Presenters

Carolyn Anderson

Carolyn Anderson is a director and playwright. Her original works, many of which have been created with long-time collaborator Wilma Hall, focus on themes that explore human dignity, social welfare, and environmental concerns. Anderson and Hall have long specialized in the Living Newspaper form of theater. Their plays have been performed at Actor’s Alley Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles, the Arizona Theater’s Cabaret Theatre, Capital Rep in Albany, the Theater of the First Amendment in Fairfax, Virginia, and the Spa Little Theater in Saratoga Springs, as well as many other venues. Faces: A Living Newspaper on AIDS, an early Anderson/Hall collaboration, has been produced by theaters and organizations across the country and was the subject of a documentary produced by PBS, WMHT-TV and aired nationally. Anderson and Hall participated in the creation of a film script, Something More at Stake, for the National Park Service about the battles of Saratoga. Chair of Skidmore’s Department of Theater, Anderson has directed numerous plays for the College, including The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Our Town, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, Execution of Justice, Endgame, Three Sisters, The Mound Builders, Spoon River Anthology, The Life of Galileo, Tina Howe’s Museum, and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocle’s Antigone, The Burial at Thebes. Most recently, Carolyn collaborated with Capital Rep for their touring program called, Petticoats of Steel, about the women’s suffrage movement.

Lisa Aronson

Lisa Aronson is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Skidmore College, where she teaches a range of courses on Native American, Pre Columbian, and her main area of expertise, African art. Her research interests focus on issues of gender in African art, the impact of trade and colonialism on African textile production, and textiles and body art. In Spring 2001, students in her African Body Arts Seminar participated in the first ever student-curated exhibition at the Tang, titled Africa Embodied: Language of Adornment.

Link: Africa Embodied: Language of Adornment

Ian Berry

Ian Berry is Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and The Susan Rabinowitz Malloy Curator of The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. A specialist in contemporary art, he has organized several exhibitions for the Tang that combine collections of astronomical atlases, scientific equipment, Edward Curtis photographs, Rube Goldberg cartoons, and Shaker furniture with new works of international contemporary art. Berry also initiated the Opener series of focused solo projects and publications for the Tang. Artists featured in that series include Paul Henry Ramirez, Jim Hodges, Alyson Shotz, Nayland Blake, and Shahzia Sikander. Berry received his M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and served as Assistant Curator at the Williams College Museum of Art before coming to Skidmore. He teaches in the Art History department at Skidmore and currently serves as chair of the New York State Council on the Arts Visual Art Panel. His recent publications include Kara Wallker: Narratives of A Negress (Tang and MIT Press, 2003), Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective (Tang and Laguna, 2005), and America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler (Tang and MIT Press, 2006).

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Janet Cardiff was born in Brussels, Ontario, Canada, in 1957. George Bures Miller was born in Vegreville, Alberta in 1960. Cardiff and Miller have been collaborating since 1995 although they sometimes present solo works. The duo represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2001 with Paradise Institute, a multi-layered installation exploring cinematic experience through architectural and aural illusions. In 2002-3 a major survey of their works toured to PS1 Contemporary Art Center of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, the Castello Rivoli in Turin, and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. In 2004 a smaller version of the exhibition was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. In 2005 they produced an exhibition, The Secret Hotel, for Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; a large percussive site work, Pandemonium, for the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia; and a video walk, Ghost Machine, for the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin. Audio walks by Cardiff have recently been mounted for the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington and Central Park (Public Art Fund) in New York.

In 2005 Cardiff and Miller have been included in the group exhibitions: Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles; Take Two. Worlds and Views: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York (Cardiff); and Faces in the Crowd: Images of Modern Life from Manet to Renoir, Whitechapel Museum, London and The Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Upcoming solo exhibitions in 2006 and 2007 include the Louisiana Museum, Denmark; MACBA, Barcelona; and Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Germany. Cardiff and Miller are represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.

Lisa Graziose Corrin

Lisa Graziose Corrin is the Director of the Williams College Museum of Art. She previously held the posts of Chief Curator at The Contemporary Museum (Baltimore), Chief Curator at the Serpentine Gallery (London), and Deputy Director of Art at the Seattle Art Museum where she continues to serve as the artistic lead on the new Olympic Sculpture Park, an 8.5 acre waterfront urban park in Seattle. The park features major works by Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Mark Dion, Teresita Fernandez, and Roy McMakin, amongst others. She has curated some fifty exhibitions including surveys of the work of Brice Marden, Richard Artschwager, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bridget Riley, Do-Ho Suh, Chen Zhen, Chris Ofili, and Rachel Whiteread and has published widely on contemporary art, museum history, and curatorial practice. Her book, Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, was awarded the Wittenborn Prize in 1994. She is currently co-authoring a second monograph for Phaidon Press on sculptor Anish Kapoor.

