionally, he has studied at the Art Students League, Nassau College and the School of Art and Design in New York. His awards and honors include a General Motors Grant, a Rockefeller Honorarium from UC San Diego and a Rockefeller Honorarium from Cal State Dominguez Hills, and a grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust/California Community Foundation in painting. His exhibits have been seen at the Eagle Rock Cultural Arts Foundation, the Traction Gallery, the A&B Gallery, and the American Gallery in Los Angeles. His works can be seen in collections at the Balthazar and Rosetta Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and at Paramount Pictures Inc. in Los Angeles.
Jeanne Brasile will be discussing her curatorial practice, which is focused on working with emerging and mid-career artists in non-profit venues. She is particularly engaged in developing exhibitions outside the white cube. Her inter-disciplinary curatorial practice is uniquely informed by her roles as a professor, arts advocate and artist. She is interested in developing exhibitions that engage non-traditional audiences while concomitantly challenging viewers to re-think their perceptions about art, art-making and the role of the museum/gallery. Brasile is currently the Gallery Director at Seton Hall University’s Walsh Gallery where she curates two to three exhibitions yearly. She is also an independent curator, recently working at Cuchifritos, SITE Festival/Arts in Bushwick and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. She earned her B.A. in art history/studio art from Ramapo College of New Jersey and her M.A. in Museum Studies at Seton Hall University.
Robin Williams was born in Columbus, Ohio. Her recent solo exhibitions include, "Rescue Party" at PPOW in New York City and "New Work" at Space 414 in Brooklyn. Williams has exhibited at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana CA, the Claire Oliver Gallery and Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn. She’s a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and now resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Ben Rubin is a media artist based in New York City. Rubin’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Science Museum, London, and has been shown at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Rubin has created large-scale public artworks for the New York Times, the city of San José, and the Minneapolis Public Library. He is currently developing a site-specific sculpture called Shakespeare Machine for the Public Theater in New York, and just completed Beacon (2010), a luminous rooftop sculpture commissioned for National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. He frequently collaborates with UCLA statistician Mark Hansen, and their joint projects include Moveable Type (2007), and Listening Post (2002), which won the 2004 Golden Nica Prize from Ars Electronica as well as a Webby award in 2003. In 2011, Rubin and Mark Hansen will join forces with the Elevator Repair Service theater ensemble to present Shuffle, a new performance and installation that will re-mix text from three American novels of the 1920s. Mr. Rubin is on the faculty of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and he has previously taught at the Bard MFA program and the Yale School of Art, where he was appointed critic in graphic design in 2004. During the fall of 2010, he taught a new graduate seminar, “An Anecdotal History of Sound,” at NYU/ITP.
Victoria Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999. Each year, she structures her life around a photographic journey crossing the American landscape. Her most recent project has been following the US/Mexican border photographing the intersection of geology, politics and culture along the volatile international boundary. She is a recipient of the 2010 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and the 2010 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Lannan Foundation.
“Public Art: the Good, the Bad, and the Truly God-Awful”: This extremely biased presentation on public art is the result of years of interest in the subject from the perspective of a visual artist who has had some less than stellar experiences working with it. Brown has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally in more than 30 solo exhibitions. Numerous museums and public collections owning her work include: Denver Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Herbert Johnson Museum of Art; Frost Art Museum at FIU; Miami Art Museum; University of Colorado; Tampa Art Museum; Jacksonville Art Museum; University of Florida; Polk Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Art Museum; Arkansas Art Center Museum; City of Orlando; and both Florida and Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places programs. Ms. Brown has been the recipient of several state and national grants. She has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grants for an individual artist. She divides her time between Miami Beach and New York and is on the faculty of New World School of the Arts, Miami.
Artist Dena Al-Adeeb was born in Baghdad, Iraq. Deported out of Iraq just before the Iraq/Iran War in 1980, she and her family escaped to Kuwait until the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, when she was forced to relocate to San Francisco, California. Al-Adeeb left the United States in 2003 when she spent time in several places (Mexico, Cuba, Spain, U.A.E, Jordon, Iraq) before moving to Egypt for four years. She returned to the US in 2008. She received her M.A. in Anthropology-Sociology, Visual and Cultural Anthropology at the American University of Cairo. She received her B.A. in International Relations, Middle East and North Africa from San Francisco State University. Her work has been presented in New York, San Francisco, Oakland, Michigan, Sweden, Cairo and at the Orebro International Video Art Festival, the Falaki Gallery, Mashrabia Gallery, Karim Francis Gallery, National Arab American Museum, SomArts Gallery, and Pro-Arts Gallery, among other venues.
Greg Lindquist received an MFA in painting and an MS in art history from Pratt Institute in 2007. His work has been recently reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, the New York Sun, the New York Observer, the Brooklyn Paper and NY Arts Magazine. Lindquist has had solo exhibitions at McCaig-Welles Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2007); NCSU College of Design (2008); and Bethel University in St. Paul, MN (2008) and Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York, NY (2010). A solo exhibition, Brooklyn Industry, was held at Brooklyn Academy of Music in March 2009. He has been in group exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (2008), Brooklyn Arts Council (2007) and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (2006). Lindquist is a contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail and artcritical.com.
Vicki DaSilva has been making single frame time exposure light painting photographs at night since 1980. Her work is created in real time on location by drawing with lamps. DaSilva moved to NYC after receiving her BFA from Kutztwon University of PA. While at KU she met Keith Haring, a Kutztown, PA native. She was heavily influenced by the convergence of street graffiti art during the birth of Hip-Hop. Equally influential was the minimalist mega blue chip artist Richard Serra for whom she worked as a personal assistant for 10 years, as well as her internship and assistant years with internationally acclaimed video and performance artist Joan Jonas. Her exploration of light graffiti and light painting as a multi disciplinary, time-based art form anchored in the photographic process continues to push boundaries of intervention art. DaSilva’s recent exhibitions include, Architectural Digest Home Design Show, NYC, “Outsight Inn,” Ruypert Ravens Contemporary, Newark, NJ, “The Takeover,” Art Whino, Art Basel Miami Beach and “Back to New York,” HP Garcia Gallery, NYC.
Denyse Thomasos is an abstract painter who has shown her work both nationally and internationally and is represented by the Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York and the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto. She graduated from Yale School of Art in the MFA painting program in 1989 before moving to New York City where she currently lives and works. She has won many awards including a Guggenheim, Pew, Joan Mitchell Award, and several other national and international awards. Her shows have been reviewed by all the main art periodicals including Art News, ArtForum, Art in America and Canadian Art. She has also attended a number of artist residencies including Bellagio and Bogliasco in Italy, Yaddo, McDowell and Ucross in the US. In 2008 she received a grant by MICA (Maryland Institute College Arts in Baltimore) to complete a comprehensive body of research on the global privatized prison crisis. Her recent exhibitions include Lennon, Weinberg in December 2009 and the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto in February 2010. She is an associate professor of fine art at Rutgers University.
Sarah Schmerler has worked as an art critic and journalist in New York City for 14 years. Schmerler's writing has appeared in newspapers like The New York Post and The New York Times, weekly publications like TimeOut New York and The Village Voice, and monthly and bi-monthly publications like Art in America, ArtNews, Photograph, and Art & Auction. Schmerler has taught Writing for Artists at The New School, and art history at Pratt Institute’s School of Professional Studies and Medgar Evers College, CUNY, Brooklyn. She is currently the curator of a virtual exhibition space called 45Projects, but she also curated at a number of non-profit art sites around the city. Schmerler also does consulting.