The 6th Annual “Meet the Curators” will be held on Saturday, April 8th, 2016 at the Council Chambers, City Hall, 280 Grove St. Jersey City, NJ

 
Participating reviewers on this year’s panel include 
Jeanne Brasile – Jeanne is currently the Director of the Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University.  She earned her Bachelor’s Degree at Ramapo College of New Jersey with a concentration in art history and studio art, and a Master’s Degree in Museum Studies from Seton Hall University.  She also teaches as an adjunct in the Museum Professions Graduate Program at Seton Hall University, and is an independent curator and frequent lecturer on such topics as public art, curatorial practice and institutional critique.  During her career of over 20 years, she has curated numerous shows throughout New York and New Jersey and worked at institutions such as Storm King Art Center, The South Street Seaport Museum and the Montclair State University Art Galleries.  Philosophically, she sees the gallery as a place for asking questions rather than a framework for imposing meaning.  She is most interested in developing exhibitions that challenge visitors to re-think their perceptions of art, art-making and the role of the museum/gallery.
Evonne Davis – Evonne is co-founder and Artistic Director of Gallery Aferro and formerly Gallery/Education Director at City Without Walls, both in Newark, NJ.  Evonne has curated independent and affiliated exhibitions since 2001 in innovative as well as traditional settings, including a vacant lot in Coney Island and the back of a 1978 Volvo. Her goal is to connect any willing audience with cultural experience. Other locations include The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Valley Arts, Ironworks Gallery, Brooklyn Borough Hall, Studio 411, Red Saw Gallery, Arts Guild of New Jersey, Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ, Print Making Center of NJ, Seton Hall University, and 207 Gallery, among many others. Her 2002 exhibition, Nostalgia and Decay, which originated in Coney Island, Brooklyn was moved to Borough Hall at the invitation of the Brooklyn Borough President. Evonne has facilitated partnerships with Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark Arts Council, The Polish Cultural Institute, Brick City Development Corporation, Camera Club of New York, The Newark Museum, The Montclair Museum and many others.  Evonne is currently a member of the City of Newark Committee on Arts, Culture, Tourism and Heritage as well as co-chair of the City of Newark Public Art Committee.  Originally from the Woodstock, NY area, she studied at School of Visual Arts and Cornell University.
Robert Langdon – Robert is the proprietor and curator at Emerge Gallery & Art Space in Saugerties, NY. Emerge Gallery is a welcoming environment that exhibits the best emerging artists from the Hudson Valley, NY Metropolitan region and beyond through monthly group exhibitions. Prior to opening Emerge Gallery, Robert was Director at Gallery U in Red Bank and Westfield, NJ, where he helped advance the art scene in both communities. Robert’s strength lies in community building and supporting and promoting emerging artists. Over the years, Robert has served as Director of Sales and Marketing at a nonprofit children’s picture book publisher in San Francisco; still-life photographer in Manhattan where he photographed still life for Macy’s and A&S catalogs among others; and teacher in suburban New Jersey.  Robert graduated from the Germain School of Photography and holds a BA from Montclair State University.
Katherine Murdoch – Katherine is the Assistant Curator at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, which is one of the largest public institutions in NJ devoted exclusively to contemporary art.  Since 2010 she has worked on over thirty curated group and solo exhibitions for the Art Center and organized over 50 community art exhibitions.  Murdock curated Adhere, X-Scapes, Elena Caravela: Girls in Sight, and in 2014 she began a curation series called Stair-Gazing which featured artists including Valerie Molnar, Clair Sherman, Louisa Armbrust, Philemona Williamson, Betty McGeehan and Rhia Hurt.  Murdock has also co-curated the show Women Choose Women Again.  She curated the show Black, White and Green as a guest curator for Gallery at 14 Maple headquarters of Morris Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.  As one of the reviewers from the Pro Arts Jersey City’s Portfolio Review Day, she curated the Curator’s Choice Exhibit organized by Pro Arts Jersey City and at Village West Gallery in Jersey City.  Murdock received her BA from Drew University.
Margaret O’Reilly – Margaret was appointed Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum (Trenton) in 2016.  Margaret joined the State Museum staff in 1988, and became Curator of Fine Art in 1997. She has organized over 100 exhibitions including a complete re-installation of the Museum’s art collection – American Perspectives: The Fine Art Collection; the critically well- received exhibitions, Wendel White: Manifest; Dahlia Elsayed: Hither and Yon; Jim Toia: From Here to Uncertainty; Transcendent: Toshiko Takaezu in the Museum Collection; Women’s Works;Mel Leipzig: A Retrospective; Vision & Voice: Artists in Dialogue with Contemporary Poetry; and most recently, Repairing Beauty: David Ambrose – A Mid-Career Retrospective.  Margaret has an MA in painting and a BFA in visual communications.  Her research and exhibition interests include issues of chance, identity and mortality, and the formal concerns of density, repetition and serial structure.
Stacy Smith – Stacy served as Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at The Noyes Museum of Art for seven years prior to joining the staff of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, where she is currently Manager of Publications and Communications. Her outside professional activities include such roles as curator, essayist, public art panelist, juror, grants reviewer, and Executive Board member of the New Jersey Association of Museums (NJAM) and the National Consortium for Creative Placemaking (NCCP.)  Stacy has BA degrees in Art and Psychology from West Maryland College as well as a Communicator Certificate from Rutgers University and a Twentieth-Century American Folk Art Certificate from the Folk Art Institute, Museum of American Folk Art in New York.
Anne Trauben – Visual artist, arts advocate, and the Curator and Exhibitions Director at Victory Hall Drawing Rooms, a 20-room non-profit art center in Jersey City, Anne began working with Victory Hall Inc. in 2009, and was a founding artist of Drawing Rooms in 2012. She has organized year-round exhibitions of multiple artists there since 2014, including The Big Small Show, an annual show which reviews current drawing, painting and three dimensional works and includes over 100 artists from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Her regular exhibition schedule at Drawing Rooms includes up to seven themed exhibitions annually in nine individual artist gallery rooms, plus collaboration in up to 40 lobby exhibits at public locations throughout Jersey City.   Anne was born in Brooklyn and grew up in NJ. She received a BA in Studio Art with a concentration in ceramics from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Anne was awarded a fellowship to study art in Rome from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA where she received an MFA in Ceramics. Anne has exhibited her works throughout the NY Metropolitan area.
Midori Yoshimoto – Midori is associate professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University with extensive curatorial background. While earning her Ph.D. at Rutgers University between 1996 and 2002, she served as Assistant Curator at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, realizing several exhibitions, which travelled to Japan. As an independent curator, she has organized Do-It-Yourself Fluxus (Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA, 2003) and New Tale of Our Age, (The Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit, 2009). Yoshimoto has also served as a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York since 2004. Areas of expertise are post-1945 Japanese art and its global intersections, with a particular emphasis on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia art. Her recent academic publications are: “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyō and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan” (Art Journal, 2008); “Women and Fluxus,” special issue of Women and Performance journal (guest-editor, 2009); “Expo ’70 and Japanese Art,” special issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society (guest-editor, Josai University, 2012); and “Collectivism in Twentieth-Century Japanese Art,” special issue of Positions: Asia Critique (co-editor, Duke Univ. Press, 2013).
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