MAR 8, 2018 | Conversations on Art hosted by K&L Gates
The Global Fine Art Awards presents
Conversations on Art
hosted by K&L Gates LLP
Thursday, March 8, 2018 | 8:00 am to noon
K&L Gates | 599 Lexington Ave. NY NY 10022
About the Panels
This full morning of moderated panel discussions premiers an international series of ongoing programs to explore cutting-edge topics in art, law, business, and culture. The first of three panels addressed the impact of crypto currency in art market purchases. The second two explored and amplified the ideals of two new GFAA Awards: Global Planet and Global Humanity, by highlighting the evolving role of art in reflecting and informing critical issues in social and human development to foster greater social cohesion, inclusion, and empathy and deepening understanding about our natural environment and its sustainability.
#1 Art Market | moderator Desiree Moore, Partner, K&L Gates
Art Market Purchase and Provenance in the Blockchain Age
- Friederike Grafin von Bruhl, Partner, K&L Gates
- Judith Rinearson, Partner, K&L Gates
- Anthony Nolan, Partner, K&L Gates
#2 Humanity | moderator Judy Holm, GFAA Founder and President
Art – the Global Voice of Humanity | Artists Tell Their Stories
- Mary Sabbatino, Galerie Lelong & Co.; representing GFAA Global Planet Nominees Jaume Plensa and the late Ana Mendieta (and GFAA Global Planet Nominee Andy Goldsworthy)
- Baiqu Gonkar, Founder & CEO of Online Artist Platform; GFAA Nominee Global Humanity for Art Represent
- Paolo Colombo and Tamara Chalabi, Co-Curators, Ruya Foundation; GFAA Nominee Best Public Art for Archaic (Iraq Pavilion, Venice Biennale)
#3 Environment | moderator Dean Phelus, GFAA Judge; American Alliance of Museum’s Senior Director of Leadership Programs
Art and the Global Environment | Art depicts Nature throughout History
- Erland Hoyersten, Museum Director and Curator ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Denmark); GFAA Nominee Best Public Art for THE GARDEN – End of Times; Beginning of Times
- Joe Lin-Hill, GFAA Judge and Deputy Director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York
- Stuart Williams, Environmental Artist, GFAA Nominee 2015 for Breath of Life/Dresden
- Diane Tuft, Artist (Photography), represented by Marlborough Gallery; GFAA Nominee Global Planet for Arctic Melt
About the Panelists
Mary Sabbatino
Mary Sabbatino is Vice President and Partner at Galerie Lelong in New York City. She holds a B.F.A from Parsons School of Design and a M.A. from New York University. She has served multiple times on the board of the Art Dealers Association of America, most recently on its Executive Board and she initiated and co-authored the ADAA’s first code of ethics. Mary also serves on the Selection Committee for Art Basel Miami Beach, the Joint Committee Art Basel and is a founding member of the Council for the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Galerie Lelong represents 24 artists and Estates from the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. The gallery is recognized as a pioneer in its work with artists from Latin America, beginning with representation of the Estate of Ana Mendieta in 1991; in addition, it works with Alfredo Jaar, Cildo Meireles, Zilia Sánchez and the Projeto Oiticica. It is also known for its support of women artists and represents more women artists than any other gallery in New York.
Baiqu Gonkar
London-based Baiqu Gonkar is the Founder & CEO of Art Represent (AR), a social enterprise dedicated to the promotion and empowerment of artists from conflict areas around the world. The only one of its kind, AR was established in 2015 to forge social cohesion through the communicative power of art. With a growing digital marketplace, and chapters in 4 countries, representing over 50 artists, Art Represent also stages exhibitions and creative projects with partners around the globe.
Growing up in London as a Tibetan refugee, Baiqu is passionate about driving engagement and dialogue in a polarising political landscape. A nominee of the UK Asian Women of Achievement Award, and a Vital Voices Fellow, Baiqu frequently gives talks on the importance of diverse representation in the media and mainstream culture. Outside of her work with Art Represent, Baiqu utilises her experience as an entrepreneur and business development expert to help build start-ups both in the UK and internationally.
Erin Barnett
Erin Barnett, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, returned to ICP in 2016 after a brief hiatus. She had previously worked in ICP’s Exhibitions and Collections department for eleven years, where she organized, curated, and co-curated over 30 exhibitions and publications including The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet, Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945, President in Petticoats! Civil War Propaganda in Photographs, Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms, and Munkacsi’s Lost Archive. Erin also conducted research on the collection, oversaw collection loans and rights and reproduction program, and co-taught an ICP-Bard course on research methodologies and writing. She has also worked in the curatorial departments of the New Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. An alumnae of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program’s curatorial program, Erin also holds an MA in the History of Art from the University of Kansas and a BA in Art History and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College.
Erin Photo credit: Eric Hetherington
Tamara Chalabi
Tamara Chalabi is a historian and curator who specialises in contemporary Middle Eastern art and culture.
