Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Panel Biographies 2003 Linda Shearer (Panel Chair) Director, Williams College Museum of Art Williamstown, MA Fatima Bercht Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio New York, New York Ulysses Grant Dietz Curator, Decorative Arts at The Newark Museum Newark, NJ Trevor Fairbrother Independent curator and scholar Boston, MA Chrissie Iles Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, New York Richard Powell Art historian and John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University, Department of Art and Art History Durham, North Carolina Paul Schimmel Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA Lydia Yee Senior Curator at The Bronx Museum of the Arts New York, New York Linda Shearer (Panel Chair) has been Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, since 1989, where she is responsible for the management of a permanent collection of 12,000 objects and a staff of thirty. She is also a Lecturer in Art at Williams. Shearer was formerly Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (1985-89). She has also been Executive Director of Artists Space, a non-profit gallery for new art in New York, and Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1969-80), where she organized numerous exhibitions. She serves on a variety of boards and committees for arts organizations around the United States as well as locally and her many affiliations include trustee of the American Federation of Arts and the Association of Art Museum Directors; member of the International Arts Advisory Council for the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University; and member of the Advisory Committee for the Museum Loan Network. She has been a frequent panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts as well as often participates in panels and lectures. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York. Return to Top Fatima Bercht is the Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York City, where she has worked in various curatorial capacities since 1995. Prior to that, she was the Director of the Visual Arts Department at the Americas Society (1988-94) and was a research assistant at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (1988). She has bachelor’s degrees from the School of Fine Arts, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado and the Instituto Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil, and a M.A. from Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology. At El Museo del Barrio, Bercht has organized such exhibitions as Curator in Charge, a Caribbean and Latin American series from 1998 to the present; Between Heaven and Earth: Devotional Art from Puerto Rico and Mexico (1999), and Altares de los Orishas: Afro-Caribbean Sacred Spaces (1998), as well as one person shows for Maria Elena Gonzáles (1996-97), Ana Busto (1996), and Carla Preiss (1996), among others, as part of the museum’s Contemporánea series of site-specific installations. She was also the Project Director for Taino: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean. At the Americas Society, she was responsible for Faces of Eternity: Masks of the Pre-Columbian Americas (1991); Wilfred Lam: A Retrospective of Works on Paper (1992); Contemporary Art from Chile (1991), and House of Miracles: Votive Sculpture from Northeastern Brazil (1989), among other projects and shows. She has written extensively on Latin American art and artists for numerous books, catalogues, and journals. She has also lectured extensively, and has been a panelist for the Cintas Foundation Fellowships (1994, 1999); Il Bienal de Panama, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Panama City (1994); National Endowment for the Art’s Museum Programs (1992); New York State Council on the Arts, Folk Arts Program (1990-92), and New York Council for the Humanities Museum Programs (1989). Return to Top Ulysses Grant Dietz has been the Curator of Decorative Arts at The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, since 1980. He received his B.A. from Yale, and his M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program. The curator of over 80 exhibitions during his tenure, Dietz is particularly proud of his work on The Newark Museum’s 1885 Ballantine House, which was re-interpreted and restored in 1994. In 1997, he was project director for The Glitter & The Gold: Fashioning America’s Jewelry, the first-ever exhibition and book on Newark’s once-vast jewelry industry. In 2003 Dietz published Great Pots: Contemporary Ceramics from Function to Fantasy, the first catalogue of the Museum’s studio pottery collection, which accompanied an exhibition of the same title. Other exhibitions he has organized include: Ancient Land, New Style: Jewish Arts & Crafts from Jerusalem, 1906-1980 (1998); Masterworks of Contemporary Craft (1998-99); Quilt Masterpieces from The Newark Museum (1996-97); The Clay Art of Adrian Saxe (1994); Steven Levine: Turned Marquetry Vessels (1993); The Herman Miller Collection: 20th Century Furniture (1991), and Masterpieces of American Quilting (1989). Additionally, he has published numerous articles on decorative arts, as well as books on the Museum’s American art pottery and nineteenth-century furniture collections. Return to Top Trevor Fairbrother is an independent curator and scholar living in Boston, MA. His most recent position was the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern Art at the Seattle Art Museum (1996-2001). Prior to that, he held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1981-96), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1977-78). Fairbrother graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. Honours degree and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Exhibitions organized at the Seattle Art Museum include: Creating Perfection: Shaker Objects and Their Affinities (2000); John Singer Sargent (2000); Earthworks Revisited: Early American Landscape and Graphic Tradition (1999); The Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection of Modern Art (1999); Roy McMakin: How Do I Know How You Know? (1999); The Paving of Paradise: A Century of Photographs of the Western Landscape (1998); Cindy Sherman: Allegories (1998), and Science (1997). His next project is Family Ties, an exhibition of contemporary art for the inauguration of the new Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (June 2003). Fairbrother was recently Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in American Art, researching and teaching contemporary art at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. His book John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist was published by Yale University Press in 2000. Return to Top Chrissie Iles has been a Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, since October 1997. Her specializations include Minimal and process-based art of the sixties and seventies, film, video and moving image installation. She is responsible for building the Whitney’s collection of film and video installation works, single screen films and videotapes, and is a curator of the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Iles' recent exhibitions at the Whitney include Jack Goldstein: Films and Performance (2002); Riverrun, film projections on the Holland Tunnel ventilation building by Richard Serra, Yoko Ono, Peter Hutton and Colleen Mulrenan (2002, with Minetta Brook); Lorna Simpson: 31 (2002-03), and Flashing into the Shadows - The Artist’s Film after Pop and Minimalism 1966 - 1976 (2000-01, with Eric de Bruyn). She was a curator of The American Century, Art and Culture 1900 - 2000 Part II (1999-2000), and of Age of Anxiety at the Santa Monica Art Museum, as well as the 2002 Whitney Biennial. In 2001, Iles curated Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, a major, award-winning exhibition of historical film, video and slide installations, which is touring internationally. Forthcoming projects include the commissioning of Gregory Crewdson's first film. Iles is an adjunct Professor at Columbia University, and teaches regularly at institutions including Harvard, Yale, MIT and Oxford University. She is a Juror for the 2003 Turner Prize at Tate Britain, London. From 1988-1997, Iles was Head of Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, England. Her exhibitions there included surveys of the work of Yoko Ono (1997), Louise Bourgeois (1996), Marina Abramovic (1995), Donald Judd (1995), Gary Hill (1993), John Latham (1992), and Sol LeWitt (1991). Return to Top Richard Powell is an art historian, specializing in American art and the arts of the African Diaspora. He has been a member of Duke University’s Department of Art and Art History, Durham, North Carolina, since 1989 as John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History. He received a B.A. in fine arts from Morehouse College, a M.F.A. in printmaking from Howard University, and the M.Phil. and Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. Dr. Powell is the author of two books: Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991) and Black Art: A Cultural History (1997 & 2002). In addition, he is the sole (or principal) author of numerous exhibition catalogs, journal articles, and artist monographs, including The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989), Jacob Lawrence (1992), and Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997). His most recent exhibition publications are Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow (2002) and To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999), the latter co-authored with Jock Reynolds. Both exhibition catalogs accompany internationally traveling exhibitions. His current work-in-progress is a book on 19th century and 20th century images of peoples of African descent. Powell is a past recipient of two Ford Foundation Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, numerous Smithsonian Institution Fellowships and Grants, and a Fulbright Grant for Graduate Study Abroad, among other fellowships and grants. He is on the advisory boards of the North Carolina Central University Art Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Romare Howard Bearden Foundation. Return to Top Paul Schimmel has been Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, since 1990, prior to which he was Chief Curator/Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art) in Newport Beach, California (1981-89). He has organized such major exhibitions at MOCA as Helter Skelter: Los Angeles Art in the 1990s; Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62; Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish; Robert Gober; Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979; and Charles Ray. Major publications accompanied each of these shows. He initiated the Focus Series at MOCA, an ongoing series of small, one-person exhibitions for artists such as Jennifer Pastor, Franz West and Richard Wilson. He also organized the 2001 exhibition, Public Offerings, which examined formative works by artists who graduated from important art school programs in the U.S., Europe, and Japan during the 1990s. Recently, he co-organized Willem DeKooning: Works on Paper, which was on view at MOCA in 2002. He also is the curator of an exhibition of paintings by Laura Owens that is currently on view at LA MOCA. Schimmel has lectured in important art institutions throughout the world and has served as a National Endowment for the Arts panelist and was a recent recipient of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence. Return to Top Lydia Yee is Senior Curator at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City, where she has worked since 1992. At The Bronx Museum of the Arts, she has organized numerous exhibitions including Commodification of Buddhism (2003); One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art (2001, with Franklin Sirmans); Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s (1999, with Betti-Sue Hertz); Division of Labor: Women’s Work and Contemporary Art (1995), and Xu Bing: Recent Work (1994). She recently curated Music/Video, a video program presented in Vidéo Topiques (2002) at the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg. She has also worked as a freelance research assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1992) and was Curatorial Assistant for The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1991-92). Her essays and reviews have appeared in exhibition catalogues for the Biennale of Sydney, La Biennale di Venezia, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and in art publications, including Art Journal, Art on Paper, and Art and Asia Pacific. She is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Return to Top