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. She has also curated at a number of non-profit art sites around the City. Schmerler also does consulting.
James Siena was born in California and received his BFA from Cornell University. Siena creates paintings, drawings, and prints in which hand-rendered procedural abstractions, methodically executed, cover a wide range of modalities and produce multiple visual and psychological effects. As Roberta Smith wrote in an early review of his paintings: "Mr. Siena is unusually adept at translating the mental into the visual. His paintings think as good as they look." Siena was included in the highly regarded Greater New York show, 2000, at PS1-MoMA in Long Island City. A ten-year survey of his work, originating at The San Francisco Art Institute, traveled to The University of Akron, in Ohio in 2003. In 2000, he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition. In 2004, he was selected for the Whitney Biennial. Recent exhibitions include: James Siena: From the Studio, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, James Siena, Pace Prints, New York, and James Siena: Paintings, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, all in 2010. Siena's works are in many public institutions and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He was a recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award. He has taught at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts, New York. The Pace Gallery in New York and Daniel Weinberg in Los Angeles represent James Siena. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Marina Zurkow makes psychological, animated works about humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. These have taken the form of multi-channel videos, customized multi-screen computer pieces, cartoons, and participatory temporary public art works. Since 2000, Zurkow has exhibited at The Sundance Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The Seoul Media City Biennial, Ars Electronica, Creative Time, The Kitchen, The Walker Art Center, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, and Eyebeam, and other venues. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been a NYFA Fellow, a Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and a Creative Capital grantee. Zurkow is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Alexandra Schwartz was recently appointed Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montclair Art Museum. There she is planning a series of solo exhibitions of contemporary artists, beginning with an exhibition of the new media artist and 2011 Guggenheim Fellow Marina Zurkow (Marina Zurkow: Friends, Enemies, and Others, September 17, 2011-Janaury 8, 2012), as well as a major traveling exhibition, New Order: Art and Politics in the 1990s, opening in Fall 2013. She was previously the coordinator of The Museum of Modern Art’s Modern Women’s Project, a curatorial initiative to increase scholarship on women artists; in this role she was the co-editor of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (2010; recently awarded the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Outstanding Permanent Collection Catalogue), and co-curator of Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now. Her exhibition Modern Women: Single Channel is currently on view at MoMA PS1. She is the author of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010), the first book-length scholarly consideration of the artist’s work, and the editor of a collection of Ruscha’s writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (MIT Press, 2002). A contributor to various journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs, she has taught at Columbia University and the University of Michigan, and in the Education Departments at MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Harvard University. At MSU, she will discuss “What MFAs Should Know about Museums and Curators,” a window onto how emerging artists should approach and work with museums.
Jacqueline Humphries has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Stuart Shave Modern Art, London and the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. Her group exhibitions include the Dallas Museum of Art, Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York, Germany, London and Milan. She has received numerous awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. The artist lives and works in New York City.
Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Her sculpture and drawing exists in an in -between zone of form and idea, of abstraction and representation. Her work offers a poetic commentary on our quickly changing material culture. Like an artistic archeologist in this age of globalization and post-industrialization, she salvages (often disappearing) ornament and craft traditions and incorporates them into sculpture and drawings. Bowen has had over a dozen solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe including the Lesley Heller Gallery in NYC, Annina Nosei Gallery in NYC, Galerie Farideh Cadot in Paris, the Betsy Rosenfield gallery in Chicago, and the James Gallery in Houston. She has been included in-group shows in various museums around the country. Her work has been reviewed widely in such journals as Art in America, Artforum, Glass Magazine, Sculpture Magazine and a host of newspapers. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Jentel Foundation and the European Ceramic Work Center among others. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY). She has taught at Columbia University, Bard College and R.I.S.D. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture, and the Coordinator of the Sculpture area at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
[dNASAb] is known for creating new media video work, utilizing consumer electronics and complex sculptural systems. Humans have incorporated these bourgeoning technologies, such as LCD screens, in all aspects of our daily existence. They are embedded in our homes, automobiles, and public spaces. [dNASAb] sees these technologies as raw materials for the creation of cutting edge artworks. Passionate about the space between the information displayed on the screen and the ideas spawned in the mind of the viewer, [dNASAb] creates work in this underutilized site for contemporary sculpture. His works have a distinct aesthetic, capturing velocity, direction, and evolutionary motion. Recent exhibitions include [dNASAb]: Dataklysmos at Irvine Contemporary and a solo exhibition at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, which featured a project entitled “dataclysmic”. In addition to being included in numerous private and corporate collections including, but not limited to, the Microsoft permanent collection. He exhibits frequently in the United States, and his work has been exhibited internationally in various locations including galleries in Paris, Basel Switzerland, South Korea, and Istanbul.