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Legacies | Biographies

Ruth Abram is President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which she founded in 1988. The Tenement Museum “promotes tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gateway to America,” Using a 19th Century tenement building, the first tenement to be designated a National Historic Landmark, and its Lower East Side neighborhood, the Museum has pioneered the interpretation of the home and community life of urban, immigrant, working class and poor people, and it has set a precedent for using history as a tool for addressing contemporary and social issues. The Museum is now affiliated with the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. An activist turned historian, Abram has graduate degrees in social welfare and American history and has pioneered in the use of history to address social issues. Her work at the Tenement Museum has been widely covered in the media including The New York Times, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and the PBS series on the history of New York. Abram is the author of, Send Us a Lady Physician, and a contributor to Museums, Society, Inequality and Looking Reality in the Eye: Museums and Social Responsibility. In 1975, President Jimmy Carter appointed Abram a Commissioner of International Women’s Year. Abram is the recipient of many awards, including: the Camille Mermod Award from the American Medical Women’s Association; Aspen Institute’s Alvin Brown Fellowship; Honorary Doctor of Public Service, Russell Sage Colleges; and the Women in Preservation Award.

Kenneth Brecher is the Executive Director of the Sundance Institute. He previously served as President of the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, Director of the Boston Children’s Museum, and Associate Artistic Director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and is an honors graduate of Cornell. An anthropologist by training, Brecher has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a research grant from the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and a Ford Foundation Fellowship for his study of Amazonian tribesmen in Brazil. He serves on a number of boards and is a Trustee of the Wildwood School in Los Angeles. He is a member of the International Arts Advisory Council for the Wexner Center for the Arts, served as Chair of the Lillian and Dorothy Gish Prize and is on the Committee of Selection for the Rhodes Scholarships. Brecher has lectured and published widely and has served as an international consultant on current challenges facing arts leadership. He is the author of Too Sad to Sing, A Memoir with Postcards published by Harcourt, and edited the classic work, Xingu: The Indians and Their Myths, by the legendary Brazilian brothers Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas. His installation, “The Little Room of Epiphanies,” was at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2006.

Claudine Kinard Brown is currently the Director of the Arts and Culture Program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She began her professional career as an art and drama teacher in New York City Public Schools. In 1976 she joined the staff of the Brooklyn Museum where she served for thirteen years in several capacities. She began her career in Brooklyn, as a museum educator. In 1984 she served as Manager of School and Community Programs and in 1985 she became the Museum’s Assistant Director for Government and Community Relations. Brown left the Brooklyn Museum in 1990 to direct the Smithsonian Institution’s initiative to create a National African American Museum. Her responsibilities included: conducting a needs assessment, developing a vision statement and program plan, and opening a Center for African American History & Culture pending passage of authorizing legislation to create a museum. In 1991, she added to her responsibilities by concurrently assuming the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Museums. Her responsibilities included developing policy affecting 13 national arts and humanities museums, reviewing their long-range plans and assisting in prioritizing institution-wide budget requests which were presented to Congress. Brown has served on several nonprofit boards, including the American Association of Museums, the National Park Service Fund, the Association of Black Foundation Executives and she recently served as President of the Board of Grantmakers in the Arts. She has taught graduate courses in the Arts Administration program at New York University, and the Museum Leadership Program at Bank Street College. Claudine Brown has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute, a Masters of Science degree in Museum Education from Bank Street College and a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Brooklyn Law School.

Jenny Dixon joined The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum as director in April 2003. Since that time, she has consolidated the Museum and Foundation into a single entity, popularly known as The Noguchi Museum, and greatly expanded public awareness of both the Museum and Isamu Noguchi’s production. She has achieved this by initiating the Museum’s first program of temporary exhibitions and by greatly expanding its roster of public programs, among other initiatives. In all of these efforts, Dixon has sought to honor Noguchi’s vision of the museum he created. Dixon began her arts career in 1977, when she joined the Public Art Fund, where she served as executive director from 1980 through 1986. Among her many accomplishments at the Fund was the initiation of the New York City “Percent for Art” program. In 1999 she was named director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. During her tenure at the Bronx Museum she initiated an extensive capital program and secured the organization’s position as a major educational resource for local school children. Dixon has taught at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Parsons School of Design, and New York University. She is on the boards of the Public Art Fund, Inc., and the New York City Arts Coalition, among other organizations. Her numerous past board affiliations include the New York City Cultural Institutions Group, the Alliance for Downtown New York, and Art Table.

Dorothy Dunn is Director of Visitor Experience and Fellowships at the Philip Johnson Glass House, the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She is responsible for all site interpretation, design programs and strategic partnerships, including “Conversations”, to position the site as a catalyst for promoting innovation and change. Dunn was the recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian Education Achievement Award in 2004 in recognition of her leadership as Education Director for Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. While at the Smithsonian, from 1989 through 2004, she launched and directed the signature programs A City of Neighborhoods: Bridging School and Community, Summer Design Institute, and Design Directions and also planned numerous international conferences including Design on the Ecological Frontier (1994), Designing for the Senses (2002), the invitational study tours Icons of Modernism: LA and Palm Springs (1999), The Architecture of Landscape and Light (2003), Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan (2004 and 2005) and the invitational retreat, Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process (2004). Dunn worked with AIGA, the professional association for design, to reposition the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Aspen Design Summit, the world’s oldest forum for business and design leaders. As Program Director for AIGA, Dunn produced the program content for the international conferences Gain: AIGA Design and Business Conference (2006) and Design Conference (2005). Dunn is a member of the Advisory Boards for the Center for Architecture, Openhouse/NY and Sweat Equity Enterprises (SEE).

