The National Arts Club and Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation are collaborating to highlight new ways into what is and will be a new arts community. This panel discussion gathers thought leaders and advocates at the forefront of speaking out and forging an equitable and sustainable future. Breaking traditional models of working separately towards the same mission, speakers discuss strategies for collaboration and ways that combining forces can help our community navigate and build resiliency moving forward.
Breaking traditional models of working separately towards the same mission, speakers discuss strategies for collaboration and ways that combining forces can help our community navigate and build resiliency moving forward.
Speakers:
Julia Halperin – Moderator
Julia Halperin is executive editor of artnet News, where she oversees editorial operations for the world’s most widely read art news site and manages a staff of editors and writers in London, Berlin, and New York. Previously, she served as museums editor of The Art Newspaper, where she oversaw international coverage of museums and other major art institutions, and as news editor of Art + Auction magazine. Her writing has appeared in WIRED magazine, the New York Observer, and New York magazine.
Hank Willis Thomas
Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist living and working in New York City. His work focuses on themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. He often incorporates recognizable icons into his work, many from well-known advertising and branding campaigns. On advertising, in an interview with Time, Thomas said, “Part of advertising’s success is based on its ability to reinforce generalizations developed around race, gender and ethnicity which are generally false, but [these generalizations] can sometimes be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying.”
Belinda Tate
Belinda A. Tate is Executive Director for the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, serving since 2014. Tate is a community bridge builder who embraces the KIA’s vision that the visual arts are for everyone. She works to provide a cultural platform that welcomes and is inclusive of all people. Through hands-on, engaged leadership, she provides strategic direction for a team of seven senior leaders who manage a complex institution consisting of development and marketing, exhibitions and collections, museum education and library services (11,000 volumes), and the Kirk Newman Art School (more than 3,300 students). The organization maintains a budget of approximately $4MM, and is powered by 98 staff and faculty and 300 volunteers who serve more than 100,000 patrons annually in Southwest Michigan.
Alex King
Alex King is the Director of Membership at Newlab, a hub for startups and platform for scaling frontier technologies located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he oversees member recruitment and experience for the community of 150+ companies and 800+ entrepreneurs, inventors, and engineers that call Newlab home. Prior to joining Newlab, he led strategy at Gridmates, an Austin-based startup devoted to reducing energy poverty and enhancing energy assistance programs. A lifelong musician, King holds a BA in Music from Wesleyan University.