Curatorial

Cheryl Haines

Principal of Haines Gallery and Founding Executive Director of the FOR-SITE Foundation

For more than 30 years, Cheryl Haines has developed exhibitions and site-specific public programs that have exposed new audiences to contemporary art and advanced the discourse surrounding what she describes as “art about place.” Through the FOR-SITE Foundation and her gallery, Haines presents provocative exhibitions by artists working across a wide range of media, as well as public, site-specific commissions on a national scale.

In 2003, Ms. Haines established the FOR-SITE Foundation to foster the creation, presentation, and public understanding of place-based art...

Raquel Gutiérrez

Critic, Essayist, Poet, Performer, and Educator

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez's first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic...

Talinn Grigor

Professor of Art History Modern, Contemporary Global Architecture, and Art Critical and (post)Colonial Theory at UC Davis

Talinn Grigor’s research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art and architectural histories through the framework of postcolonial and critical theories, grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, and Parsi India. Her books include a winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies, The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture (Penn State Univ., 2021); Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (Reaktion, 2014); and Building Iran: Modernism,...

Benjamin Grant

City Planner, Urban Designer, Curator, Teacher

Benjamin Grant is a city planner, urban designer, curator and teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent over a decade at SPUR, the urban policy research organization, where he served as Urban Design Policy Director, leading research on physical planning, public space and urban design.

He is the author of numerous reports and studies on subjects that include retrofitting suburbs for walkability, the innovation-sector workplace, accommodating regional growth, and managing public open space. He led the development and implementation of the...

Cross Sector Conference

Open Engagement Pre-conference | CROSS-SECTOR Thursday, April 28, 2016, 10am to 6pm Friday, April 29, 2016, 10am to 1:30pm The Magnes Collection, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Accessible from the Downtown Berkeley BART station CROSS-SECTOR pre-conference will be free and open to the public. Kindly REGISTER here for the plenary talks, break-out sessions, and closing lecture so we can track attendance.

Rita Gonzalez

Curator, Author, Media Artist, Head of the Contemporary Art Department at LACMA

Rita Gonzalez is the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she has curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection; Agnés Varda in Californialand, In Production: Art and the Studio System, Christian Marclay: Sound Stories, among other exhibitions and programs. Gonzalez...

Mark Godfrey

Art Historian, Critic, Former Curator at Tate Modern

Mark Godfrey is an art historian and curator based in London. From 2007 to 2021 he was senior curator of international art at Tate Modern, London, where he curated and co-curated retrospectives of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Alighiero Boetti, Franz West, and others, as well as the acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. He is currently working on projects with Anicka Yi, Laura Owens, and Jacqueline Humphries.

Lori Fogarty

Director & CEO of the Oakland Museum of California

Lori Fogarty is the Director and CEO of the Oakland Museum of California, a multidisciplinary museum that brings together collections of art, history and natural sciences to tell the extraordinary stories of California and its people. Since 2006, Lori has worked to oversee and guide all Museum programmatic and administrative operations and has transitioned OMCA from a public/private cultural institution supported by the City of Oakland and the Oakland Museum of California Foundation to an independent non-profit organization with an innovative new organizational structure....

Deborah Fisher

Executive Director at A Blade of Grass

Deborah Fisher is the founding Executive Director of A Blade of Grass, and a strategic and philanthropic advisor to Shelley and Donald Rubin. She also currently serves on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism.

Fisher is a practicing artist and creative leader working to expand the roles art and artists play within communities. She has worked in many capacities at the intersection of art and civic life in New York City, including as studio manager at Socrates Sculpture Park, and as an educator and curriculum developer for the Brooklyn Center for the Urban...

Courtney Fink

Former Executive Director of Southern Exposure, Organizer, Arts Advocate, Curator, Writer
Courtney Fink (she/her) works in the expanded field of nonprofit leadership as a steadfast champion of visual artists and the organizations that center and support them. Her hybrid practice merges creative process with strategic implementation and is informed by responsive open source frameworks as models for exchange, connection, collaboration, and shared experience. Fink’s mission is to establish equitable access to ideas and projects in which artists and experimental platforms are positioned to manifest social change.

For 30 years Courtney has employed a...