STATE OF THE ARTS

Photo by Will Vaultz
Hosted by Savona Bailey-McClain

NYC’ s creative industries have exploded over the last decade. But this growth has benefited just a few museums, galleries and auction houses. This special broadcast will discuss what is needed to sustain a vast array of performance and visual arts professionals jockeying high rents, high marketing cost , bureaucracy and fragmented audiences.

HOST

SAVONA BAILEY-MCCLAIN currently lives and works in New York City. She is an independent curator and producer. The range of McClain’s practice has included sculpture, drawings, performance, sound, and mixed media. McClain is the Executive Director & Chief Curator for The West Harlem Art Fund, Inc. a seventeen year old public art organization and curatorial collective serving neighborhoods around the City. Her public art installations have been seen in the New York Times, Art Daily, Artnet, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post among others. McClain has installed works in Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island and Harlem. Noted works include The H in Harlem, Counting Sheep, Story Piles, East River Flows and Loosely Coupled. McClain is now developing new digital installations and location-based interventions using a tour platform. McClain is a member of Independent Curators International and Arttable.

GUESTS

ADAM FORMAN is a Senior Researcher at the Center for an Urban Future, an urban policy think tank. He has authored several reports for the Center, on topics ranging from the arts economy to city infrastructure. His reports and op-eds have appeared in local and national media outlets including The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, New York Daily News and New York Post. Adam has previously worked at the NYC Public Advocate’s Office and as a freelance writer. He received his BA from Colgate University in economics and an MA in political science from the University of Washington. Adam currently lives in Brooklyn.

TIM TOMPKINS has been the President of the Times Square Alliance since 2002. He is a former Co-Chair of the NYC BID Association and a member of the IDA Board. Prior to joining the Alliance, he was the Founder and Director of Partnerships for Parks, which works to support New York City’s neighborhood parks and which won an Innovations in Government Award from the JFK School of Government at Harvard for its work to restore the Bronx River. He has also worked at New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, The New York City Charter Revision Commission, and was briefly the Nationals Editor at the Mexico City News, an English language newspaper in Mexico. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale and an M.B.A. from Wharton, and currently teaches “Transforming the Urban Economy” and “The Arts and Artist in Urban Revitalization” at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. When not in the most urban and unnatural place on the planet, he enjoys being in New York’s natural areas, ideally sailing or practicing yoga.

SHERRY DOBBIN is the Creative Director & Director of Times Square Arts at the Time Square Alliance. Since February 2012, she has developed programs for Times Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas, popular venues, and online platforms. Ms. Dobbin brings over 20 years international experience across performance and visual arts, and art in the public realm, where she has worked as producer, administrator, consultant and curator. Prior to Times Square, she was the Director of Robert Wilson’s The Watermill Center and a Project Director of arts-led regeneration throughout London and Eastern UK. Ms. Dobbin sits on advisory and review panels for cross-disciplinary arts organizations, including PULSE Advisory Committee, The Laundromat Project, Eyebeam and Open House New York, and co-teaches “The Arts & Artist in Urban Revitalization” at the NYU Robert F Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

As founding Artistic Director of CultureHub, BILLY CLARK has overseen the development of CultureHub’s artistic, education, and community programs since its inception in 2009. At CultureHub, he has overseen and curated over 300 events featuring more than 100 artists from over 35 countries. With the CultureHub team, he has curated the annual Media Arts Festival, Refest, which showcases the artists working at the intersection of art and technology in a three-day, all ages festival each year. He directed and co-designed visual elements for Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky’s piece Seoul Counterpoint, which premiered at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2013. Seoul Counterpoint was subsequently presented in conjunction with Asia Society’s exhibition, Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot in October 2014. For the La MaMa Galleria, he co-curated Mediated Motion, an exhibit of works that explored how video and new media technologies alter human movement and our perception of the body in motion, and featured works by Whitney V. Hunter, Nina Waisman, Lisa Parra, and others. For the annual La MaMa Moves! Festival of contemporary dance, Clark curated & directed Digital Duets, an evening of partnered dances performed  in real time on two continents in an interactive environment.

NEIL GAGLIARDI, ASLA, is the Director of Urban Design at the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) where he offers more than 25 years of interdisciplinary design and planning experience. During his six-year tenure at NYCDOT, he has spearheaded design initiatives that foster pedestrian-friendly, visually-appealing and sustainable streetscapes, public spaces and transportation corridors citywide. Mr. Gagliardi’s international achievements and versatile project portfolio ranges from neighborhood zoning and design plans in Queens to a transformative, art-in-action, redevelopment projects in a favela of Rio de Janeiro. Forming the foundation of his career are postgraduate degrees in landscape architecture and urban planning.

SCHEREZADE GARCIA was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. As a child she became involved in the arts by participating in projects that involved mural painting with visual artists Elias Delgado and Nidia Serra. She studied at Altos de Chavon; The School of Design/ affiliated to Parsons School of Design. In 1986, she moved to New York as a student at Parsons School of Design, where she obtained the Parsons Institutional Scholarship and the Dana Foundation Work Grant. Her work as a fine arts artist has been continuously exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean since 1990. Among the museums and galleries that have exhibited her work are the Newark Museum, The Jersey City Museum, and El Museo del Barrio in NYC, Lehman College Art Gallery and The Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo, DR.