David Anfam, Managing Director of Art Exploration Consultancy Ltd., London, is an international art writer, curator, and consultant. He has worked with the world’s foremost museums, collectors, publishers, artists/estates, art dealers, and diverse scholarly institutions, his expertise especially associated with Abstract Expressionism—and the artists Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, and Philip Guston—as well as the work of Edward Hopper, Conrad Marca–Relli, Wayne Thiebaud, Piero Dorazio, and Larry Poons. His many publications, reviews and more than eighty catalog essays—spanning half a century—include Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas – Catalogue Raisonné (National Gallery of Art & Yale University Press, 1998), now in an unprecedented sixth printing. Among Anfam’s diverse exhibitions is “Abstract Expressionism” (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2016 – 2017), the largest survey of its kind ever held in Europe. In 2020, he also curated the select retrospective, “Lynda Benglis: In the Realm of the Senses,” for NEON at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens. He has delivered solo lectures and conference speeches at venues world-wide, ranging from Tate Modern, London; the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Asia Society, Hong Kong. Anfam holds a BA Honors Degree (First Class) and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Debra Bricker Balken has organized numerous exhibitions on subjects relating to American Modernism and contemporary art for major museums internationally. Balken’s books include Philip Guston’s Poor Richard (2001) and Abstract Expressionism: Movements in Modern Art (2005), as well as exhibition catalogues such as Arthur Dove, A Retrospective (1997), The Park Avenue Cubists (2003), Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence (2009), After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest (2009), John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist (2010), and John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (2011). Her exhibition, “Mark Tobey, Threading Light,” organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with the Venice Biennale in May 2017. She is completing a study of the American midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg for the University of Chicago Press with grants from the Getty Research Institute (2002), Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts (2008). She has taught at numerous institutions, among them Brown University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Amanda C. Burdan, Senior Curator, Brandywine Museum of Art; Burdan is collaborating with Erin Pauwels and Jonathan Frederick Walz on a forthcoming exhibition on Pennsylvania Modernist Charles Demuth that will open at Brandywine in 2027. Her interest in Demuth is an extension of the consideration of the transfer of Modernism from urban to rural locales, the focus of her exhibition “Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City,” and the catalogue of the same name. The transfer of style from Europe to the United States also informed her 2021 traveling exhibition “America’s Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution” and the accompanying catalogue.
Adrienne L. Childs, historian and Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC where she curated the 2020 exhibition “Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition.” More recently, she co-curated the exhibitions “The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sex and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture” (Henry Moore Institute, 2022), “Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM (Montclair Art Museum, 2024), and “Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest” (Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, 2024). She has published widely on race and representation in European art as well as on African American art. Her current book project is Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts (forthcoming, Yale University Press). She contributed to The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard University Press) and co-authored Blacks in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge). Awarded the 2022 Driskell Prize by the High Museum, Childs has held fellowships at the Lunder Institute, Colby College Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), The Hutchins Center at Harvard University, The Clark Art Institute, and the David C. Driskell Center at the High. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she has two adult children and lives with her husband in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.
Wanda Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University, and scholar of American art and photography from the late-19th to mid-20th century. Among her publications and exhibitions are The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915 – 1935 (1999), Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (2011), and the traveling exhibition (for which she authored the accompanying publication) “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” (2017).
Robert Cozzolino is an independent curator, art historian, and critic based in Minneapolis. He curates collaboratively, in partnership with artists, colleagues, and broad communities. “Starting where you are” is critical to his practice. He is drawn to artists who make work about the full range of human experience, especially those who aspire to visually express the intangible, states of consciousness, and a full range of emotions. Although he has worked on topics from the 19th and 20th centuries, he regularly works with contemporary artists in examining history. He considers himself a curator of fluid time, not bound to labels imposed on the field. His numerous publications include Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021), World War I and American Art (2016), Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (2014), and David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014).
Erika Doss is Distinguished Chair in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her multiple books include Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy (1995), Looking at Life Magazine (ed., 2001), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), American Art of the 20th – 21st Centuries (2017), and Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (2023).
