PRO ARTS JERSEY CITY presents:

MEET THE CURATORS    

In-Portfolio Reviews for Visual Artists

Pro Arts invites visual artists to gain valuable feedback on their portfolios with 20-minute, one-on-one review sessions from prominent gallerists and curators at its 12th annual portfolio review. 

EVENT LOCATION

City Hall of Jersey City, 280 Grove Street, Jersey City. City Hall is two short blocks from the Grove Street PATH station. There will be free parking in the lot behind City Hall. City Hall is wheelchair accessible.

THE REVIEWERS (See below for full bios)

Virginia Fabbri Butera, PhD, Director of the Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery and Professor of Art History, Morristown, NJ

Lisa Dubois, Visual artist, independent curator and creative consultant, NYC

Josh Gosselin, Jazz drummer and independent curator, NYC

Katelyn Halpern, Multidisciplinary artist and founding Artistic Director of SMUSH Gallery, Jersey City, NJ

PE Pinkman, Artist, curator, and Executive Director and Curator at the Watchung Arts Center, NJ

Vida Sabbaghi, Cultural producer, Director of Exhibitions of 630 Flushing Ave. and Executive Director of COPE NYC

Anne Trauben, Visual artist, arts advocate, and Curator and Exhibitions Director at Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, NJ

Midori Yoshimoto, Professor of Art History and Gallery Director at New Jersey City University

REGISTRATION will go live at 11am on March 25th

Registration is on a first come, first serve basis. Artists can register for up to 3 reviews.

Cost is $55 per review.

Registration will happen via the Eventbrite link below, which will go live on 3/25. To register, purchase one ticket for each of the curators you wish to see. Once all slots have been filled, you will be assigned time slots for each of the curators for whom you bought tickets. 

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/meet-the-curators-2023-registration-registration-574721305897

All participating artists will have a chance to be selected for the Curators Choice exhibition to be held in May 2023.

THE REVIEWERS’ FULL BIOS

Virginia Fabbri Butera, PhD

Virginia Fabbri Butera, PhD, is the Director of the Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, a tenured Professor of Art History, and Chairperson of the Art Department at Saint Elizabeth University in Morristown, NJ. She received her BA in Renaissance Studies from Trinity College in Hartford, CT, her MA in History of Art from Johns Hopkins University and her PhD in Art History from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.

She has curated art exhibitions for more than forty years for museums and galleries such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery and other institutions around the country. She has also organized shows at various New Jersey galleries such as the Arts Guild in Rahway, the Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, Gallery 14 Maple at Morris Arts in Morristown, Pro Arts, Jersey City and the Watchung Art Center. This January 2023, she opened  Placed & Displaced, her fortieth-fourth exhibition of work by contemporary professional artists at the Maloney Art Gallery. She has been awarded two NEA grants for multi-disciplinary programs, “The Phrase in Art” and “When Art and Science Collaborate,” and private grants that support the exhibitions and programs of the Gallery. In May 2010, Dr. Butera was named Arts Advocate of the Year by Morris Arts, Morristown, NJ. She has published and lectured widely during her career on various aspects of art history, curating, professional practice and legacy planning for artists. 

Lisa DuBois

Visual artist and curator Lisa DuBois was born and raised in New York City, she is a modern-day Renaissance woman who exhibits her talent in a variety of genres, spanning from traditional photography to digital surrealism. Her work has exhibited in the US and internationally, including in India, France, and Greece. 

As a curator, Lisa operated  X gallery in Harlem as director and curator from 2017-2020 During covid the gallery closed and is now an online collective for photographers and artists. Through X gallery and many other projects, Lisa has helped and encouraged many artists and photographers to follow their passion and to find their authentic self through their medium. 

 During the pandemic, Lisa became  curator and creative consultant for ArtontheAve and helped to develop the first full-scale outdoor-indoor exhibition. She designed a project that involved masking all of the statues of heroes in Harlem in order to raise awareness and inspire people to wear masks. Community Works honored her for her contributions to the healing of Harlem. A film was created and curated by Lisa titled Awareness Through Conceptual Art and Photography and can be seen on you tube. The work features the art of 85 artists and photographers from around the world. 

