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MUSEUMS OF TOMORROW: AN INTERNET CONFERENCE
Moderator and Participants
Maurice Berger, moderator, is a Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of the New School for Social Research in New York and Curator of the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County. His articles have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Village Voice, October, Wired, and The Los Angeles Times. He is the author of White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999)-which was named as a finalist for the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of Harvard University-and six other books, including Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (Harper & Row, 1989), How Art Becomes History (HarperCollins, 1992), Constructing Masculinity (Routledge, 1995), The Crisis of Criticism (The New Press, 1998), and Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion (Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center/CAVC, 2003). He has served as curator or catalog essayist for numerous institutions, including Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Addison Gallery of American Art, Santa Monica Museum, Grey Art Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and Jewish Museum (New York).
Alexander Alberro, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Florida, is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (The MIT Press, 2003). His essays have appeared in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues. He has also edited and co-edited a number volumes, including Two-Way Mirror Power: Dan Graham's Writings on Art (The MIT Press, 1999), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (The MIT Press, 2000), and Recording Conceptual Art (University of California Press, 2001).
Bruce Altshuler is Director of the Program in Museum Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University. From 1992 to 1998 he was Director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York. Altshuler is the author of The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (Harry N. Abrams, 1994, and University of California Press, 1998), Isamu Noguchi (Abbeville Press, 1994), and numerous essays on modern and contemporary art, including catalog essays for exhibitions organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Independent Curators International, Japan Society, Fundacion Juan March, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, The Sculpture Center, Vitra Design Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has taught at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, and from 1994 to 2000 was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Art Critics/United States Section.
Maxwell Anderson: The author of dozens of articles and monographs on art and museums, appearing in publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post, Maxwell L. Anderson holds a Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University, and has directed three of the leading art museums in North America, most recently New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. He is serving as a Leadership Fellow at the Yale School of Management during the 2003-04 academic year. His commitment to collaboration among museums has led him to advocate on Capitol Hill both international conventions and treaties to permit the free circulation of artworks internationally and national bills in support of the arts, including H.R. 7, the Charitable Giving Act. He chairs the Association of Art Museum Directors' Task Force on Collecting, in a search to harmonize the collecting policies of America's leading art museums with fast-evolving international legislation. He is currently at work on a book titled "The Quality Instinct", a primer about discerning quality in art from antiquity to today, and serves as Executive Director of the Art Museum Network, a global online network maintained on behalf of the world's leading art museums.
George Baker will begin teaching modern and contemporary art history at UCLA in the fall of 2004. Currently on a fellowship from the Getty Research Institute, he is completing a book on Dada entitled "The Artwork Caught by the Tail." He is also the author of a book on contemporary artist James Coleman's work in film ("James Coleman: Drei Filmarbeiten," Hannover, Sprengel Museum, 2002) and the editor of an OCTOBER Files anthology of criticism of Coleman's work (published by MIT Press in October 2003). A long-standing critic for Artforum Magazine, Baker is an editor of October Magazine and October Books.
Stefano Basilico is Curator of the University Art Collection at New School University, New York, and Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Last year, he completed the installation of two site-specific works for New School University: a large two-part walldrawing by Sol LeWitt, and a fifteen-part work on paper by Dave Muller. He is currently organizing several exhibitions for the Milwaukee Art Museum, including "CUT: Film as Found Object," to be presented in the fall of 2004, and, with Glenn Adamson, "Sleight of Hand: The Reinvention of Craft in Contemporary Art," scheduled to open in the summer of 2005. He has lectured extensively on contemporary art in such venues as The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Indianapolis Museum, The Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is also active as a critic of contemporary art, with writings in such journals as Bomb Magazine, Time Out New York, and Documents Magazine. Most recently, he completed an essay on the artist Paul Pfeiffer for the 2003 International Cairo Biennial.
