On December 3, please join Artadia and LAXART for a free online public program featuring Courtney J. Martin, Director, Yale Center for British Art in conversation with Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, at Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. The event will be live closed captioned, if any accessibility accommodations are needed please email info@artadia.org.

Thursday, December 3, at 7pm EST/ 6pm CST / 4pm PST

Click here to RSVP 

In 2019, Courtney J. Martin became the sixth director of the Yale Center for British Art. Previously, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Dia Art Foundation; an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University; an assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University; a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; a fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute research fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

In 2012, Martin curated the exhibition Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. In 2014, she co-curated the group show Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark. From 2008 to 2015, she co-led a research project on the Anglo-American art critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and was co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award). In 2015, she curated an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation focusing on the American painter Robert Ryman. At Dia, she also oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, and Andy Warhol. She was editor of the book Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016), surveying an important collection of modern and contemporary work by artists of African descent.

Rita Gonzalez is the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she has curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection; Agnés Varda in Californialand; In Production: Art and the Studio System; Christian Marclay: Sound Stories; View From Here: Recent Acquisitions, among other exhibitions and programs. Gonzalez curated L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, an exhibition that featured sixty gifts and marked the culmination of LACMA’s 50th anniversary year. From 1997–1999, she was the Lila Wallace Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. She was on the curatorial advisory team for Prospect 3 New Orleans and part of the curatorial teams for the first Current L.A. Biennial in 2016 and the Gwangju Bienale in 2018. Gonzalez was one of the 2018 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellows.

Artadia’s Art & Dialogue invites curators from across the United States, who are experts in their field, to deeply engage with each Award city through a series of virtual studio visits with local Awardees and public programs, co-hosted with local partner organizations.

Founded in 1999, Artadia is a nonprofit grantmaker and nationwide community of visual artists, curators, and patrons. Artadia elevates the careers of these artists through a proven combination of recognition, grantmaking, community support, and advocacy. We believe that by working collaboratively to improve the conditions necessary for artists from all backgrounds to thrive and succeed, Artadia can strengthen their communities and foster economic justice in the arts. 

LAXART is a nonprofit visual art space that promotes developments in contemporary culture through exhibitions, publications, and public programs.

Founded in 2005 as a platform for emerging and under-recognized talent, LAXART has expanded its mission to encompass thematic exhibitions that engage with key issues of our time. It believes that contemporary art is a means of understanding key issues of our time with all their inherent contradictions. Contemporary art assumes many forms. Rather than provide answers, it raises questions. Through a range of offerings, we contextualize contemporary art both socially and discursively.