Debra Fernandez

Debra Fernandez is a director/choreographer whose work has spanned dance, theater and opera. She was choreographer for the Virginia Opera’s production of Orfeo and Euridice and her work with the MAD DOG Theater Company’s TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, was seen in the Belgrade International Theater Festival. Her recent work has focused on the museum as an interactive theater space and she has directed three large-scale performance events for The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. In 2007 she will be the choreographer for a London production of Astor Piazzolla’s opera, Maria de Buenos Aires. It will premiere at the Royal Opera House under the direction of John Abulafia. Fernandez is an associate professor of dance at Skidmore College and an avid yoga practitioner who leads workshops throughout the capital region.

Elaine Heumann Gurian

Elaine Heumann Gurian is a consultant/advisor to a number of museums and visitor centers that are beginning, building or reinventing themselves. Her current clients include the County of Nassau, New York, Museum of London, UK, Minister of Culture, Argentina, Norton Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of American History, and the Pew and Bush Foundations. Gurian is a visiting faculty member in the museum graduate program at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the immediate past president of the Museum Group, an association of independent museum consultants and a partner in a new venture, Interim Museum Services.

Over the past thirty five years, Ms. Gurian has served in the following positions: Acting Director of the Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Deputy Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Deputy Director for Public Program Planning for the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; Deputy Assistant Secretary for Museums at the Smithsonian, Director of the Exhibit Center, the public facility of the Boston Children's Museum and Director of Education at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 2004, Gurian received the Distinguished Service to Museums Award from the American Association of Museums. She has held elected positions in AAM, AAM/EdComm, ICOM and AAM/ICOM and is author of Civilizing the Museum:the Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian, published by Routledge in 2006.

Ivan Karp

Ivan Karp is the National Endowment of the Humanities Professor in The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University and co-director of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship. Karp is a social anthropologist who has worked on African cultures, social organization and systems of thought. Karp has taught at Colgate University, Indiana University and Emory University, in addition to having been a Curator at the Smithsonian Institution. Since the early 1980's Karp has written about museums, representations and the relationship between museums and their constituencies. He is coeditor of three books on museums, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Displays, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (both Smithsonian Institution Press) and the forthcoming Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Duke University Press).

Sharon Macdonald

Sharon Macdonald holds a personal chair in Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has researched and written widely on museums and related topics. This has included an in-depth ethnographic study of curators and visitors at the Science Museum in London (Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, Berg, 2002), research on cultural revival in the Scottish Hebrides (Reimagining Culture, Berg, 1997) and current research, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, on representing 'difficult heritage' in Germany, especially Nuremberg. She has also edited and contributed to a number of key collections on museums: Theorizing Museums (with G.Fyfe, Blackwell 1996), The Politics of Display (Routledge, 1998), A Companion to Museum Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Exhibition Experiments (with P.Basu, Blackwell, forthcoming).

Janet Marstine

Janet Marstine is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall University where she teaches in the Master’s Program in Museum Professions. She is editor of New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, published by Blackwell in 2005. She previously taught at Bowdoin College and Central Washington University and held a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has curated several exhibitions, including What a Doll! at CWU for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge Grant. An exhibition she curated on incest survivor Jane Orleman led Marstine to write "Challenging the Gendered Categories of Art and Art Therapy" which she published in Feminist Studies. Marstine is currently working on a new book, entitled Feminist Curation and the Post-Museum: Theorizing Change. She is also engaged in exploring the long-term impact of museum interventions and in developing new approaches to student exhibitions.

Margo Mensing

Margo Mensing, Associate Professor of Art, teaches Fibers/Textiles in Studio Art and Current Issues in Art. A diversity of interests informs both her work and teaching, resulting in installations, collaborations, and curatorial projects. In 2004-05 she co-organized A Very Liquid Heaven at the Tang Museum as well as co-directed the Mac 3 performance and pre-performance of George Crumb’s Makroskosmos III. Historical narrative, sometimes fictionally adapted, is central to her practice. Recent work includes, meta/Metasequoia, opening April 2006 in the Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Collaborating with John McQueen and J. Shermeta (KSS Architects), the artists have created a viewing platform with a sound installation that delivers visitors twelve feet up into the branches of the metasequoia trees. Mensing writes frequently for exhibition catalogs and periodicals.