Jonathan P. Binstock has been Curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art since January 2001. He is the organizer of numerous exhibitions, including Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction (2003), featuring recent work by Jim Sanborn; The 47th Corcoran Biennial: Fantasy Underfoot (2002); Primary Properties: Mary Judge, Joseph Dumbacher John Dumbacher (2001); Jeremy Blake: Digital Projections (2000); and Andy Warhol: Social Observer (2000). He has a broad spectrum of interests in art of the post-WWII era and has written on artists as varied as Hung Liu, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Bruce Nauman, Pepon Osorio, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Tuttle, and Alma Thomas. His essay on Mark Tansey for the 1996 exhibition catalogue American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution) is included in the anthology, Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (2001; ed., Patricia Hills). Prior to the Corcoran, Dr. Binstock was Assistant Curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is currently working on a retrospective of the paintings of Sam Gilliam, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation.
Dan Cameron has been Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York since 1995, and before that was active for more than a decade as an independent curator in Spain, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Mexico, Russia, Portugal and other countries. He has published his art criticism in numerous books, exhibition catalogs, and magazines, and teaches Critical Theory in the MFA program at Columbia University. Most recently he was curator of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, which runs through November 16, 2003.
Karen Mary Davalos, is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and the co-Senior Editor of Chicana/Latina Studies: the journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Trained as a cultural anthropologist with a specialization in feminist and ethnic studies, her work addresses Chicana/o art, museum studies, Latino religion, popular culture, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy. Her essays have appeared in Aztlan: a journal of Chicano Studies, Latino Studies Journal, and Frontiers: a journal of women studies as well as exhibition catalogs. Her book Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001) has received critical praise from a broad audience of reviewers, including Art Journal and American Studies. She is co-editor of The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlan Scholarship, 1970-2000 (with Chon Noriega, Eric Avila, Rafael Perez-Torres and Chela Sandoval. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2001). While on sabbatical supported by a grant from UCLA American Cultures Institute and Chicano Studies Research Center, she is working on a book, tentatively titled Museum Culture in Chicano Los Angeles, 1963-2003.
Donna De Salvo is Senior Curator at Tate Modern, London. She has held senior posts at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Dia Art Foundation, where she worked with, amongst others, Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, and Cy Twombly. She has also been an adjunct curator for the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Most recently, she curated Tate Modern's commission for the Turbine Hall-The Unilever Series: Anish Kapoor (2003) and led (with Sean Rainbird) the reinstallation of the suite of collection displays, History/Memory/Society. She is also a catalogue contributor to Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective (UCLA,MCA,Chicago, 2003).
Other past exhibitions and publications include: Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (Tate Modern, 2002); Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (Tate Modern, 2001); Ray Johnson: Correspondences (Wexner Center, 1999), Gerhard Richter (Wexner Center,1998); The Collections of Barbara Bloom (Wexner Center artists residency project 1998) Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition: 1955-62 (LAMoCA, 1992 ), Face Value: American Portraits (Parrish, 1995) and Success is a job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol (NYU, 1989). In 1992, she organised the exhibition, A Museum Looks at itself: Mapping Past and Present at The Parrish Art Museum and an accompanying symposium on museums in the 21st century.
Carol Duncan is Professor of Art History at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where she has taught since 1972. With an interdisciplinary Master's degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University, her interests as an art historian have been wide ranging, from 18th century French art to art institutions of the present in both Europe and America. She has written about the representation of the family and patriarchal authority in 18th art, the appearance of state politics in 19th century, the representation of nudes in early 20th century art, and sexual politics in 20th century art. A collection of her essays on these subjects, The Aesthetics of Power, was published by Cambridge University Press. For the past two decades, art museums has been her main area of research; Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Routeledge) represents her major published work so far in that field.
Mark Alice Durant is an artist and writer on the faculties of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He is author of 'McDermott and McGough: A History of Photography' and co-author of 'Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing'. Recent projects include 'Robert Heinecken: A Material History' and guest editing the Fall 2003 issue of the CAA Art Journal on the topic of 'Photography and the Paranormal'.
