CANCELED: ANNUAL BENEFIT & AWARD CEREMONY⎪Honoring Susan Unterberg

Your health and the health of our supporters is important to us. It is with a heavy heart that we have decided to cancel this year’s annual benefit and award ceremony.

This is a signature ArtTable event that we look forward to each year as an opportunity to bring our network together from around the world celebrating the women who make a difference in the art world.

The excitement around this year’s event in celebration of our 40th anniversary as well as our honoree Susan Unterberg and our awardees Wassan Al-Khudairi, Erin Christovale, Lauren Haynes and Jami Powell has been incredible. These women are an inspiration to us all.

Consider supporting ArtTable today. Every dollar counts to help us support women in the visual arts. 

               ArtTable Benefit and Award Ceremony Honorary Benefit Co-Chairs:

Susan K. Freedman

Lowery Stokes Sims

Barbara Tober

ArtTable Benefit  Journal: Ad Deadline Extended to April 3!

We are still planning to share our Annual Benefit Journal with our members + friends digitally. This a wonderful opportunity to show your support for our honorees or promote your business and services. See the link below for journal rates and sizes!

Journal advertising rates

For more information please contact Jonquil Schaller-Harris at jharris@arttable.org

Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts Press Release

New Leadership Awards Press Release

2019 Gala Highlights

For more information on making a donation or program ad sales please email jharris@arttable.org

ArtTable is a 501(c)(3) organization. All programs are non-refundable.

            Honorees + Presenter Bios 

2020 Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts Honoree

Susan Unterberg is a New York–based photographer and philanthropist whose poetic photographic and video work explores the psychological complexities of intimate relationships, especially familial ones, as well as nature and broader political themes. She was represented by Lawrence Miller Gallery, and later Yancey Richardson Gallery, and her work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and abroad at such institutions as the New Museum, International Center of Photography, and Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Unterberg is represented in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Jewish Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artists Program, American Academy in Rome, and Bogliasco. In 2019, she was awarded NYU’s Distinguished Alumni Award, as well as being honored at the Skowhegan Awards Dinner. In 2018, Unterberg stepped forward as the founder and sole funder of the Anonymous Was A Woman award, which awards 10 unrestricted $25,000 grants to women-identifying artists over the age of 40.

2020 New Leadership Awardees

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) in St. Louis where she organized Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, Bethany Collins: Chorus, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Eartwitness Theatre, Guan Xiao: Fiction Archive Project, Hayv Kahraman: Acts of Reparation, Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Re-Evolving Door to the Moundverse, and SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte. Prior to her position at CAM, Al-Khudhairi was the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art where she organized the first large-scale exhibition of the museum’s contemporary collection, Third Space/shifting conversations about contemporary art. She was invited to be a curator for the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan in 2017 and co-artistic director for the 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea in 2012. Serving as the founding director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Al-Khudhairi oversaw the opening of the museum in 2010 and co-curated Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab.

Erin Christovale is associate curator at the Hammer Museum and co-founder of Black Radical Imagination with Amir George. Notable exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Memoirs of a Watermelon Woman (2016), and A Subtle Likeness (2016), both at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the critically acclaimed Made in L.A. 2018 (2018) with Anne Ellegood, and belonging (2019) at the Hammer Museum.

Lauren Haynes is the curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and curator of visual arts at the Momentary in Bentonville, AR. Haynes was co-curator of the 2018 Crystal Bridges’s exhibition The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art and is co-curator of the 2019 exhibition Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today. Haynes is currently leading the curatorial team working on the exhibition State of the Art, which opened at both Crystal Bridges and Momentary in February 2020. Prior to joining Crystal Bridges in October 2016, Haynes spent nearly a decade at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As a specialist in African-American contemporary art, Haynes curated dozens of exhibitions at the Studio Museum and contemporary art institutions in New York. Haynes was a 2018 Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow. Haynes is co-curator of the inaugural Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art taking place across Tennessee in 2021.

Jami Powell is the Hood Museum’s first associate curator of Native American art and was recently appointed as a lecturer in Native American Studies at Dartmouth. Powell is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to working at the Hood, she was a faculty lecturer at Tufts University. She has also worked as a research assistant at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, was a Mellon Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum, and has conducted research projects at the Field Museum of Natural History and the Denver Art Museum. Powell’s research examines representations of Indigenous peoples in museums as well as the interventions contemporary Indigenous artists make through creative acts of self-representation. Powell is currently working on a book manuscript from her dissertation titled Stitching an Osage Future: Aesthetic Resistance and Self-Representation. She has also published articles in Museum Anthropology, Panorama, Museum Management, and Curatorship, and is an editorial advisor for First American Art Magazine. Powell has served on curatorial advisory boards for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University. She is currently working on several exhibitions including Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) Dartmouth, and This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World.

Presenters

Amy Sherald was born in 1973 in Columbus, GA, Sherald documents contemporary African-American experience in the U.S. through arresting, otherworldly portraits. Sherald subverts the medium of portraiture to tease out unexpected narratives, inviting viewers to engage in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate black heritage centrally in the story of American art. Sherald received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and her BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University (1997). She was the first woman and first African-American ever to receive first prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; in February 2018, the museum unveiled her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Sherald has also received the 2018 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the 2018 Pollock Prize for Creativity, and the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman grant. Her solo exhibition “Heart of the Matter” opened at Hauser &Wirth in NYC in September 2019. Alongside her painterly practice, Sherald has worked for almost two decades alongside socially-committed creative initiatives, including teaching art in prisons and art projects with teenagers.

Shinique Smith is known for her monumental artworks of bundled fabric and gestural calligraphy that resonate on a spiritual and social scale which have been featured in acclaimed exhibitions such as Revolution in the Making: Women Abstract Sculptors 1940-2016; 30 Americans: Rubell Family Collection; UnMonumental: The Object in the 21st Century; New Museum, and Frequency; Studio Museum in Harlem. Smith’s works are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and Whitney Museum among others. She earned her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, where Smith was awarded the Alumni Medal of Honor (2012).