Link: A Very Liquid Heaven

Mary Crone Odekon

Mary Crone Odekon is Associate Professor of Physics at Skidmore College. Her research is focused on the formation of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe, which she studies with the help of computer simulations and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Crone Odekon earned her B.S. from the College of William and Mary and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has also completed research at the University of Washington, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Among her other publications, Crone Odekon co-organized the 2004-05 Tang Museum exhibition, A Very Liquid Heaven.

Link: A Very Liquid Heaven

David Porter

As Skidmore College's fifth president, David Porter was integrally involved in the creation of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum. Porter was also involved as a pianist in two major performances at the Tang, Satie/Cage Tango at the time of the Tang's opening, and Mac 3, a performance built around George Crumb's Makrokosmos III and offered in 2004 to coincide with the opening of the Tang's exhibit, A Very Liquid Heaven.

David Porter taught classics and music at Carleton College from 1962-1987 and was Carleton's president from 1986-87. After serving as president of Skidmore from 1987-1999, he returned to teach at Williams College, where he is currently the Harry C. Payne Visiting Professor of Liberal Arts. He is the author of books on Horace and on Greek tragedy and of two monographs on Virginia Woolf, and editor, with Gunther Schuller and Clara Steuermann, of a book on Edward Steuermann; in recent years he has been writing on Willa Cather. As a pianist, he has performed throughout the United States and in Great Britain as well as on radio and television. A recent recital at Skidmore featured piano works by Mozart, Schubert, and Ives ("Emerson," from the Concord Sonata).

Link: Satie/Cage Tango

Jock Reynolds

Jock Reynolds is the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery. He earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis. From 1973 to 1983, he was an Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art at California State University at San Francisco, and was also co-founder of New Langston Arts, San Francisco’s premier alternative artists’ space. From 1983 to 1989, he served as the Executive Director of the Washington Project for the Arts, a multidisciplinary visual arts association in Washington, D.C., before becoming the Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, a position he held until September 1998.

He has won numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and multiple NEA Art in Public Places project awards. He frequently collaborates in his work with his wife, Suzanne Hellmuth. Their performances, installations, and photographs have been commissioned and exhibited in Japan, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and across the United States. Their artwork is represented in both private and public collections, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery.

Doran H. Ross

Doran H. Ross served as deputy director and curator of African collections at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History from 1981 to 1996 and as director of the Museum from 1996 to 2001. Ross has been project director and/or curator of 32 African and African American exhibition and publication projects including: Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos; The Essential Gourd: Art and History in Northeastern Nigeria; Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture; The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou; Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity; and Music in the Life of Africa (all produced by the Fowler Museum and funded by NEH). He is the author of The Arts of Ghana (1977) with Herbert M. Cole and of Akan Gold from the Glassell Collection (2002) and editor of Elephant (1992) and Wrapped in Pride (1998). Ross has served on the Selection Committee of the SSRC African Archives and Museums Project (1991-1996), the Board of the West African Museums Program (1993-2000), the NEA Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Advisory Panel (1996-1999), and on the Advisory Committee of the Getty Leadership Institute (2000-2003). He is currently co-editor of the journals African Arts and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture.

Susan Schwartzenberg

Susan Schwartzenberg is an independent artist and holds a senior artist position at the San Francisco Exploratorium. She has realized her work in multiple formats from books and installations to curated exhibitions and larger scale public works. Her projects have explored themes including, biography, memory, studies of urban life and the psychology of place. She was a recipient of the Loeb Fellowship for Advanced Environmental Studies at the School of Design at Harvard University in 1998-9. She has exhibited her work internationally and has accomplished public projects for the cities of Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Richmond.

At the Exploratorium she initiated the creation of an archive of photographs on scientific phenomena, technology and research. Major exhibition projects include, Memory, Capturing Light: 150 Years of Photography and Tracing Time: Explorations in Space, Time, and Movement. Schwartzenberg is a principal in projects exploring new media and web-casting as an educational medium. Currently she is co-developing Invisible Dynamics, an investigation on the scientific and social systems that define the SF Bay Area as a microcosm of the Pacific Rim. Her current book, Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability was published by University of Washington Press in 2005.