Jennifer Gonzalez is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her scholarly essays and reviews have appeared in both art magazines and journals, including Bomb, Frieze, World Art, Diacritics, Art Journal and Aztlan. She has contributed chapters to The Cyborg Handbook, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture and Race in Cyberspace. She has served as catalog essayist for the Mexican Museum, San Francisco, the Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the International Center of Photography, New York. In 2002 she served as the Joanne Cassullo Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Mary Kelly is Professor of Art and Critical Theory in the Department of Art at the University of California Los Angeles. She is author of "Post-Partum Document", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983 and "Imaging Desire", MIT Press, 1996. Her project -based artwork is featured in the monograph, "Mary Kelly", Phaidon Press, 1997, and is included in such collections as the Tate Modern, London, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Generali Foundation , Vienna, the National Gallery of Australia and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
George G. King joined the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum as director in April 1998. Since its opening to the public in 1997, the Museum has developed and adopted its first Strategic Plan, organized over 20 exhibitions, opened the first research center in the country dedicated to American modernism, and become accredited by the American Association of Museums. During his tenure, King has led these important initiatives and overseen a growing staff and Board of Directors, as well as a budget that has more than tripled in size. King came to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum from the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York, where he was executive director for ten years. During this period he oversaw the capital campaign and construction of a new museum facility and organized more than 60 exhibitions, several of which he curated. Before his appointment to Katonah, King held several positions at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in New York City over a six-year period, including program director.
He attended Bennington College in Vermont and the Maryland Institute College of Art, earning his BFA there in art history and painting. King's own special interests are in 20th century art and photography.
King has served as panelist on a number of arts councils, including Santa Fe Arts Commission, New York State Council on the Arts, Westchester Arts Council and New York State Council for the Humanities. He is a Trustee of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the chair of the AAMD's Program Committee, and a member of its Professional Issues Committee. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Mountain-Plains Museum Association, as well as a member of the College Art Association and New Mexico Association of Museums.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she chaired the Department of Performance Studies for more than a decade. She serves on the academic advisory committee for NYU's Master Program in Museum Studies. She is the recipient of many awards, among them the Guggenheim. In 2003, she was designated Distinguished Humanist by the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University. She serves on the academic advisory board of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and is a member of the Association for Museum History. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Museum and Society (Leicester) and Journal of the History of Collections and recently served on the editorial board of Museum Anthropology. She is co-editing three books: Museum Frictions: Public Cultures, Global Transformations; Modern Jewry and the Arts; and The Work Itself: Social Scientific Approaches to the Arts. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage and Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939, with Lucjan Dobroszycki (Schocken, reissued 1995), which accompanied an exhibition at The Jewish Museum and served as the basis for a feature documentary film.
Miwon Kwon teaches in the Department of Art History at UCLA and serves as residency faculty in the MFA in Visual Art Program at Vermont College. Her research and writings engage several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, public art, and urban studies. She is a founding editor and publisher of Documents, a journal of art, culture, and criticism, and serves on the advisory board of October magazine. She is the author of One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002).
Raina A. Lampkins-Fielder is Associate Director, Helena Rubinstein Chair of Education at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Previously, Lampkins-Fielder held positions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), and the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh). She has organized academic symposia, exhibitions, and film and video series and has given numerous presentations. Lampkins-Fielder curated the 2002 Everson Biennial (Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, 2002) a series of new British films entitled Going Underground: British Independents and Beyond (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, 1999) as well as a series highlighting films about Africans abroad entitled Black Beyond Borders: Mapping the African Diaspora (BMA, 1999). She was co-organizer of alt.youth.media (1996, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC), an exhibition of young artists using alternative media, originator and curator of Keeping Track of the Joneses (1998, New Museum), an exhibition visualizing the contemporary family, and curator of Juegos Ilegales/Illegal Games (1999, New Museum). She was also co-curator of a project about youth zine culture entitled Global Bedroom Communications in Manchester, England in 1998.
Lampkins-Fielder has an M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge, England, where she was the Paul Mellon Fellow and a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University.
Simon Leung is an artist who lives in Los Angeles and New York and teaches in the Studio Art Department at University of California, Irvine. Leung's projects in various media include: a reposing of Duchamp's oeuvre as an discourse in ethics; a rethinking of the psycho/philosophic/political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; and meditations on the residual space of the Vietnam War. His recent solo museum exhibition, Proposal for The Side of the Mountain, an opera/film/sculpture, was presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2002. His work has been presented at the Whitney Biennial (1993) and the Venice Biennale (2003); at the Museum of Modern Art; PS1 Museum; NGBK, Berlin; the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); Generali Foundation, Vienna; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Kunsthalle Fredericianum, Kassel; and the International Museum of Surfing. Leung has recently published in Surface Tension (ed. Ken Ehrlich and Brandon Labelle); Negotiations in the Contact Zone (ed. Renee Green); radiotemporaire (Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble 2002), and Art Journal, on which he has been on the editorial board of since 1998. He is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Theory in Contemporary Art, 1985 to the present (Blackwell, 2004).