Samantha Friedman is curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Most recently, she organized the collection exhibitions “Brice Marden: The Form of a Plane and Nature Symbolized” and the acclaimed loan exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time” (2023). Since joining MoMA in 2008, Friedman has contributed to and organized exhibitions including “Stage Pictures: Drawing for Performance” (2009, with J. Hauptman), “Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration” (2012), “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” (2014 – 2015, with J. Hauptman and K. Buchberg), “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” (2016, with A. Sudhalter), “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern” (2019, with J. Hauptman), “Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury” (2020 – 2021), and “Cézanne Drawing” (2021, with J. Hauptman). She produced a special-edition facsimile of one of Ellsworth Kelly’s sketchbooks for his 2023 centennial celebration and is the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction Blue (2022) for MoMA’s One on One series and the children’s books Matisse’s Garden (2014) and What Degas Saw (2016). Friedman has contributed to traveling exhibitions of MoMA’s collection, including “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters” (2011 – 2012), “Fast Forward: Modern Moments, 1913 – 2013” (2012 – 2013), “Van Gogh to Warhol: The World Reimagined” (2013), and “MoMA at NGV” (2018). She earned her bachelor’s degree in art history and English from Northwestern University and her master’s degree in modern art history from Columbia University.
Nonie Gadsden is the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) where she is responsible for a wide range of artwork including North, Central, and South America decorative arts and sculpture from ancient times through the 20th century. Her recent work includes the exhibition “Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction” (2023 – 2024), “Women Take the Floor” (2019 – 2021) (for which she served as lead curator), developing the MFA’s new 20th century galleries, including “Art and Jazz” and “Folk Meets Modernism” (opened 2022), and publishing a book based on the MFA’s collection of American modern design, America Goes Modern: The Rise of the Industrial Designer (2022). She earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale College and a master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware.
JR Henneman is director and curator of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum. Most recently, she executed the NEH-funded exhibition project “Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism” at the Denver Art Museum (March – May 2023) and edited and contributed to the accompanying catalog. She also edited and contributed to The American West in Art: Selections from the Denver Art Museum (2020) and co-curated and contributed to the catalogue of the NEH-funded exhibition “Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington” (2020). Her research reflects her upbringing on a farm and cattle ranch in Montana and her interest in the art and culture of the 19th and early-20th century.
Dakota Hoska, Associate Curator, Native Arts, Denver Art Museum since 2019. At Denver, she is responsible for the installation of permanent galleries and the production of temporary exhibitions of Indigenous art, as well as contributing to accompanying catalogs, producing information for docents, and presenting at related symposia. At Denver, she established and led the Museum’s Indigenous Community Advisory Council. Prior to joining the Denver Art Museum, she worked as a curatorial research assistant in the Arts of Africa and the Americas department at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and in particular on the exhibition “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” (2019) for which she wrote five essays for the accompanying catalogue, spearheaded community engagement initiatives, and facilitated communications between Native board members, lenders, and museum staff. She also co-curated two Native arts-focused exhibitions at Mia, “Brilliant” and “Horse Nation.” While in Minnesota, she also served as an adjunct professor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and as an instructor at Nawayee Center School. She received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MA in Art History, with a focus on Native American Art History, from the University of St. Thomas. She is a citizen of the Oglála Lakȟóta Nation from Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee.
Laura Katzman is professor of Art History at James Madison University. She served as guest curator for “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity / De la no conformidad,” a retrospective exhibition hosted by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (October 4, 2023 – February 26, 2024) and was principal author of the accompanying catalog. Katzman specializes in 20th-century American art and documentary photography in the continental United States and Puerto Rico and her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian Research and Scholars Center, CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, and the J. William Fulbright Foundation. She co-authored (with B.W. Brannan) Re-viewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam (2014), and (with D.M. Kao and J. Webster) Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times (2000). She is a contributor to La mirada en construcción; ensayos sobre cultura visual puertorriqueña (The Constructed Gaze: Essays on Puerto Rican Visual Culture; 2022) and editor and essayist for The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano (2023).