Christopher Steiner

Christopher Steiner is the Lucy C. McDannel '22 Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Museum Studies at Connecticut College in New London. He served as Interim Director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum from 2003 to 2004, during which time Connecticut College resigned from its commitment as the museum's trustee. Prior to his current teaching appointment, Steiner taught art history and museology at the University of East Anglia and UCLA. Steiner is the author of African Art in Transit and co-editor of Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. His current research project, Performing the Nut Museum, focuses on an outsider artist and the history of her offbeat museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Jill Sweet

Jill Sweet is Professor of Anthropology at Skidmore College where she brings to the classroom her years of experience in Southwest Native American communities. She has been most interested in their ritual dance events as powerful, sacred, social, and aesthetic expressions. Sweet sees these as vehicles for understanding the values and worldview of the people who create and perform them. Interpretive or symbolic anthropology is her primary theoretical orientation. In addition to basic research on ceremonial dance, she has conducted several applied projects. Her applied work looks at the impact of tourism, community development, and the legacy of paternalism in contemporary reservation communities. In 1994 Sweet received a grant from the Aspen Institute to conduct evaluation research on a non-profit organization working with reservation communities. She was made a Weatherhead Fellow and Resident Scholar at the School of American Research in 1979-1980 and again as a Summer Scholar in 2002 under a grant from the Ethel-Jane Bunting Foundation. Sweet was co-curator of the exhibition, Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation, which was on view at the Tang Museum in 2002.

Link: Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation

Mason Stokes

Mason Stokes is Associate Professor of English at Skidmore College, where he teaches courses in African American Literature and the History of Sexuality. He is the author of The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy, (Duke UP, 2001); essays in American Quarterly, Transition, Callaloo, and American Literary History; and chapters in Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality (Routledge, 2005) and “Next to the Problem of the Color Line”: Gender and Sexuality in the Work of W.E.B. Du Bois (forthcoming, U. of Minnesota Press). He was a fall 2001 Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. His involvement with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery includes a public interview with Nayland Blake as part of the Dialogues series, as well as his membership on the search committee that led to the selection of John Weber as Dayton Director.

Adam D. Weinberg

Adam D. Weinberg has been the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art since October 2003. Previously, he was Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where for over four years he set the institutional vision, built the collection, and organized numerous exhibitions of contemporary and historical American Art. In addition to two other posts he held at the Whitney as Curator of the Permanent Collection 1993-99 and as Director of the Museum’s former Equitable Branch 1989-1990, he has also held positions as Artistic Director of the American Center in Paris 1990-1992 and as Director of Education and subsequently, Assistant Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis 1981-89.

Weinberg has curated dozens of exhibitions on artists ranging from Edward Hopper, Isamu Noguchi and Richard Pousette-Dart to Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Alex Katz, and Terry Winters. He has also organized numerous thematic exhibitions, The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere and Glen Seator; A Year in the Collection, Circa 1952; In Contingent Realms: Four Contemporary Sculptors; Vanishing Presence, and On the line: The New Color Photojournalism. At the Whitney he organized the groundbreaking series Views from Abroad: European Perspectives on American Art with the Stedlijk Museum, the Museum für Moderne Kunst, and the Tate Gallery. He has also organized major public projects with artists ranging from Mark Dion, Jessica Stockholder and Andrea Zittel to Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik. He is the author of numerous catalogs and essays on contemporary and modern art. Weinberg has served as a board member for diverse organizations including Minetta Brook Foundation, Williamstown Art Conservation Center, and the Minnesota Composers Forum. He has been a grant panelist for numerous federal, state, city, and private foundations. He holds a BA from Brandeis University and a Masters degree from the Visual Studies Workshop, the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson has created site-specific installations in collaboration with numerous museums and cultural institutions throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He received his B.F.A. from the State University of New York, Purchase in 1976. Since his first solo exhibition in 1988, Wilson’s work has been the subject of many individual shows and retrospectives including the critically acclaimed Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson at The Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (1992-93), and Fred Wilson: The Greeting Gallery, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1999). In 2001, the solo exhibition Fred Wilson, Objects and Installations 1979–2000 began its three year tour, traveling to eight different venues nationally, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, the Santa Monica Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Chicago Cultural Center. Wilson’s work has also been featured in over 100 group exhibitions, including the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) as the American representative, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition (1993), and the 4th International Cairo Bienniale (1992).

As the recipient of many honors and awards, Wilson received the 10th Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2002), the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, Chicago (1999), the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts awards (1990), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (1987 and 1991). Wilson is currently the Luce Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge at Skidmore College (2004-06).

Link: Fred Wilson, Objects and Installations 1979–2000

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