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum; The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center; curator of numerous exhibitions on Georgia O'Keeffe and her American Modernist contemporaries, and author of numerous books and exhibitions catalogues, such as Maria Chabot/Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949. Edited with Ann Paden. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming, fall 2003; "O'Keeffe's O'Keeffe's: The Artist's Collection." In O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection. Exhibition catalogue. New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2001; and Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonn. London and New Haven: Yale University Press; Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art; and Abiquiu, N.M.: The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, 1999.
Olu Oguibe is associate professor of art and art history as well as African American studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is The Culture Game (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Joan Rosenbaum, in her 22-year tenure as Director of The Jewish Museum has presided over a period of significant growth and development for the institution. Moving from a budget of $1 million to its current $13 million operation, she focused the Museum's identity as an art museum presenting exhibitions, education programs and a diverse collection, to audiences of all cultural backgrounds. The notable strengths of the Museum are its critically acclaimed exhibition program, its unparalleled collections of over 27,000 works, and its beautiful building, the core of which was the former home of the Warburg family.
Ms. Rosenbaum has been a frequent speaker and panelist on subjects related to art and Jewish culture and contributed articles to both Jewish Museum and other publications. Among her various honors she has received an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1993 the Chevalier for arts and letters from the Cultural Ministry of France, in 1999.
David A. Ross has been a leader in the arts community for more than 30 years, serving nearly 20 years as a director at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Mr. Ross has made significant contributions to the field through his roles as scholar, trustee, champion of contemporary art, and leader of pioneering cultural organizations. He has organized more than 100 exhibitions of 20th-century art, is widely published, has lectured at museums and universities around the world, and has been involved in the organization and jurying process of major international exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and The Carnegie International.
Mr. Ross was director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1998 through 2001. At SFMOMA he was responsible for a period of unprecedented growth in the size and quality of the museum's permanent collection, and oversaw a period during which the museum's membership achieved record high levels of 43,000 and annual attendance averaged near 800,000.
As director of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1991 till 1998, Mr. Ross also focused on the museum's permanent collection, enhancing the quality of its historical and contemporary collections, starting a photography collection, and leading the museum to build a new floor of galleries expressly for the museum's pre-War collections. Widely known as a strong advocate for contemporary artists, Mr. Ross, while Whitney director, insisted that the museum take a very public stand in support of artists' rights.
Mr. Ross is currently Curatorial Director of UPX in Mexico City, an agency producing exhibitions and educational programs in the media arts for the Mexican public. Since 2002, Mr. Ross has been Executive Director of the Beacon Cultural Project, a landmark initiative encompassing the investment in cultural resources to help catalyze the revitalization of Beacon and the Hudson Valley. Mr. Ross will direct the Beacon Cultural Project's commercial, educational and community-based cultural activities and will oversee the development of a wide range of arts organizations and ventures. The Beacon Cultural Project (BCP) is a public-private collaboration consisting of a series of non-profit, for-profit, and governmental organizations working together to continue Beacon's revitalization through a series of innovative cultural initiatives.
Mr. Ross currently chairs the Board of Directors of the Miami-based Anaphiel Foundation, and is a Trustee of The Studio Museum in Harlem. Mr. Ross also serves on the Board of Rhizome, an online community space for artists working in media art. Rhizome presents artworks by new media artists, critics and curators, in addition to fostering critical dialog and preserving new media art for the future. Mr. Ross is also on the Board of the non-profit American Anti-Slavery Group, and he is a member of the Committee Scientifico (advisory board) of the Fondazione CRT in Turin, Italy.
Edward Rothstein is Cultural Critic at Large for the New York Times, writing criticism on cultural politics, literature, music, intellectual life, the arts, and technology. He writes a column on culture and ideas ("Connections''), a monthly column on academic books ("Shelf Life"), along with essays for Arts & Ideas and other sections.
