Heinz Aeschlimann
Panel: Patron: New Ideas in Emerging Artist Support
Heinz Aeschlimann is a Swiss artist and successful entrepreneur. His approach to both his business concerns and his artistic production is focused and directed, ensuring success and quality on both fronts.
Educated as civil engineer, since 1970 Aeschlimann has created numerous steel sculptures, ranging in size from small to monumental. The latter weigh in at several tons and are appear in many sculpture parks and famous collections. He has been invited by distinguished curators to participate in exhibitions in the USA, Europe and Asia.
In 2005, with his wife, he founded and began to manage Art-St-Urban, a unique art and cultural center in St. Urban, Lucerne, with an integrated Museum, sculpture park and projects for artist-in residence. He has received international recognition for his strong support and promotion of programs for young artists in art and music. He lives and works in Switzerland, in the towns of Zofingen, St. Urban, Stansstad and Monte Ceneri (Ticino).
Maggy Cuesta
Panel: Patron: New Ideas in Emerging Artist Support
Maggy Cuesta was born in Cuba and grew up in Texas, graduating from Texas Tech University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. She moved to Houston, Texas where she worked professionally, before receiving her Masters Degree in Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts [CalArts].
In 1988 Maggy relocated to Miami where she worked for a local firm before establishing a partnership in The Image Designers Group. She worked both professionally and as Associate Professor Senior at New World School of the Arts, until 2005 when she was named Dean of Visual Arts.
Janet Echelman
Panel: Keynote Speaker
Janet Echelman builds living, breathing sculpture environments that respond to the forces of nature -- wind, water and light -- and become inviting focal points for civic life. Exploring the potential of unlikely materials, from fishing net to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create her permanent sculpture at the scale of buildings. Experiential in nature, the result is sculpture that shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in.
Recent prominent works include: “Her Secret is Patience” spanning two city blocks in downtown Phoenix, “Water Sky Garden” which premiered for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, “She Changes” on the waterfront in Porto, Portugal, and "Every Beating Second" in San Francisco Airport's new Terminal Two.
Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Echelman was named Architectural Digest's 2012 Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.” Her TED talk "Taking Imagination Seriously" has been translated into 33 languages and is estimated to have been viewed by more than a million people worldwide. Janet Echelman is represented by the gallery CYNTHIA-REEVES.
Caoimhghin Ó Fráithile
Panel: The Art & Act of Making The Irish artist Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile (Quee-veen O Fra-ha-la) makes sculptures and drawings all over the globe—in Asia, Europe, and America. A reticent, monk-like personality, he maintains his peripatetic lifestyle by taking on residencies in different parts of the world.
Despite his wanderings and the temporary nature and sometime remote locations of his large-scale work, a geographically diverse group of critics is bringing his wooden structures and exquisite drawings to the attention of the international art world.
John Grade
Panel: Artist Talks
John Grade received his BFA from the Pratt Institute, NY in 1992, and has traveled extensively following his graduation, gaining critical exposure to the cultures and environments that have come to shape his artistic vision. Over the past decade, Grade has earned numerous grants and awards including the 2010 Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (NY), a Tiffany Foundation Award (NY), an Andy Warhol Foundation Award (NY), and two Pollock Krasner Foundation Grants (NY). He has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in the US and Europe and his work has been featured in Art in America, Sculpture, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Conde de Nast Traveler, Italian and Russian Domus and on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Studio 360”.
Grade’s perennial focus is on environmentally related works, often inspired and extracted from microscopic points of view, that range from monumental (interior and exterior) installations to a more intimate scale. Grade recently exhibited at Galerie Ateliers L'H Du Siege in France, Fabrica in the UK, and Cynthia Reeves Gallery in New York. He has been a fellow at the Djerassi Foundation (CA), the MacDowell Colony (NH), and the Ballinglen Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland. His 2013 installations for the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle and the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, will be followed by multi-location projects in Portland, OR and installations in Austin, TX, Jackson Hole, WY, Anchorage, AK and Paris, France. Two monographs of the artist’s work have been published coinciding with major museum surveys of his work.
CYNTHIA-REEVES represents John Grade on the East Coast. He has been exhibiting with the gallery since 2010. For more information, please visit http://cynthia-reeves.com/ny-artists/john-grade
Coral Lambert
Panel: The Art & Act of Making British Sculptor Coral Lambert, is Head of Sculpture at Alfred University, New York, where she also directs the National Casting Center Foundry. Born in the UK, she studied at Central School of Art, London, Canterbury College of Art, Kent and received her MFA in Sculpture from Manchester in 1990. She specialized in cast metal sculpture as an International Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota from 95 -98, the realm of metal casting has remained a consistent investigation in process and material ever since.