Her artistic and curatorial work has been recognized in publications such as the Guardian and the New York Times. Lisa is currently both the photo editor and diversity advisor at Social Documentary Network and conducts personal portfolio reviews by zoom.  She can be found on Facebook and Instagram.

Josh Gosselin

Joshua Gosselin is an independent curator focused on engaging new audiences with the work of Contemporary visual artists. From a young age, the visual arts informed his practice as a jazz drummer. Explorations of jazz music’s contemporaneous visual art movements, such as action painting and other twentieth century abstract movements, inspired Gosselin to seek out visual creators from his own generation. In this process, he found an affinity for helping these artists put on exhibitions and sell work.

Joshua holds a bachelors degree in Jazz Performance from the University of Miami where he studied drums with McArthur Fellow, Dafnis Prieto, and established himself as an in-demand jazz drummer on the Miami scene. Always balancing performance and scholarship, he was awarded the prestigious “Plus One” scholarship to further his academic studies in musicology and art historical research, focusing on the cross-pollination of contemporaneous sonic and visual movements.

In 2019, Gosselin moved to NYC just a few months before the Covid outbreak. As music work dried up, he used the opportunity to intern at Van Der Plas Gallery, a Lower East Side space specializing in Outsider and Street Art. Post internship, Gosselin was hired as a gallery associate where he focused on sales, artist relations, and a little bit of everything else. The opportunity proved invaluable as Gosselin had the opportunity to work directly with artists such as Jason McLean, Al Diaz, the co-creator of SAMO along side Jean-Michel Basquiat, and other important figures from the 1980’s

Downtown Scene such as LA2, Bryan Gormley, Clayton Patterson, and various members of the Rivington School, such as postal artist Ed Higgins. After more then two years with Van Der Plas Gallery, Gosselin left the space to begin curating his own shows and to work more directly with artists as a consultant and liaison. His first exhibition, entitled “Now You See NYC,” featured 8 New York based artists dealing with “street” themes. With the help of artist/ curator John Herbert Wright, Gosselin curated, produced, hung, and managed the sales of the exhibition. Only a few months later in June, 2022, Gosselin curated and produced the “Emerging Artists Exhibition” for NYC SALT, a non-profit whose mission is to work with immigrant high school students through photography. The “Emerging Artists Exhibition” featured the works of distinguished program alumni such as Devin Osorio and Malike Sidibe, and garnered a nearly 300 person crowd at its opening at the Starrett Lehigh Building in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.

“Josh Gosselin Projects,” his most current project, is an art gallery that exists in some of Manhattan’s favorite coffee shops. In an effort to engaging “new audiences,” Gosselin puts on gallery level displays that connect local artists with businesses and potential collectors looking to promote and support their work. Current displays exist at Ludlow Coffee Supply, Paper Cafe @ MADE Hotel, and The Blue Building Cafe. Josh Gosselin can usually be found traversing the streets of New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood where he lives and works wearing many different hats.

Katelyn Halpern

Katelyn Halpern is a multidisciplinary artist from Austin, Texas living in Jersey City, New Jersey. Trained as a dancer and writer and self-taught in other media, she works in installations, performance, multimedia visual art, and the written word on subjects of peace/not peace, intimate relationship, space dust, and possibility-freedom-futures, and the experience of moving through the world in a feminine body. Hailed as a “compelling conceptual artist,” “mischief maker,” and “born searcher,” (Jersey City Times), she is the founding artistic director of SMUSH Gallery, an art space dedicated to creative and community work in Jersey City.