He is the co-author of "Visions of Utopia" (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the author of "Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics'' (Times Books, 1995; Avon Books, 1996), which was named one of the 25 best books of 1995 by both Publisher's Weekly and the New York Public Library.
He has been the chief music critic of the New York Times (1991-1995), a technology columnist for the New York Times, and the music critic for The New Republic (1984-1991). His essays on science, politics, music, and the arts for The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The London Independent, and other magazines and journals. He has won two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for his music criticism, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1991.
A graduate of Yale University (1973), he holds a doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has done graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis University and earned a Master's Degree in English literature from Columbia University.
Dr. Irving Sandler is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the State University of New York at Purchase and a former Acting-Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art. He has written a four-volume history of art since 1945, consisting of The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: Painters and Sculptors of the 1950s (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), and Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996). He has also edited (with Amy Newman) Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1988). In addition, he has written monographs on Alex Katz, Al Held, Philip Pearlstein, and Mark di Suvero, numerous catalogue introductions and articles in Art News, Artforum, Art in America, Art International, Arts Magazine, and The New York Times. He was the art critic of the New York Post (1961-65) and is currently a contributing editor to Art in America. He was a trustee of the Mark Rothko Foundation and a co-founder and board member of Artists Space, a former board member of the College Art Association, and a former president and current board member of the American Section of the International Art Critics Association.
Charles Stainback is currently the Executive Director of SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary art space in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Previously he was the Dayton Director of the Tang Museum and a professor in Liberal Studies at Skidmore College. He has also served as the Director of Exhibitions for the International Center of Photography; the Founding Director of the Burden Gallery, Aperture Foundation; and the Assistant Director, The Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University. Mr. Stainback holds a B.F.A from the Kansas City Art Institute and a M.F.A from the State University of New York at Buffalo/Visual Studies Workshop.
Mr. Stainback has been involved in photography as a practitioner, educator and curator for over two decades. Over the past decade he has published several books and curated numerous exhibitions of some of the most challenging work by contemporary artists including: From Pop to Now: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection (2002), Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing (1998), David Levinthal: Works from 1975-1996 (1997), Special Collections: The Photographic Order from Pop to Now (1993-94), Jeff Wolin: Written on Memory (1991), The Anonymous Other: Photographic Installations by Christian Boltanski, Barbara Bloom and Alfredo Jaar (1991), Bruce Charlesworth: Private Enemy/Public Eye (1988), and Portrayals (1987). In 1995 he co-curated a special exhibition that toured Russia and Eastern Europe entitled Along the Frontier: Video Installations by Ann Hamilton, Bruce Nauman, Francesc Torres and Bill Viola.
Michele Faith Wallace is Professor of English, Women's Studies and Film Studies at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also author of BLACK MACHO AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN, INVISBILITY BLUES and the forthcoming DARK DESIGNS AND VISUAL CULTURE (Duke University Press).
Alan Wallach has been Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and Professor of American Studies at the College of William and Mary since 1989. A critic and historian, he writes frequently about museums and also about American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was co-curator of the exhibition "Thomas Cole: Landscape into History," which was seen at the National Museum of American Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Brooklyn Museum in 1994-95, and author of the exhibition catalog's principal essay. Exhibiting Contradiction, a collection of his essays on the art museum in the United States, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1998. His writings have appeared in leading periodicals—Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art History, Harvard Design Magazine, etc.—and anthologies, and he is very active as a speaker, commentator, and panel chair. He served as a member of the board of directors of the College Art Association from 1996 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2003 was a member of the Board of Managing Editors of The American Quarterly. His current concerns include the impact of corporate sponsorship on museums and the history of landscape vision in the United States before the Civil War.
Sylvia Yount, conference participant, is the Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art at the High Museum of Art. Previously, she served as Chief Curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art and in research and administrative positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Her projects at the Academy included the popular and critically acclaimed To Be Modern: American Encounters with Czanne and Company (1996), Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966 (1999), a major reinstallation of the museum's historic collection, and numerous contemporary art exhibitions. She has lectured and published widely on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and culture as well as on issues of curatorial responsibility and current museum practice.