Christy MacLear is the Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. She was brought to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to develop the strategy, hire all staff and prepare the site and Visitor Center to open to the public this past June 2007. With the goal to “reshape the historic house museum model”, Christy and the staff team of the Glass House have sold out tours through 2008, launched a survey of 90+ modern homes in New Canaan, structured a “center for Modernism” to co-lead the National Trust’s investment in Modernist preservation, managed the NTHP board approval to purchase adjacent properties to preserve the Glass House view in perpetuity, and developed the “conversations” series to continue the legacy of new ideas through diverse leaders on-site. Christy is known for her ability to conceive of and lead large scale projects through opening and on-going operations. She was the Manager of Strategy for the Walt Disney Company’s new town project called Celebration, was the Director of the Museum Campus in Chicago where she represented 3 museum boards through the movement of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of a lakefront park, and was an independent consultant in Strategy & Visitor Experience to such clients as the Field Museum, the Cleveland Clinic and the leaders of the UAE. She has a degree in Urban Design from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton in Real Estate Finance where she received a Barnes fellowship. She has been a professor in the graduate program of Arts Administration for the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and has served on the boards of Chicago’s Three Arts Club, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Steppingstones Museum for Children.

Christopher Mason, a longtime contributor to the House & Home section of the New York Times, is the author of The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal. Christopher is also a prolific writer and performer of satirical songs. He serenaded guests at Philip Johnson’s rollicking 90th birthday party at the Museum of Modern Art. Born in England, he studied History of Art at Cambridge University, where he was student president of Kettle’s Yard, a 20th-century-art house museum. He lives in New York City.

Nils Norén is the Vice President of Culinary Arts of The French Culinary Institute (The FCI) and The Italian Culinary Academy (The ICA), at New York City’s International Culinary Center. An embodiment of the new international chef, disciplined in the classic sensibilities and driven by immense creativity, Norén was appointed in 2006 to lead the schools’ culinary, pastry, bread and Italian programs. For the previous 10 years, he had been at Aquavit, where Marcus Samuelsson appointed Chef Nils to be Executive Chef in 2003. At Aquavit, under Marcus Samuelsson’s exemplary leadership, Chef Nils strove to solidify the restaurant’s place on the culinary map and to show the world what Swedish food and cooking techniques are all about. Prior to joining Aquavit, Chef Nils worked in Stockholm as Executive Chef at Restaurant Riche, which features a fine dining room, tapas bar and bistro; and as Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant KB, one of the country’s classic Swedish restaurants in the center of town. He also coordinated cooking classes for Restaurant Akademin. Chef Nils is a graduate of Culinary School in Gävle, Sweden.

Susan Sollins, Founder and Executive Director of Art 21, and Curator of the Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century PBS series, has been well known in the field of contemporary art for more than 30 years for her innovations in public programming and museum education, and as a curator. In addition to her work for many art institutions as a curator and consultant, Sollins is the co-founder and Executive Director Emerita of Independent Curators International (iCI), a nonprofit organization that develops, organizes, and circulates traveling exhibitions of contemporary art presenting a broad range of recent trends and aesthetic concerns to viewers nationwide and abroad. During her 21-year tenure, iCI’s 75 exhibitions featuring more than 1,700 artists were seen at more than 360 institutions and alternative spaces in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Mexico. For her work at both iCI and Art21, Sollins was awarded the Skowhegan Governors Award for Outstanding Service to Artists by the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008. Sollins was formerly the visual Arts consultant for Thirteen/WNET’s Emmy and Peabody Award-winning arts magazine City Arts; serves on the Boards of the MacDowell Colony and iCI, has been a panelist for the NEA, NYSCA, and New York’s Percent for Art program. Early in her career, Sollins was the Curator of Education (Chief, Museum Programs) at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, and Curator of its Discovery Gallery, which showcased contemporary art. In her private life, as the wife of the late composer Earle Brown, she was actively involved in the world of contemporary music for many years.

Joel Wachs, long-time member of the Los Angeles City Council, its past President, and candidate for Mayor, joined The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as its President in October 2001. Following a career as a tax attorney, Wachs was first elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1971 and won re-election to that office seven times by record margins – most recently in 1999. During his tenure on the City Council, Joel Wachs was widely recognized as Los Angeles’ strongest advocate for the arts, and authored most of the city’s significant legislation designed to support artists and arts organizations, including the establishment of the landmark Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts. Wachs also served as acting chairman of the National League of Cities Task Force on the Arts, which drafted the nation’s first comprehensive municipal policy statement on the role of the arts in our cities. He has served a variety of arts organizations, most notably the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art where he was vice chairman of the Board of Trustees.