Studio Visits

Sarah Corona is an independent art professional based in New York. One of her main interests is to bring art into the public realm and to discover how technology affects art and culture, arousing that astonishment that is considered a fundamental ontological element for a work of art. She is the founder of SARAHCROWN Art Consulting, founder of the Art In Lobbies program, and specializes in private sales and business strategies in the arts. She co-founded ROOMSERVICE Gallery (2015–2017), a space for artistic and cultural production and critical discourse around the curatorial practice in Williamsburg, NY and opened her own gallery in Tribeca in the summer of 2021.

She has organized exhibitions at and consulted to private and public art galleries, not-for-profit organizations, art fairs, corporate environments, and co-working spaces as well as established active collaborations with New York based real estate developments forging the importance of art in the semi-public realm. Sarah Corona has curated extensive community-focused and public art exhibitions/festivals in the Bronx and Queens, in collaboration with New York based organizations, and initiated several pop-up galleries in vacant spaces downtown. She also developed the initial syllabus of the No Longer Empty Curatorial Lab, teaching emerging curators the art of exhibition making and critical thinking. Writing is another fundamental aspect of her practice. Sarah Corona has published numerous exhibition catalogs, essays, and +200 reviews about art and cultural events, on different international media outlets and in different languages. She also operates as lecturer and guest curator at New York-based arts organizations. Sarah Corona wrote her doctoral thesis about Chinese Contemporary Art (Alma Mater Bologna) after completing a MA in Communication and Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. In 2014, she successfully completed a professional program in Art and Business at NYU.

Jessica Hong is a curator and cultural worker who has dedicated her practice to highlighting under-recognized narratives and stimulating generational change within institutional sites. She is interested in rethinking curatorial practice to center the support of artists, mentorship, to build upon community, facilitate critical dialogues, while foregrounding collaboration, transparency, and equity.

Hong joined the Toledo Museum of Art in spring 2021 as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art where she is responsible for broadening art historical narratives and shaping a dynamic collection and exhibitions program. At the TMA, she has organized the premiere of Stan Douglas’s major film installation Doppelgänger in a U.S. institution and Living Legacies: Art of the African American South. In the lead-up to the Museum’s historic reinstallation, Hong has acquired key works by Huguette Caland, Jeffrey Gibson, Kerry James Marshall, Remedios Varo, among others. In 2022, she was awarded Toledo’s 20 Under 40, which recognizes leaders in the community. Prior to the TMA, she was the Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art and the first to fill this position on the occasion of the museum’s major expansion. In this inaugural role, she complicated the presumed temporal specificity of the “contemporary,” bridging collection areas across time and media in her exhibitions, to foster holistic understandings of our present. Hong made significant acquisitions for the HMA including works by Ho Tzu Nyen, Haegue Yang, and Zarina. Previously, she was Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she organized exhibitions including Arthur Jafa: Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2018) and the Boston presentation of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2018). During her tenure at the ICA, Hong organized and coordinated thirteen exhibitions along with corresponding publications, such as Huma Bhabha: They Live (2019), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st Century Naturalist (2018), and Liz Deschenes (2017). Before the ICA, she was part of the new Division of Modern and Contemporary Art that launched the renovated Harvard Art Museums. She was previously based in New York and held curatorial positions at Independent Curators International (ICI), SculptureCenter, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hong has written editorials and articles for BOMB Magazine, New England Museums Now, as well as Hood Museum, ICA/Boston, SculptureCenter, and Dartmouth publications. She was formerly ICI’s external evaluator for curatorial programs and has been a visiting lecturer at various academic institutions including Emerson College, Dartmouth College, Maryland College of Art, Lesley University, New York University, among others. Additionally, she continues to serve as a national critic and juror for numerous fellowships, awards, prizes, and residency programs and is a member of the U.S. Pavilion curatorial advisory committee for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Hong received her M.A. with Distinction in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and B.A. in art history from Barnard College, Columbia University, graduating Cum Laude and with Department Honors.

jessica-hong.com

Trained in architecture, informed by research and a keen eye on how materials and processes can be integral to concept development, H Lan Thao Lam’s practice reaches across a wide range of mediums and disciplines including object-making, installation, photography, film, video, writing and performance. Since 2001, they have been active as artist duo “Lin + Lam,” producing projects about archives, immigration, sites of residual trauma, national identity and historical memory. Their current projects investigate critical issues around toxicities, ecology, environmental racism, place-based knowledge and mythologies. They have been awarded commissions from the KW Berlin, Queens Museum and their work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues, including Busan Biennale, The Kitchen, The New Museum, NY; 3rd Guangzhou Triennial; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul, Korea; Taiwan International Documentary Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival; rum46, Denmark; Void Gallery, Ireland; Cold City Gallery and Lennox Contemporary, Toronto. They received grants and fellowships from Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, India China Institute and AICAD BIPOC Academic Leadership Institute, among others. Lam is faculty and Director of the MFA Fine Arts program at Parsons, The New School.

Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Costalegre (a GOOP book club pick and one of Glamour Magazine’s top books of the decade), I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and Touch (a New York Times Editor’s Choice and NPR Best Book of the Year selection), the Zibby Award-winning guidebook Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting, and surviving your first book, and the forthcoming memoir, The Year of the Horses. A nominee for the Joyce Carol Oates prize, Courtney’s short fiction and essays about creativity have been widely published in outlets such as The New York Times and Interview Magazine, her short story This is Not Your Fault was turned into an Audible original, and with her filmmaker husband, she has co-written films that have debuted at Sundance and won awards at Cannes. The executive director of the nonprofit learning collaborative, The Cabins, Courtney currently works as a writing coach and hosts the “Beyond the Writing of Fiction” conversation series through Edith Wharton’s storied home, The Mount.

Tracy McKenna is a bicoastal independent curator with recent shows at the Flinn Gallery (Greenwich, CT), Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, ME), and Rick Wester Fine Art (Chelsea, NYC). Tracy began her career in the arts with positions at Washington Project for the Arts, the Phillips Collection, and ICA Boston, and served on the board of Franklin Street Works (Stamford, CT). She has been a Visiting Critic for the Wassaic Project and NYC Crit Club, wrote a catalogue essay for The Landing (Los Angeles), and has moderated Artist Talks for galleries in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Tracy received her BA in Cultural Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, with a particular focus on pop culture. Before turning her attention to curating a decade ago, she coordinated artist-, dance-, and writer-in-residency programs for her local Title I elementary school; started a free weekly children’s art program at a library; and relocated internationally twice while raising two children.

Amy Smith-Stewart is Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Since 2013 she has organized forty-two exhibitions and projects at the Museum. Her unique perspective has brought artists to The Aldrich during important stages of their careers including first time solo museum presentations  with artists Milano Chow, Lucia Hierro, Genesis Belanger, Eva LeWitt, and Jessi Reaves, and survey shows with Jackie Winsor, Ruth Root, Suzanne McClelland, Harmony Hammond, and Karla Knight. Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art was named one of the best exhibitions of 2019 by the New York Times. The show traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum and was accompanied by the artist’s first monograph. Her current curatorial project is 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone (cocurated). It revisits the historic exhibition, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, curated by Lucy R. Lippard in 1971 and joins it with a new roster of twenty-six female identifying and nonbinary emerging artists to track the evolution of feminist art practices over half a century. Upcoming exhibitions include Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home; Raven Halfmoon co-organized with Rachel Adams at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; and Chiffon Thomas.

Smith-Stewart has organized more than eighty exhibitions in museums, collections, galleries, and temporary spaces. She is founder of the eponymous nomadic curatorial project, Smith-Stewart, previously located on the Lower East Side from 2007–2009. She began her career as a curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), where she mounted nineteen exhibitions and projects including first time solo museum presentations with artists Adrian Paci, Mika Rottenberg, Taryn Simon, and Aleksandra Mir, as well as group exhibitions including Day Labor and Greater New York 2005 (cocurated). From 2006–2007, she was a Curatorial Advisor for the Mary Boone Gallery, where she organized a series of group exhibitions introducing a new generation of artists to the Gallery. She has organized exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park and the Noguchi Museum and was the 2006–2008 Guest Curator for the Peter Norton Collection. She has served on faculty at the School of the Visual Arts, MFA Fine Arts department, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art MA Contemporary Art program. Her writing has appeared in books and catalogues published by Taschen, Gregory R. Miller & Co., Revolver Publishing, Bates College Museum of Art, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Charta, Perrotin, among others.

Ryan Turley is a New York based artist producing work that deals with issues relating to social conditions, sexuality, and politics. Turley has completed large-scale public artwork in New York, New Jersey and in Minnesota with a Jerome Foundation Fellowship Grant awarded by Franconia Sculpture Park. Ryan has shown in the United States and abroad.  He was named a finalist for the Chicago Transit Authority Public Art Project and has completed numerous residencies including The Bronx Museum, I-Park, Connecticut, and JustMad Residency in Spain.

Ryan is also the Director of Turley Gallery, in Hudson, NY. The gallery is focused on emerging and established artists, specifically those who push the boundaries of their respective mediums and create work that is fresh, relevant, and significant to the contemporary art world. Ryan is a working artist and understands the need for galleries to consider the art business from the artist’s perspective, while simultaneously navigating the challenge of operating a successful contemporary art gallery. Ryan founded and directed the program, Art Austerlitz, in upstate New York for the three years preceding the opening of Turley Gallery in late 2021. This program put a spotlight on contemporary artists from the Hudson Valley.

Brian Andrew Whiteley is a visual artist creating works that incorporate painting, sculpture, video, new media and performance. He is known for having had Justin Bieber sue him and for his political works the "Trump Tombstone" and “The Vladimir Putin Painting at Trump’s DC Hotel”, for being the original “creepy clown”, haunting cemeteries across the U.S. and for being the performer behind several urban Bigfoot sightings. He has also snuck his work into the Museum of Modern Art, proudly displaying it between the men’s and women’s bathrooms. His large-scale projects manifest themselves as interactive installations, incorporating several forms of media.

His work has been shown at experimental venues and larger institutions, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; The Invisible Dog, NYC; The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Spring / Break Art Show, NY; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago; The Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston; Satellite Art Show SXSW, Austin, TX; David Owsley Museum of Art, Indiana; Joshua Liner Gallery, NYC; Bushwick Open Studios, NYC; Art on Paper Fair, New York; and Bakehouse Art Center, Miami. Recent projects have garnered press from The New York Times, The NY Daily News, Village Voice, Daily Mail UK, Gothamist, Brooklyn Magazine, Art Net, BBC, Time, Esquire, GQ, Fox, ABC, NBC and NY Magazine, among many, many others.

He received his masters from the School of Visual Arts and his bachelors at Ball State University. Whiteley is widely heralded as the originator of the creepy clown pandemic that swept across the United States (soon to be a movie). Whiteley is also the founder of the artist-run fair entitled SATELLITE which takes place in Miami during Art Basel. The fair has received major accolades and has become a mainstay during Miami Art Week.