As a recipient of Awards from the Gottlieb, Jerome and Joan Mitchell Foundations, Lambert is recognized for working on an ambitious scale, international exhibitions include: ‘The Avant Garden’ at The Barbican Center, London, Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, ‘Convergence’ in Providence, ‘Grounds For Sculpture’, NJ, ‘Pier Walk’, Chicago, Salem Art Works, NY, Pirrkala in Finland, Huian China, The National Metals Museum, Memphis, Onsite Insite, Sloss Furnaces, ‘Nature Rules’, Governors Island, NY, The Scottish Sculpture Workshop and ‘IronStone’ at Kidwelly Castle, Wales. She is a member of the New York Sculptors Guild.
Kathyrn Mikesell
Panel: Patron: New Ideas in Emerging Artist Support
Kathryn Mikesell wears many hats. She’s a mother, wife, supporter of the arts and a technology consultant. She, along with her husband Dan and two children Galt and Skye, has been collecting art for over 15 years. In 2008, she and Dan founded The Fountainhead Residency, an artist residency program, the first of it’s kind, in the heart of Miami burgeoning art scene. Later that same year, they opened The Fountainhead Studios, providing low-cost, flexible studios to Miami based artists. To date the Fountainhead Residency has hosted over 200 artists from more than 20 countries. In addition to artists invited directly, the residency supports Miami’s alternative art spaces and museums by hosting artists and providing them a truly unique, “local’s” experience. After expanding the footprint four times, the Fountainhead Studios now provides workspace to more than 40 artists. Her personal goals through the Fountainhead are to create environments and opportunities for artists to improve their practice and thrive in the “business” of art, nuture Miami’s growing cultural community, and inspire people to collect and take up their own initiatives to support the arts.
Patricia C. Phillips
Panel: Reclaiming the Commons
Patricia C. Phillips’ research and writing involve contemporary public art,
architecture, sculpture, landscape, and the intersection of these areas. Her essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, Art in American, Flash Art, Sculpture, and Public Art Review, as well as books and collected essays published by Rizzoli International Publications, Princeton Architectural Press, M.I.T. Press, Actar Press, Bay Press, and Routledge. She is the author of Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working (New York: Prestel, 2011) and It is Difficult, a survey of the work of Alfredo Jaar (Barcelona: Actar Press, 1998). She recently completed essays on artists Mel Chin, Alfredo Jaar (for the 2013 Venice Biennale), and temporary public art for a forthcoming Companion to Public Art by Wiley Publishers.
Her curatorial and design projects include Disney Animators and Animation (Whitney Museum of Art, 1981), The POP Project (Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S. 1, 1988), and Making Sense: Five Installations on Sensation (Katonah Museum of Art, 1996.) In 1996, she curated City Speculations, a major exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art. She is the editor of City Speculations (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
From 2002-2007, she was Editor-in-Chief of the Art Journal, a quarterly on contemporary art published by the College Art Association.
She was appointed Dean of Graduate Studies at Rhode Island School of Design in August 2009.
Brandi Reddick
Panel: Reclaiming the Commons
Brandi Reddick is an arts administrator, curator and art historian with fifteen years of professional experience working in nationally and internationally recognized arts organizations.
Since 2003, Ms. Reddick has served as the Curator and Visual Artists Manager for Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She has overseen the commissioning process for multi-million dollar, highly integrated works of public art, including artworks for the Miami Marlins Stadium, PortMiami, Zoo Miami, Jackson Memorial Hospital and Miami International Airport, among other public institutions. She has contributed essays on public art, emerging and mid-career artists to exhibition catalogues and other publications including “From Vision to Reality: Public Art at the Arsht Center of Performing Arts” (2006); “Selections from the Miami-Dade County Public Art Collection” (2010); and “New Art in New Public New Places”, which accompanied an exhibition she curated at the ArtCenter South Florida (2011).
In addition to her work in public art, Ms. Reddick oversees professional development opportunities for visual artists and directs the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship Program for Visual and Media Artists, an annual program which offers the largest regional, government-sponsored artists’ grants in the United States. From 2006-2009 she was the curator of The Art Gallery at Government Center, an exhibition space dedicated to showing the work of Miami based artists
Brandi Reddick received her B.A in Art History from the College of Charleston and completed graduate coursework in Art History and Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has been adjunct lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami and has presented lectures on public art at state-wide and international conferences, including The International Symposium on Public Art in Taipei, Taiwan: Hocus Pocus, MARTE Contemporary in San Salvador, El Salvador and the Florida Association of Public Art Administrators.
