Annual Leadership Series: Enacting Equality, Ending Racism with Sandra Jackson-Dumont

Image: Marie Watt, ‘Companion Species (Calling All My Relations)’, 2018, photographed by Edward Robison

4 PM EDT/ 3 PM CDT/ 1 PM PDT

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ArtTable’s Annual Leadership Series is dedicated to convening top voices in the arts to deeply explore the most pressing issues of our time. This year, Sandra Jackson-Dumont (Director and CEO, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art) moderates an essential conversation on race and equity in the art world with Suzy Delvalle (former Head of Creative Capital), Lisa Yancey (President, Yancey Consulting, LLC), and Marie Watt (artist). These inspirational visionaries will share their perspectives on systemic inequity and racism in the art world—as reflected in leadership roles, salary structure, fundraising priorities, and beyond—and discuss the meaningful changes they are spearheading to move the field toward equity and inclusion. 

ArtTable’s Annual Leadership Series presents a public forum featuring a distinguished roster of artists, change-makers, and leaders in our field to discuss relevant and emerging issues for those working in arts and culture. In the past, our speakers have included Thelma Golden, Christy Maclear, Monica O. Montgomery, Anne Pasternak, and many more.

How to take part!

1. Click the above link to register for this program.
2. Following registration, you will receive a Zoom link to dial into the program.
3. If you do not already have it, download the Zoom app for your computer or mobile device from Zoom’s Download Center and select the “Zoom Client for Meetings” option. Alternatively, you will be prompted to download and install Zoom when you click a Join link.
4. For further instruction on how to use Zoom, click here.

About Sandra Jackson-Dumont

Sandra Jackson-Dumont joined the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art as director and CEO in January 2020. Tasked with leading the institution through its opening and beyond, Jackson-Dumont came to the Lucas Museum from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she served as the Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education from 2014 to 2019.

At the Lucas Museum, Jackson-Dumont oversees wide-ranging programming and operational teams and will manage a staff of more than 230 by the time the museum opens. She leads the curatorial, museum experience, education, and collections management teams in exploring the extensive collection and developing exhibitions and programs for the museum’s extensive gallery and classroom spaces. The Lucas Museum broke ground in March 2018 in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, and Jackson-Dumont also works with the architecture and construction teams to bring architect Ma Yansong’s vision for the 11-acre campus and 300,000-square-foot building to life. Jackson-Dumont reports to the Lucas Museum’s board of directors.

Throughout her career, Jackson-Dumont has developed programming around museum collections and special exhibitions to engage a broad range of audiences, from school-age children and their teachers to artists and scholars. At The Met, Jackson-Dumont conceived of and managed an array of dynamic public programs, community engagement and academic initiatives, and live arts performances for diverse audiences. Jackson-Dumont also served for eight years as the deputy director for education and public programs and adjunct curator of modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). There, she oversaw educational public programs, interpretive technology, and community affairs across the museum’s three venues, as well as organized significant exhibitions and collaborative projects on the work of Theaster Gates, Titus Kaphar, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Sondra Perry, among others. Prior to that, Jackson-Dumont held positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other cultural organizations.

Known for her ability to blur the lines between academia, popular culture, and non-traditional art-going communities, Jackson-Dumont is invested in curating experiences that foster dynamic exchanges between art/artists, past/present, public/private, and people/places. She has organized numerous exhibitions, lectures, performances, symposia, and education initiatives and has contributed essays to a host of publications and worked with numerous artists.

About Suzy Delvalle

Susan (Suzy) Delvalle is a fierce advocate for art and artists. With over 20 years of leadership experience in the cultural sector, she has committed her career to enhancing the impact of mission-based organizations and building opportunity and equity in the arts. She most recently served as President and Executive Director of Creative Capital, an innovative arts nonprofit that adapts venture philanthropy concepts to support individual artists. Only the second Director in Creative Capital’s history, Suzy oversaw some of the most dramatic changes in the organization’s two-decade history. Under her leadership, Creative Capital increased its annual operating budget 20 percent by instituting a three-year fundraising cycle, further developed the board with ten new active members while also establishing a National Advisory Council, and expanded services to artists by instituting regular, annual Creative Capital Awards and retreats.

Suzy formerly served as the founding Director of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, where she oversaw all aspects of the development and opening of the museum. She previously served as Director of External Affairs and Development at El Museo Del Barrio, where she dramatically increased the museum’s budget and attendance over her eleven-year tenure. Before joining El Museo, she worked for American Composers Orchestra following a career in consumer banking and advertising. Suzy has served as adjunct faculty at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and is a guest lecturer at several universities. She serves on the Board of ArtTable, New Yorkers for Culture & Arts, The Laundromat Project and is a member of The Metropolitan Museum’s Advisory Committee in Culture Engagement. She was born and raised in Curaçao and speaks Spanish, Dutch, and Papiamento.

About Lisa Yancey

Recently coined a strategic maverick by a long-time colleague, Lisa Yancey is an organizational development consultant who specializes in strategic organizational planning, business planning, program evaluation and assessments, executive project management, revenue modeling, leadership coaching, and organizational structure assessments for nonprofit institutions. She is the President of Yancey Consulting, LLC, an organizational and leadership development consulting firm committed to unlocking, provoking, facilitating, and collaboratively imagining equitable social impacts on the local to national level™. Lisa advises a spectrum of practitioners, nonprofit organizations, philanthropists, and philanthropic institutions committed to dismantling inequities, enriching disinvested communities, building leadership, and amplifying diverse perspectives. She has worked with, facilitated, and provided pro bono services to over 100 organizations or grantmaking institutions in the past 19 years. She works across arts and culture, youth development, social justice, media justice, economic justice, and open internet sectors. As an entrepreneur, Lisa also advises emerging for-profit entities that are values-aligned with her equity-based values. Getting to know organizations personally to co-develop strategies, benchmark indicators, and measurable objectives is a hallmark of her work.

Lisa matriculated from both Boston College Law School and Emory University, respectively earning her Juris Doctorate and Bachelor of the Arts degrees. She used to be a professional dancer and choreographer and has been a member of the New York State Bar Association since 2000. She started her consultancy practice in 2001. Her professional ambition is to make meaningful differences that systemically elevate equity, particularly disrupting inequities that impact historically disinvested, underinvested or marginalized communities.

About Marie Watt

Marie Watt is an American artist and citizen of the Seneca Nation with German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.

Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University; she also has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and in 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University.

She has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Vermont Studio Center; and has received fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and the Ford Family Foundation and the Native Arts and Culture Foundation.

Marie serves on the board for VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) and on the Native Advisory Committee at the Portland Art Museum and in 2020 became a member of the Board of Trustees at the Portland Art Museum. She is a fan of Crow’s Shadow, an Indigenous founded printmaking institute located on the homelands of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, as well as
Portland Community College.

Selected collections include the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and Renwick Gallery, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum. She is represented by PDX
Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon, Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington, and Marc Straus Gallery in New York City, New York.