PAST GUESTS

Leonardo Drew is know for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materias such as wood, scrap, metal and cotton to articulate various overlapping themes with emotional gravitas: from the cyclical nature of life and decay to the erosion of time. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the labored process of writing oneself into history.

Drew’s works have been shown internationally and are included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and Tate, London.

Drew was commissioned for a new outdoor project for Madison Square Park in summer 2019, marking the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s 38th public commission and the artist’s first major public art project. Recent solo museum exhibitions include shows at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2013); Beeler Gallery at the Columbus College of Art & Design (2013); Palazzo Delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy (2006); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2000). Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009, and  traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Drew was born in 1961 in Tallahassee, Florida, and he grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

SOPHIE HUBER, Switzerland-born Huber, who reaped much acclaim in 2012 for Partly Fiction, her vivid and informal portrait of actor/musician Harry Dean Stanton, traces the label from its birth in 1939 – when German-Jewish immigrants and jazz enthusiasts, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, started the company – up until the present day. The film’s narrative is told via a combination of music, imagery (Blue Note had a strong visual identity, thanks to Francis Wolff’s photographs and Reid Miles’ cover designs) and talking-head contributions from musicians and people associated with the label. These include jazz grandees Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who joined the label in the early 60s; 90-year-old Lou Donaldson, whose affiliation with the company goes back to the late 40s; the late Rudy Van Gelder, the audio engineer who helped to establish the Blue Note sound; the label’s current president, producer Don Was; and some of the company’s current roster, including Robert Glasper, Norah Jones, Ambrose Akinmusire and Marcus Strickland.

MIAO XIAOCHUN was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. In 1986 he received his bachelor’s degree and graduated from Nanjing University. In 1989 Miao graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China and from Kassel Academy of Fine Arts in Germany in 1999 for two master’s degrees. Until now he is teaching Art Photography and Digital Media at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

He is best known for his large scale photographs, often assembled panoramas, of modern Chinese cityscapes. His signature element is the presence of “He”, a figure in ancient Chinese scholar costume. Other works include computer graphics installations such as The Last Judgement in Cyberspace, a 3D monochrome reworking of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment from the Sistine Chapel replacing every figure with a virtual model of Miao himself.

Miao Xiaochun is considered one of the most representative and influential artists In the domain of China’s new media art. He started in 90s his creative explorations on the interface between the real and the virtual. His extensive body of work includes photography, painting and 3D computer animation which are parallel to each other. He works in contemporary photography based on the “multiple view point” perspective to pioneer connections between history and the modern world.

Miao Xiaochun successfully uses 3D technology to create upon a 2D image a virtual 3D scene, to transform a still canvas into moving images, concurrently changing the traditional way of viewing paintings and giving a completely new interpretation and significance to a masterpiece of art, especially with the striking use of his idiosyncratic imagination about history and the future. His works add an important example to contemporary negotiations with art history, and open up new potential for art as he experiments with new possibilities, taking a step forward into new potential spheres.

His photographic and 3D animation works such as The Last Judgment in Cyberspace, H2O, Microcosm, Restart and Disillusion as well as his digital ink painting series “Beijing Handscroll”are worldwide exhibited.

LAURA PHILLIPS “LAURIE” ANDERSON (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, making particular use of language, technology, and visual imagery.She became widely more known outside the art world in 1981 when her single “O Superman” reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

Anderson  was married to musician Lou Reed from 2008 until his death in 2013.

RITA DOLORES MORENO (born December 11, 1931) is a Puerto Rican-American actress and singer. Her career has spanned over 70 years; she notably appeared in the 1961 film West Side Story, as well as a 1971-1977 stint on the children’s television series The Electric Company. Moreno is one of twelve performers to have won all four major annual American entertainment awards: an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony She has also won numerous other awards, including various lifetime achievement awards.

Moreno’s Broadway credits include Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), the very short-lived musical Gantry (1970) and The Ritz, for which she won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress. She appeared in Chicago in the female version of The Odd Couple, for which she won the Sarah Siddons Award in 1985. In 2006, she portrayed Amanda Wingfield in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s revival of The Glass Menagerie. In September 2011, Moreno began performing a solo autobiographical show at the Berkeley Rep (theater) in Berkeley, California, Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup written by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone after hours of interviews with Moreno.

Moreno acted steadily in films throughout the 1950s, usually in small roles, including in The Toast of New Orleans (1950) and Singin’ in the Rain(1952), in which she played the starlet “Zelda Zanders”. In March 1954, Moreno was featured on the cover of Life Magazine with the caption “Rita Moreno: An Actress’s Catalog of Sex and Innocence”. In 1956, Moreno had a supporting role in the film version of The King and I as Tuptim, but disliked most of her other work during this period. In 1961, Moreno landed the role of Anita in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ film adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s and Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking Broadway musical, West Side Story, which had been played by Chita Rivera on Broadway. Moreno won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for that role.

DERRICK ADAMS is a multidisciplinary New York-based artist working in performance, video, sound and 2D and 3D realms.  His practice focuses on the fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface, exploring self image and forward projection. A recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and 2014 S.J. Weiler Award, Adams received his MFA from Columbia University, BFA from Pratt Institute, and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alum. His exhibition and performance highlights include: Greater New York ’05, MoMA PS1; Open House: Working In Brooklyn ’04, Brooklyn Museum of Art; PERFORMA ‘05, ‘13, ‘15; Radical Presence & The Shadows Took Shape, Studio Museum in Harlem; The Channel, Brooklyn Academy of Music; and is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. His work can be seen in New York at Tilton Gallery; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Gallerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

Andres Caballero is a public radio producer and filmmaker based in New York. He is a former producer at NPR’s Latino USA, StoryCorps and is an NPR/Above the Fray fellow. He co-directed GAUCHO DEL NORTE (2015), an observational documentary that follows the journey of a Patagonian immigrant sheepherder recruited to work in the American west. He is a 2016 MacArthur Documentary Grant recipient for THE INTERPRETER.

JILL NEWHOUSE is the fourth generation of her family to be an art dealer. She was a founding member and past President of the Private Art Dealers Association (PADA) and since 1999, a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), currently serving on board of the ADAA Foundation. Jill is a member of the Visiting Committee of the Dept. of Prints and Drawings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and of The Morgan.

Gallery director Christa Savino joined the gallery in 2004, after five years of experience as manager of an important paper conservation studio in New York City. Liliya Lifanova, associate director, joined in 2015.

JNG has sold many important works to major collectors and to important museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Louvre Museum, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; and many others.