Friday December 6, 2013

2:00 PM

“In Conversation with Deborah Kass”
Eric Shiner, Director of The Andy Warhol Museum will interview artistDeborah Kass whose celebrated works explore the intersection of politics, popular culture, art history and personal identity. 

3:00 PM

“Art Talk: Presentations and Panel”
Hear from leading industry figures as they present their work and discuss their insights into the contemporary culture of the Art world. 
Njikeda Akunyili, Artist

Paula Tin Nyo, Founder and CEO, YONE ARTS

Manish Vora, Co-founder, Grey Area, Founder & Publisher, Artlog

4:30- 6:00

Networking Reception 
Get your art on! Mixing and mingling with alumni and friends in the heart of South Beach.

BIOS

Njideka Akunyili was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2011, a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2006, and her BA from Swarthmore College in 2004.  Recent group shows include those at Victoria Miro gallery, London; Marianne Boesky gallery, NY; The Bronx Museum, NY; the American Academy of Arts and letters, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. 

Akunyili was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem; a 2013 Van Lier Fellow at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, NY; a 2013 recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program; and a 2012 participant at the Acadia Summer Arts Program, Acadia, MA. In 2013, she took part in the Bronx Museum Artist in Marketplace Program. 

Awards and Grants include the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant; the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting, American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Carol Schlosberg Memorial prize for excellence in Painting, Yale University. Her work has been featured in ARTnews, the New York Times, and Phaidon’s Vitamin D2, a survey of contemporary drawing. Her work is held in public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Yale University Art gallery, the museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and the Rubell Family collection. Akunyili has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, and Swarthmore College.

©Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Deborah Kass employs the visual motifs of post-war painting to explore the intersection of politics, popular culture, art history and personal identity.  Her celebrated series, The Warhol Project, from the early 1990’s refocused Andy Warhol’s eye for celebrity portraiture. Her work incorporates lyrics from Broadway musicals, movie quotations and Yiddish sayings into canonical formats like Frank Stella’s concentric squares, Ellsworth Kelly’s rainbow spectrum and Andy Warhol’s camouflage patterns.

Kass’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, among others.  She is a Senior Critic in the Graduate Painting Program at Yale University.   Recent solo and group exhibitions include The Pittsburgh Biennial at The Andy Warhol Museum; “The Deconstructive Impulse” at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY; “feel good paintings for feel bad times” and “MORE feel good paintings for feel bad times” at Paul Kasmin Gallery; and “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism” at The Jewish Museum in New York, NY.  In 2012, The Andy Warhol Museum hosted  “Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After, a Mid-Career Retrospective.” Kass’s work was also featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years.”

Eric Shiner is the Director of The Andy Warhol Museum, the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world, located in Pittsburgh, PA.   At The Warhol Museum, Shiner organized Factory Direct: Pittsburgh, an exhibition that showcased the artwork of 14 established contemporary artists invited to conduct artist residencies in Pittsburgh-based factories.  In addition, Shiner led The Warhol team in creating Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, the largest traveling exhibition of Warhol artwork in Asia, as well as the first retrospective of appropriation artist Deborah Kass, titledBefore and Happily Ever After.   In 2013, Shiner curated Armory Focus: USA at The Armory Show, which presented a broad snapshot of the country’s contemporary cultural practice.  Further, Shiner is a scholar of contemporary Japanese art and a leading authority on Andy Warhol.  His hometown is New Castle, PA.  He received a Bachelor of Philosophy in The History of Art & Architecture and Japanese Language & Literature from The University of Pittsburgh Honors College in 1994, an M.A. in The History of Art from Osaka University in 2001, and an M.A. in The History of Art from Yale in 2003.

Paula Tin Nyo, Founder & CEO, YONE ARTs, is a marketing and art consultant dedicated to improving cross-cultural awareness, good will and prosperity through creativity in the business model. Born in Yangon, Myanmar, Ms. Tin Nyo is a third generation artist and writer from the premiere media family in post-colonial Burma. As one of the intellectual and artistic diaspora now returning to Myanmar after four decades of its isolation, she contributes her robust background in cultural education, writing and media ethics. She has lived in five different countries and throughout the United States. Ms. Tin Nyo envisions strong economic relationships between Myanmar and the rest of the world in order to provide prosperity and depth in a multidimensional framework that makes connections across sectors of arts, media, industry and social progress. She draws from her experience in advertising, education, arts management and writing to initiate communication and actualize opportunities for Myanmar and parties interested in her native country’s development. 

Manish Vora is the co-founder of GREY AREA. He leads the online business and business development, developing partnerships with Helmut Lang, Stella McCartney, Guggenheim, Smart Car and Bergdorf Goodman. He is also the founder and publisher of Artlog. He has been a regular art correspondent on NBC New York and a digital content strategy consultant for American Express. He is involved with numerous non-profits and is currently on the young board of UNICEF, an Ambassador to Creative Time and an Art Advisor to Times Square.   Previously he was Director of Research at Monness Crespi and an Investment Banking Analyst at Citigroup. He has been featured in the NY Times, WSJ, Vogue, Elle and Business Week. He graduated from Yale University.