Karen Lemmey is the Lucy S. Rhame Curator of Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; she joined the museum’s staff in 2012. Lemmey is responsible for research, exhibitions, and acquisitions related to the Museum’s extensive sculpture collection, the largest collection of American sculpture in the world. Her research interests include public art and monuments, the history of materials and methods, American artist colonies in 19th-century Italy, the construction of race in American sculpture, the history of sculpture conservation and direct carving. Lemmey co-curated “Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern (2016) with Dakin Hart, senior curator at The Noguchi Museum, and she was the coordinating curator for “Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions” (2016). Other recent projects include “Measured Perfection: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” (2015) and an installation of 24 examples of direct carving from across the 20th century, drawn mostly from the museum’s permanent collection. Before joining the Museum’s staff, Lemmey was a research associate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as monuments coordinator for the City of New York’s Parks & Recreation. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she organized the exhibition “Alexandre-Louis-Marie Charpentier” (2006). Lemmey earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Columbia College, Columbia University (1995) and she holds a doctorate in art history and certificate in American studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2005).
Larry List is a New York-based writer and independent curator. He has organized exhibitions and written about Dada, Surrealism, Modern and contemporary art for The Noguchi Museum, The Menil Collection, The Tate Modern, The Andy Warhol Museum, Reykjavik Art Museum, DOX Center for Art, Prague, and others. His exhibitions include “The Imagery of Chess Revisited”; “The Art of Chess; Man Ray & Sherrie Levine”; “John Cage and Glenn Kaino: Pieces and Performances,” and “SKINTRADE.” List is currently completing Permanent Attraction: Man Ray & Chess, the first book to comprehensively survey the artist’s chess-related work in all media and to be published by Hirmer Verlag in late 2024 or 2025.
Glenn D. Lowry is the sixth director of The Museum of Modern Art. He is a strong advocate of contemporary art and has lectured and written extensively in support of contemporary art and artists and the role of museums in society. He sits on the boards of The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, the Art Bridges Foundation, and The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a resident member of the American Philosophical Society. He was director of the Art Gallery of Ontario (1990 – 1995), is a former Trustee of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), is an Officier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France (2004), and a member of the Order of the Rising Sun of Japan (2020). In 2005 he was honored with the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre national du Mérite by the French government and is the recipient of a Williams College Bicentennial Medal which is awarded to alumni for distinguished achievement. Mr. Lowry received his BA degree (1976) magna cum laude from Williams College, and his MA (1978) and PhD (1982) degrees in history of art from Harvard University.
Emily Ballew Neff is Kelso Director of the San Antonio Museum of Art where she has served since January 2022. She strives to situate American art in a more expansive, global context and across diverse cultures and geographies. For over six years she led the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art where she was instrumental in the effort to relocate the Brooks to a new building in downtown Memphis designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Neff’s longest tenure has been at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she began in 1989 as a curatorial assistant and became the first head of the department of American Painting and & Sculpture, a position she held from 1997 to 2013. She has held research fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; CASVA at the National Gallery of Art; the Clark Art Institute; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Research Center; and Bayou Bend Collection & Gardens at the MFAH. She holds a BA from Yale University, an MA from Rice University, and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, all in the history of art.
Jonathan Stuhlman, Senior Curator of American Art, The Mint Museum, where he has worked since 2006 and served as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art (2013 – 2019). He has held curatorial positions at the Norton Museum of Art, the University of Virginia Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Among the traveling exhibitions he has organized and accompanying catalogs to which he has contributed are “Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction”; “Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy”; “Seeing the World Within: Charles Seliger in the 1940s”; and most recently, “Southern/Modern.” He received his BA from Bowdoin College, his MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Virginia.
Steven Watson is a cultural historian particularly interested in the group dynamics of the 20th-century American avant-garde. During his 20-year career as a psychologist, he began writing books about the first American avant-garde, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Beat Generation. His most recent book is Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. In addition to his writing, he has curated two exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and created several documentary films, one of them broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System. Most recently, he started Artifacts.movie, an online platform featuring his video interviews with pioneers of the avant-garde and queer culture.
