Artist John Beech, born in England and living in Brooklyn, is recognized for his wry Duchampian twist on the everyday, producing minimalist sculptures and images that combine humor and beauty in perfect union.
Uta Barth is a photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Unlike traditional photography where the camera is used as a pointing device for selecting significant moments and places, Barth’s overriding interest is in perception—in vision itself.
Dallas-based architect Brent Brown, AIA, has focused his efforts on bringing “design thinking” to all communities. The founding director of the building community WORKSHOP (bcWORKSHOP), Brown has received a great deal of recognition for his socially conscious design concepts, including the 2007, 2008, and 2010 Awards for Excellence in Community Design and Sustainable Design by AIA/Dallas and most recently, the 2010 National AIA/HUD Secretary Award for Community-Informed Design by the U.S.
Sterling Allen is an artist and cofounder of Okay Mountain gallery in Austin, Texas, whose own work is known for its humor and profundity.
Kristen Morgin is an artist based in Los Angeles who is known for her incredible feats with fired and unfired clay in creating sculptures that conjure the past as they seemingly mimic a variety of enchanting, though a little worse-for-wear, memorabilia. L. A. Times art critic Christopher Knight comments, “Melancholy does not merely waft into the atmosphere from Kristen Morgin's elaborately crafted clay, wire, and wood sculptures.
Mary Ellen Carroll is a conceptual artist living and working in New York City and Houston, Texas, whose career, spanning more than 20 years, has focused on a single, fundamental question: What do we consider a work of art? The results are multifarious, provocative, and often wry outpourings in architecture, writing, performance, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture, and painting that interrogate the relationship between subjectivity, language, and power.
Annie Cohen-Solal is the author of several books pertaining to culture and those who have played a role in forming it. Currently a professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and Research Fellow at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, Cohen-Solal came to New York as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States after her biography on the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre: A Life, became an international best seller.
Simon Lee, a British artist living in Brooklyn, is known for his thoughtful presentations of light projection and the resulting narratives that grow from found imagery and common objects or occurrences in his stunning films, photographs, and performances.
Dan Cameron is a renowned contemporary art curator known for his enthusiasm and activism, having founded and currently serving as the Artistic Director of U.S. Biennial, which organizes the Prospect New Orleans biennial and related exhibitions. Prospect 1 was a post Katrina effort that received critical acclaim and notoriety for its quality and outreach and Prospect 2 is scheduled for fall 2011. Among other positions, Cameron served for eleven years as Senior Curator of the New Museum in New York, was the Artistic Director for the 8th Istanbul Biennial and co-organizer of the 2006 Taipei Biennial, indicating the breadth and depth of his perspective and expectations of contemporary art. For Tuesday Evenings Cameron talks about how contemporary art can help restore a city's self-image following a major catastrophe, and in the case of a city as heavily dependent on tourism as New Orleans, provide an important economic boost through a cultural sector that has never been looked to in the past for economic development in his presentation Reclaiming a City through Art.
Michael Auping, the Museum’s chief curator, discusses the Tadao Ando–designed gallery spaces of the Modern from a behind-the-scenes curatorial viewpoint in Installing the Modern. For this enlightening presentation, Auping shares his choices for pairing certain key works from the collection with different spaces in the museum; specifically Anselm Kiefer’s Book with Wings, Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T.