Tamsie Ringler The Art & Act of Making
Tamsie Ringler works in the environmental and populist traditions of public art. Her installations and sculptures integrate process, space and viewer; as elements and witnesses. Through iron casting, video, and interactive works she fuses public spectacle with the production of contemplative spaces and objects. Recent projects explore our relationship with land and the environmental impact of our hunger for natural resources. These explorations focus on connections between the materials of sculpture and industry and between our daily lives and petro-chemical landscapes.
Tamsie Ringler studied Art at the University of Wisconsin and received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin. Currently she teaches Sculpture at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She serves on the Board of Directors of Franconia Sculpture Park and leads their annual Community + Collaboration Hot Metal Pour. She is serving as Co-Director of the 7th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art to be held at the Pedvale Open-Air Art Museum in Latvia in 2014. Her work can be seen at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, Touhy Park and Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park in Chicago and on the MAX Light Rail System in Portland, Oregon.
Ursula von Rydingsvard
Panel: Artist Talks
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who has been working in Brooklyn, New York, for over 30 years. Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces.
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculpture is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, three awards from the American section of the International Association of Art Critics, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011, a monograph by Patricia Phillips was published on her work, and the Sculpture Center in NYC presented a survey of her sculpture, which was named “Best Show in a Non-Profit Space” by AICA-USA. Her current projects include commissions for a Princeton University complex designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, a permanent outdoor sculpture in front of the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington DC, and an outdoor sculpture for the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. April 3, 2014 will be the opening of a retrospective exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England.
Dennis Scholl
Panel: Patron: New Ideas in Emerging Artist Support
Dennis Scholl is the Vice President / Arts for the Knight Foundation. He oversees the foundation's national arts program, including the Knight Arts Challenge and Random Acts of Culture. He is well known as a collector of contemporary art for over three decades.
Dennis is also the founder of a series of initiatives dedicated to building the contemporary art collections of museums, including the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern and the Miami Art Museum. He is a three time regional Emmy winner for his work in cultural documentaries. Dennis is also the co-founder of Betts and Scholl, an award winning wine project.
In 2012, he was a Harvard University Advanced Leadership Fellow, focusing on the role of culture in community engagement. Dennis is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. Previously, he was a practicing attorney and CPA.
Magnus Sigurdarson
Panel: The Art & Act of Making
Sigurdarson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1966 and currently lives in Miami, Florida. He attended The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavik, Iceland (1992, BFA in Mixed Media) and Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (1997, MFA). He is a Fulbright Scholarship Recipient with multiple grants and awards on his Resume. His performances and Video works have been on display at venues like, MoMA PS1 and The New Museum, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, N Miami. His works are included in the collections of; Collezione La Gaia, Busca, Italy, The Icelandic National Gallery, Reykjavik, and the private collections of Emmanuel Javouge, Miami, Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami Beach to name but a few.
Jason deCaires Taylor
Panels: Artist Talks Born in 1974 to an English father and Guyanese mother, Jason deCaires Taylor grew up in Europe and Asia, where he spent much of his early childhood exploring the coral reefs of Malaysia. Educated in the South East of England, Taylor graduated from the London Institute of Arts in 1998 with a BA Honours in Sculpture and went on to become a fully qualified diving instructor and underwater naturalist. With over 17 years diving experience under his belt, Taylor is also an award winning underwater photographer, famous for his dramatic images, which capture the metamorphosing effects of the ocean on his evolving sculptures.
In 2006, Taylor founded and created the world’s first underwater sculpture park. Situated off the coast of Grenada in the West Indies it is now listed as one of the Top 25 Wonders of the World by National Geographic. His latest creation is MUSA (Museo Subacuatico de Arte), a monumental museum with a collection of over 486 of his sculptural works, submerged off the coast of Cancun, Mexico; described by Forbes as one of the world’s most unique travel destinations. Both these ambitious, permanent public works have a practical, functional aspect, facilitating positive interactions between people and fragile underwater habitats while at the same relieving pressure on natural resources.
Mel Ziegler
Panel: Reclaiming the Commons Widely known for his collaborative work with his late partner Kate Ericson, Mel Ziegler was integral to the emergence of social and integrated practice and community engagement as vital forms of contemporary art. Ziegler is the current chair of the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. America Starts Here, the Ericson Ziegler retrospective, was co-organized by the The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and List Visual Arts Center at MIT and toured the country. Ziegler has presented solo exhibitions at venues including Secession, Vienna; Artpace, San Antonio; and Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal.
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts opens exhibition of new works and projects by Mel Ziegler on September 19, 2013. The exhibition brings together multiple recent works that occupy a continuum of cultural hierarchies and connect subjects including the American flag, guns, agricultural landscapes and rural life. In the broadest sense, Ziegler's work asserts the value of rural identities and aesthetics and aims to locate authentic spaces within the increasingly fragmented American experience.