Born in Beirut to Lebanese and Iraqi parents, Chalabi studied at Cambridge and Harvard. She has a PhD in History and the Middle East and first book The Shi’is of Jabal’Amil and the New Lebanon: 1918-1943 (2006) was a pioneering study of a crucial period of change in Lebanon.
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace; the Lost Dreams of my Iraqi Family (2010) uncovered the lives of four generations of Chalabi’s family at the forefront of Iraqi political life and was praised in The New York Times as ‘a work of exile literature, beautifully written, rich with human detail as only personal family histories can be.’ Chalabi has also written for publications including The Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Prospect and Condé Nast Traveler. She is working on her first novel, The Wedding Carpet, which will be released in 2018.
In 2012, Chalabi co-founded the Ruya Foundation, a non-governmental organisation that is the only Iraqi foundation focused on enriching Iraqi contemporary culture both within the country and internationally. Chalabi steers the Foundation’s main programme, whose work is particularly pertinent at a time when contemporary culture is overshadowed by conflict and an international prioritisation of antiquities.
Ruya has an extensive programme of art relief activities in the refugee camps of northern Iraq; co-ordinates a programme of workshops, seminars and exhibitions in Baghdad; is the commissioner for the National Pavilion of Iraq at the Venice Biennale; and manages the only publically accessible online database of contemporary Iraqi artists.
With Ruya, Chalabi has collaborated with international artists including Ai Weiwei and Francis Alÿs. She was co-curator of the National Pavilion of Iraq at the 2017 Venice Biennale and co‑wrote Welcome to Iraq, the accompanying catalogue for the 2013 Pavilion. She was nominated as one of 100 global thinkers for her work on the 2013 Biennale by Foreign Policy magazine.
Stuart Williams
Williams’ monumental site-specific art installations have been critically acclaimed around the globe. His head-turning, mesmerizing works have captivated thousands. Educated as an architect, Williams leads teams of engineers and technicians tuned to the unique needs of each project. With his extensive experience working with community groups and planners, he envisions concepts that deeply resonate with the essence of each specific locale.
His most ambitious installation, “Luminous Earth Grid,” was realized in the rolling hills 50 miles north of San Francisco. Cosponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, it was a vast array of nearly 2000 energy- efficient fluorescent lamps, which swept over an expanse equal to 8 football fields. Said Williams, “The glowing green grid can be seen as an icon of computer imaging technology, which in this ‘real life’ incarnation, gently melds with the flowing shape of a lovely landscape… a dream-like vision of symbiotic unity.”
In 2015 Williams installed “Breath of Life/Dresden” at the historic Dresden Cathedral to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in World War II. By bathing the facade in computer-controlled waves of uplighting that rose and fell at the pace of human breath, he made the Cathedral appear to breathe. The Dresden Cathedral (c. 1738) is one of Dresden’s foremost landmarks. Towering 275 feet above the heart of the city, the installation became an artwork on the scale of the cityscape, thematically joined to a city deeply entrenched in geopolitical conflict and historical controversy. Said Williams, “I think the vision of one of Dresden’s most treasured landmarks appearing to breathe was deeply moving.” A documentary film is currently in development.
Williams has been the recipient of grants and commissions from the U.S. Embassy, Berlin; The City of Dresden, Germany; Pacific Gas & Electric, San Francisco; the LEF Foundation, St. Helena, CA; the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation, Napa, CA; the Osram Sylvania Corporation; Anheuser Busch; Columbus Public Art 2012; and an anonymous foundation in New York. He has been an invited lecturer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of California, Davis, among others. Williams lives and works in New York City.
Dr. Joe Martin Lin-Hill, GFAA Judge
Dr. Joe Lin-Hill is currently Deputy Director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. He received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2013; his dissertation, Becoming Global: Contemporary Art Worlds in the Age of the Biennials Boom, completed under the direction of Robert Storr, considers the global proliferation of large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions since the mid-1980s and the impact they have had upon the contemporary art world. At the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, he has organized the large-scale exhibition Screen Play: Life in an Animated World (June – September 2015), which was the first international survey of artists’ use of animation in contemporary art.
Lin-Hill’s academic and curatorial work is directly tied to his diverse professional experience. He served on Rob Storr’s curatorial support team for the 2007 Venice Biennale, and from 2005 to 2008, he was the principal consultant to Sotheby’s New York office as the company launched the Pan-Asian contemporary art sales that internationalized the Chinese contemporary art market. Lin-Hill has also worked in the New York offices of AEA Consulting, one of the world’s leading cultural consulting firms, and with a broad range of flagship cultural institutions and funding organizations.
Diane Tuft
Diane Tuft is a mixed media artist who has focused primarily on photography since 1998.
Tuft has always been fascinated by how environmental factors shape the Earth’s landscape, and capturing this through her camera has been a guiding principle in her work. By travelling to remote places including both the North and South Poles, she has been able to document the visual effects of climate change and global warming on our planet.
Tuft’s first monograph, UNSEEN: Beyond the Visible Spectrum is a retrospective comprised of work created from 1998-2009. The images in this book explore the visual effects of infrared and ultraviolet light throughout the world, including areas such as Tunisia, Nepal, Iceland, Greenland, and Utah.
