Sara Reisman, Executive Director & Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, is joined by Debra Wimpfheimer, Interim Director of the Queens Museum, and Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Curator & Director of NLE Curatorial Lab (NLE Lab) for a conversation on their career paths and the role of socially engaged art.
$5 Members / $15 Non-Members
About Sara Reisman
Sara Reisman is Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation which is focused on supporting art and social justice through grant making to organizations and exhibitions at The 8th Floor. Recent exhibitions include When Artists Speak Truth, In the Power of Your Care, Enacting Stillness, The Intersectional Self, The Supper Club, a solo exhibition by Elia Alba, and co-curated with Elyse Gonzales The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy, and Engagement: Two Projects by Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy with Pilar Riano-Alcala. From 2008 until 2014, Reisman was the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, where she managed more than 100 permanent public art commissions, including projects by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Mattingly, Tattfoo Tan, Karyn Olivier, and Ester Partegas, among others for civic sites like libraries, public schools, courthouses, plazas, and parks. She was the 2011 critic-in-residence at Art Omi, an international visual arts residency in upstate New York, where she serves as a board member, and a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, awarded by the Foundation for a Civil Society. Reisman has taught the University of Pennsylvania, the School of Art + Design at Purchase College, and she currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Curatorial Practice Masters Program.
About Debra Wimpfheimer
Debra Wimpfheimer is a Queens native and currently serving as the Interim Director of the Queens Museum. She was appointed to this role in February 2018. Debra is responsible for overseeing all operations and programmatic departments, including Exhibitions, Public Programs and Community Engagement and Education. She is the Museum’s liaison with key stakeholders for community engagement and capacity building initiatives in all program areas and administration. Partners include Queens Library, Queens College, The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and community-based organizations.
Debra has worked in several arts and social service organizations including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Boston Medical Center and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
About Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger
Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger is curator at No Longer Empty (NLE), a nonprofit arts organization that curates site-responsive exhibitions, education and public programs in unexpected locations around New York City, creating artistic platforms for collaboration and dialogue around social, cultural and civic issues. She also serves as Director of NLE Curatorial Lab, a professional development program for emerging curators that incorporates community engagement as a fundamental component in the formation of curatorial projects. In 2018, NLE Lab organized the inaugural Southeast Queens Biennial in partnership with York College Fine Arts Gallery / CUNY and Queens Library in Jamaica, New York. In 2016, Gugelberger curated Jameco Exchange, a site-responsive exhibition and socially engaged education platform on storytelling about Jamaica, Queens.
Gugelberger is co-founder of 1@111, a series of process-oriented discussions that focus on a single work, text, curatorial premise or proposition. Independent curatorial projects have focused on the intersection of information, data and art and include: Once Upon a Time There was the En at Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Data Delug at Ballroom Marfa, TX; and Library Science at Artspace, New Haven, CT. She has served as co-director of Sara Meltzer Gallery and curator at Exit Art in New York, where she curated the organization’s final exhibitions Every Exit Is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art and co-curated Collective/Performative. She received an MA in Curatorial Studies in Contemporary Art and Culture from The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
About Colleagues & Friends
The Colleagues and Friends breakfast series invites established women in the art world to have conversations about their current positions, career paths, and professional relationships. The program is generously hosted by Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance, a subsidiary of Emigrant Bank (Member FDIC, founded 1850) and its subsidiary, Fine Art Asset Management (Member APAA, AAA). Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance is a leading provider of loans secured by paintings, drawings, sculpture, wine, classic cars, stringed instruments, and other passion assets. Fine Art Asset Management provides independent, conflict-free, expert art advisory services, and USPAP compliant appraisals.