PE Pinkman

Mr. Pinkman is an accomplished fine artist and long-time curator who currently works as the Executive Director and Curator at the Watchung Arts Center in Watchung, NJ. Over the last thirty years, he has worked in non-profit art organizations with the purpose of providing under-represented visual artists in the NY-NJ area the opportunity to have their work recognized. Prior to his position at Watchung, he served as either president or director of the Tweed Art Group, Art Group NYC, and the New Art Group. At the Watchung Arts Center, he is responsible for curating and mounting at least six exhibitions a year encompassing two galleries. His early connections with non-profit art communities established a lasting commitment to helping other artists, acting as a curator for well over a hundred exhibits in the last thirty years. In his position at the Watchung Arts Center, he has exhibited the works of many artists who have developed high-profile, national, and international careers.

As a fine artist himself, he started painting in elementary school and, by the 1980s and 90s, was displaying his early mature works in galleries and alternative spaces such as La Mama La Galleria, Charas El Bohio, and Torn Awning Gallery in New York City’s Lower East Side. More recently his works have been seen at the New Jersey State Museum, the Monmouth Museum, Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, and the University of North Carolina. Examples of his photography were included in a special exhibit in the Louvre, Paris in 2017. His work has been reviewed and/or discussed in major publications such as the New York Times, The New Jersey Star-Ledger, and, more recently in the Jersey City Times. His art focuses on both abstract and representational narrative elements, recently utilizing his own image in “100 Days of a Pandemic” as an avatar for the anxieties and fears present during the 2020 election cycle and the COVID pandemic.

Vida Sabbaghi

Vida Sabbaghi, a cultural producer, is the Executive Director of COPE NYC (Creative Opportunities Promoting Equality New York City). COPE NYC promotes social relations through art exhibitions, residencies, art and design education, fashion shows, and community art projects. 

She is the Director of Exhibitions of 630 Flushing Avenue, a thriving building situated in Brooklyn with a vibrant ecosystem of tenants, including Pratt Institute, Brandon Haw Architecture Firm, and Savaria Music Studios.

In 2021, Vida founded THE IW GALLERY to provide opportunities for artists and designers from around the world, and to inspire and promote cultural exchange.

Sabbaghi is a consultant for NYC galleries; her curatorial projects include artworks, photography, and film. She curated several exhibitions at Queens Museum where she also organized a three-day international art education conference. Her expertise extends to curating traveling exhibits, including Overlap: Life Tapestries, and Repsychling. Vida designs programming, workshops, and discussions to accompany exhibitions. She expanded COPE NYC’s reach with Artists in Residence in Brooklyn, Taiwan, and Germany. 

For the past five years, Vida has been accommodating Pratt Institute Students with a COPE NYC artist in residence program for their courses that encourage to activate spaces with art for the community and to extend their creativity beyond the Institute.

Vida, an editor, and writer for art publications, coedited Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art, with Dr. Alice J. Wexler, published by Routledge. She is a contributing writer of museum-based art therapy: a collaborative effort with access, education, and public programs.

Vida studied Industrial Design; Theory, Criticism, History of Art, Design, and Architecture; and Art & Design Education at Pratt Institute. She graduated with Distinction. She is a part time faculty member of Parsons School of Design The New School where she applies her curatorial expertise.

Anne Trauben

Anne Trauben is a visual artist, arts advocate, and the Curator and Exhibitions Director at Drawing Rooms, a non-profit art center and gallery in Jersey City. She began working with Victory Hall Inc. in 2009, and was a founding artist of Drawing Rooms in 2012. Anne has organized year-round exhibitions of multiple artists at Drawing Rooms since 2014.

Anne received an MFA in Ceramics from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she received a fellowship to study art in Rome. Anne has exhibited her works throughout the NY Metropolitan and beyond.

Midori Yoshimoto

Midori Yoshimoto is professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. Yoshimoto specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and its diaspora with a focus on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia. Her 2005 book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, led to numerous publications including an essay in Yoko Ono One Woman Show (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015). Yoshimoto co-curated a major survey exhibition of Japanese American artist Shigeko Kubota, which traveled three museums in Japan in 2021-22. Its catalog, Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha and received the Ringa Art Encouragement Award in Japan. She is also a co-editor and author of a recent publication, Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021).