In 2012, after receiving an Artist and Writer’s Grant from the National Science Foundation to explore the visual effects of ultraviolet radiation on Antarctica’s landscape, Tuft published her second monograph Gondwana: Images of an Ancient Land. The photographs in this series are both visual and scientific studies that convey the subtle and violent atmospheric changes registered in Antarctica over millions of years.
Tuft travelled during the summers of 2015 and 2016 throughout the Arctic to visually document the melt that is occurring in its landscape and its enormous impact on global ocean level rise. This resulted in her most recent work and book The Arctic Melt: Images of a Disappearing Landscape. Featured in these images are the mountain glaciers of Svalbard, Norway, her journey through the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole, and the icebergs and ice sheet of Greenland. This monograph includes haikus written as tribute to the Arctic’s beauty and vulnerability.
By using art as a platform in discussing climate change, Tuft has spoken at many venues including The Taihe Global Institute in Beijing and The Arctic Circle Assembly in Iceland.
Tuft has had solo exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery in New York City, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., Ameringer-Yohe Gallery in New York City, Pace Gallery in New York City, The Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut and The Southampton Center in Southampton, New York. Her work is included in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The International Center of Photography in New York City, The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, as well as numerous private collections.
Tuft received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and science from the University of Connecticut, and continued with studies in art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. By bridging art and science, Tuft seeks to bring difficult scientific subjects to a broad audience in order to stimulate dialogue encouraging policies that will protect our environment.
Tuft lives and works in New York City.
About the Panel Moderators
Judy Holm, GFAA President and CEO
Ms. Holm’s background includes twenty-five years of experience in arts and culture, direction of more than 60 art installations and 600 cultural events throughout the United States and Europe. Her career and education span fine art, opera, symphony, ballet, literature and film.
For fifteen years, Ms. Holm developed and curated programs and client events integrating culture and education for Wells Fargo, Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab and Citibank. Recent career highlights include developing strategic partnerships in Art Basel (Switzerland) for a large media client, and corporate and private client events during Art Basel Miami Beach for the past seven years including the Biltmore Hotel. She developed an Art Concierge business in 2011 in Venice, Italy for the Biennale, and continues to consult with private and corporate art clients internationally. She served as Vice-Chair for the Miami Beach Chamber’s Arts and Culture Council from 2011 to 2014, and for three years was the founding editor of the bi-weekly column “Arts and Culture (PRE)View – (RE)View for the Miami Beach newspaper.
A native of San Francisco, currently residing in New York, she has also lived in Paris, Venice and Miami. Ms. Holm received bachelor’s degrees with honors in Economics and French Literature from U.C. Berkeley, and an MBA from l’Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP).
Desiree F. Moore, GFAA Executive Committee and Chair of GFAA Young Visionaries
Desiree F. Moore is a partner in the Chicago office of the international law firm K&L Gates LLP. Ms. Moore is commercial litigator, with a focus on Intellectual Property, Social Media, and Art Law related matters. Ms. Moore is the founder and co-chair of the firm’s Social Media and the Law practice group, as well as the firm’s Middle East Art Law representative.
Ms. Moore has successfully represented visual artists, major Hollywood producers, international media conglomerates, theater/dance companies, and other creative industry clients, both in pre-dispute counseling and in active litigation in state and federal courts across the United States. Ms. Moore regularly writes and lectures on various legal topics, including social media and the law and the intersection of art and law.
Ms. Moore is the author of the American Bar Association bestselling book, Thrive – A New Lawyer’s Guide to Law Firm Practice. She is also an adjunct professor of practical skills training at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and has lectured at law schools throughout the United States and Qatar on best litigation practices, legal writing, and other practitioner skills.
Ms. Moore is actively involved in the Chicago and Doha offices’ Women in the Profession group and spearheads the Women’s Mastermind program, which supports the business development goals of women associates and partners.
Ms. Moore graduated from the University of California San Diego magna cum laude with a major in Psychology and a minor in Theater/Dance. In law school, Ms. Moore was the Conference Editor of the Loyola Law Journal, the Student Bar Association President, an academic tutor, and the Joan Marie Corboy Scholarship Recipient (2005). Ms. Moore speaks conversational Italian and Spanish.
Dean Phelus, GFAA Judge and Executive Committee
Dean Phelus is the Senior Director of Leadership Programs at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).
In this capacity he oversees the editorial content for Museum magazine and a portfolio of programs and activities globally that foster a deeper understanding on best practices in museum programs and operations and the invaluable contribution museums make to society.
Prior to this position, he served for over a decade as director of the AAM annual meeting and
professional development where he provided direction and oversight of the AAM annual meeting–the largest museum convening in the world, attracting 5,000-6,000 museum professionals from over 50 countries, and offering multilingual educational content in Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish—and other face-to-face and virtual professional development programs to strengthen core competencies in museum practice.
In his tenure he has had extensive exposure to numerous exhibitions in the US and around the world which have informed his thinking on exhibitions and the visitor experience.
He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration from the American University in Washington, DC.