We are pleased to announce the appointment of Mary Kemper Wolf, cultural leader, strategist and independent curator and Brendan Fernandes, artist and Artadia Awardee, to the Artadia Board of Directors.

Mary Kemper Wolf is a cultural leader, strategist and independent curator. Mary has served as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art since 2013.

Mary’s passion for co-creating impact driven art experiences stemmed from her early-career research on one of America’s most prolific Expressionist painters, Frederick J. Brown. Brown later became the subject of a documentary film she wrote and directed,120 Wooster Street, which aired on PBS and at The Kennedy Center.

Her current curatorial project entitled JewelHouse, is a collaboration with artist Summer Wheat to convert a former historic planetarium on the grounds of Kansas City Museum into a monumental, site-responsive contemporary artwork.

She is co-curating 30X, a national public art and ecology concept to align with the global initiative to protect 30 percent of earth’s land and water by 2030. She will also co-produce a companion documentary series tracking 30X’s vision to highlight Indigenous-led conservation and restoration efforts in America through contemporary art.

She is launching 63rd Street Wellustrations in Spring 2025, a billboard commission for illustrators centered on health equity, well-being and belonging.

In 2021, Mary mounted a multi-media exhibition for the U.S. premiere of award-winning jazz musician Hermon Mehari’s album “A Change For The Dreamlike” to benefit MIRR Collective, a cultural music exchange program.

She has also served on the boards of Mass MOCA, The American Jazz Museum and Addison Gallery of American Art. She was appointed to the Public Art Executive Committee for Kansas City International Airport and the Art Advisory Committee for CPKC Stadium (the first stadium in the world purpose-built for a professional women’s team).

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest…always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others.

He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; The MCA Denver, Denver, Colorado; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, CA; and Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway