Biographies

*more informal information and links to participant's websites is available on the blog.

Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni was born on January 19, 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA in 1986 from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. She received the MacArthur Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Inc. Painting and Sculpture Grant in 1998, and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999. Antoni has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad at venues including Luhring Augustine Gallery, The Wadsworth Athenaeum, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Reina Sofia, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Aldrich Museum. Her work was included in the 1993 Venice Biennial, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, the 2000 Kwangju Biennial in Korea, SITE Santa Fe in 2002 and she will be included in the forthcoming Prospect.1 A Biennial for New Orleans.

Leslie King-Hammond

Leslie King-Hammond was born in the South Bronx and grew up in South Jamaica and Hollis-Queens, New York and educated in the New York City public education system.  She won a full stipend-tuition scholarship awarded under the SEEK Grant (Search for Education, Evaluation, and Knowledge) at the City University of New York, Queens College (BFA degree, 1966-69). In 1969 she attended The Johns Hopkins University under a Horizon Fellowship for doctoral studies in art history. In 1973, she began to teach the art history courses at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In 1976, she completed the Ph.D. was appointed Dean of Graduate Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art where she administers 200 students in eleven degree programs. She maintains a constant teaching schedule in the Art History Department.  In 2008 she retired to become Graduate Dean Emeritus and was appointed the Founding Director of the new Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She received Mellon Grants for Faculty Research in 1988, 1989, and 2005. In 1985, she won the Trustee Award for Excellence in Teaching. As a member of the “Girls of Baltimore,” she won an NEA artist grant in 2001. In the spring of 2006 King-Hammond was appointed Chairperson of the Collections and Exhibits Committee at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture and in January 2007 became the Chairperson of the Board of the Lewis Museum. She also sits on the Board of the Creative Alliance for the Artists, Baltimore, MD.

Between 1985 and 1998, King-Hammond became the project director for Ford/Phillip Morris Fellowships for Artists of Color at MICA (including Yale School of Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and California Institute of the Arts). She sits on juries, boards, organizations, and art commissions including Executive Board, International Association of Art Critics (2000-2003); President, College Art Association (1996-2000); Board of Overseers, Baltimore School for the Arts (1996-1999); Vice-President, Jacob Lawrence Catalog Riasonne Project; Trustee, Baltimore Museum of Art (1981-1987); Center For Emerging Artists (2005-2007); Advisory Board, Edna Manley School for the Visual Arts, Kingston, Jamaica (1988-Present).

Major exhibitions and publications include Celebrations:  Myth and Ritual in African American Art (Studio Museum in Harlem, 1982); The Intuitive Eye (The Maryland Art Place, 1985); Art as a Verb (The Maryland Institute College of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Met Life Gallery, 1988); Black Printmakers and the WPA (Lehman Gallery of Art, New York, 1989); Masters, Mentors, and Makers, Artscape ’92 (The Maryland Institute College of Art Decker Gallery, 1992); Gumbo Ya Ya; An Anthology of Contemporary African American Women Artists (Midmarch Arts Press, 1995); Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors:  A Study in Paradox; Vice-President and essayist for the Jacob Lawrence Catalog Riasonné Project, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (University of Washington Press, 2000); Sugar and Spice: The Art of Bettye Saar (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2003); “Aminah Robinson: Aesthetic Realities/Artistic Vision” in The Art of Aminah Robinson (Columbus Museum of Art, 2003); and “Inner Being/Altered States: Painting the Life-Worlds of Beverly McIver’s Realities” in The Many Faces of Beverly McIver (40 Acres Gallery, 2004). Forthcoming is the Life and Work of Hughie Lee-Smith, (2008) Pomegranate Press.

King-Hammond has won Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Studio Museum in Harlem (2002), Lifetime Service, Maryland Institute College of Art (2005), The DuBois Circle (2006). In 2008 received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Women’s Art Caucus-College Art Association and the James A. Porter Colloquium, Howard University and a Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellowship.

Saul Ostrow

Saul Ostrow is Chair of Visual Arts and Technologies at The Cleveland Institute of Art. Before accepting this position in 2003, he was  Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Director of the Center of Visual Arts and Culture and Coordinator for the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Master  Artists and Scholars Institute at the University of Connecticut.   Before joining the University of Connecticut I was the graduate thesis advisor in the NYU MFA program where since 1989  he had taught courses in  critical theory and contemporary art history.  From 1995-2001 he was  the Editor  of  book series Critical Voices  in Art, Theory and Culture published by G+B Arts International, this series has since been purchased by Routledge for whom he continues to edit it.  Books  in this series were on or by Arthur Danto, Marshall McLuhan, Freidrich Kittler, Griselda Pollack, Stephen Melville, Jonathan Katz, Moira Roth, Mark Poster, Stanley Aronowitz, Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, David Carrier and two books edited by Richard Woodfield respectively on the work of Alois Riegl and Aby Warburg. 

Prof. Ostrow is Art Editor for Bomb Magazine (a quarterly magazine of art, literature, theater and film) and  was Co-Editor of Lusitania Press (which published anthologies focusing on contemporary cultural issues.) His own writings have appeared in Flashart International, ArtPress (FR.), Neue Bilde Kunst (Ger) the International Review of Art (Col.) Arts Magazine, World Art and the New Art Examiner (USA) as well as numerous exhibition catalogues for numerous artists in the US and Europe, these include Moira Dryer/ Jessica Stockholder, Johnson State Community College, KC, Mo., Ray Johnson, Richard Feigen Gallery, NYC & Chicago, Russell Maltz, Kustverien, Ludwighaven, Ger., Valarie Jaudon, Sidney Janis Gallery, Jonathan Lasker, Bravin/ Post Lee Gallery, NYC, Noel Dolla, Center for Contemporary Culture, Tours, France, Alan Uglow, Kolnische Kunstverien, Koln,Ger, as well as for exhibitions he has curated. He has also written entries on Art History and Criticism for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, on sculpture in the US since 1960 for the Encyclopedia of Sculpture also published by Routledge, on Photography and the Visual Arts for the Encyclopedia of 20th Century Photography, Focal Press, on Identity and Post Modernism, and Identity and The Spectacle for the Encyclopedia of Identity, Saga Press. His essay "Criticism: Politics' Phantom Limb, or the Exemplary Supplement (for JD)" was published in the State of Criticism, edited by James Elkins, Routledge, USA (2008.)

In addition to writing and teaching, he has been curating since1986. Approximately half of his exhibitions have dealt with the issues of abstract art, the others with issues arising from other forms of representation. These include Dreaming of a More Better Future, Rhienberger Gallery, Cleveland Institute of Art, 2005, Support/ Surface, Prescient Now and Then for David  Dorsky Projects, NYC, 2002, "Painting Function, Making it Real", Spaces, Cleveland Ohio,  2000, "Painting All-Over: Again" at the Municipal Gallery, Zaragoza, Spain 1996, "Painting in an Expanding Field" Bennington College, Vt. 1997 and "Divergent Models", Kunstverein, Wiesbaden,Germany, 1997.  His most recent exhibition was Color in 3D at the Westport Art Center, Westport, Ct. (June, 2008.)