Four outstanding jurors have selected the exhibitors for this show:
Dorothy Kosinski
Dorothy Kosinski served as the Vradenburg Director & CEO of The Phillips Collection from 2008, until her designation as Director Emerita beginning in 2023. During her tenure, she successfully shepherded a $64 million Centennial Campaign enhancing the endowment to almost $100 million. Also under her leadership, the museum established a satellite campus in Southeast DC at the Town Hall Arts Recreation Campus (THEARC) as a focal point of community engagement, partnership, and collaboration. Dr. Kosinski was an early champion of equity and diversity throughout the museum’s work, establishing an early career pipeline of paid internships and fellowships, hiring the museum’s first Chief Diversity Office, reforming the museum’s hiring practices, guiding the board towards more expansive representation among the trustees, and enhancing the permanent collection, exhibitions and programs by centering the voices of contemporary artists, emphasizing artists of color, women, and forefronting urgent issues of today.
In August 2013, Dr. Kosinski was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities. She also serves on the boards of the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation. In December 2017, she was recognized by the Ambassador of Italy with the Order of the Italian Star, a distinction recognizing her outstanding contributions to the arts and promotion of Italian culture.
Prior to joining The Phillips Collection, Dr. Kosinski worked at the Dallas Museum of Art, where she served in a number of capacities from 1995 to 2008, last as Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture. From 1985 to 1997, she lived in Basel, Switzerland and was the curator of the Douglas Cooper Collection of cubist art, and organized numerous major exhibitions across Europe and the United States. Widely recognized as a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth-century painting and sculpture, Dr. Kosinski received her BA from Yale University, her MA and PhD degrees from New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Dr. Kosinski has written and edited many books and catalogs on a variety of art topics including 19th Century Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, 20th Century sculpture and contemporary art.
Robert K. Liu
Robert K. Liu, Ph.D. was trained as an ethnologist at UCLA, but self-trained as a jeweler and photographer. He has lectured frequently and presented workshops on jewelry photography and bamboo jewelry, while writing extensively on ancient, ethnic and contemporary jewelry and personal adornment. He is the author of Collectible Beads, The Photography of Personal Adornment and over 770 articles and publications.
With his son Patrick R. Benesh-Liu, he co-edits Ornament Magazine, which he founded with his wife, the late Carolyn L.E. Benesh. Ornament began in 1974 as The Bead Journal and continues to meet the exciting challenge of documenting the art and craft of personal adornment and demonstrating the richness and diversity of this vast subject. The magazine serves as a trusted conduit for information and scholarship concerning jewelry, artwear and its many creative makers. Dr. Liu continues exploring the use of bamboo as a sustainable jewelry material and recently published a book on naval scale models of WW II, part of a lifelong making of scale models.
Dorene Red Cloud
Dorene Red Cloud is Curator of Native American Art at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. An enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, she received her Master of Arts in American Indian Studies at UCLA and also studied at the University of Michigan, and at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Red Cloud worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian as a Repatriation Research Specialist from 1999-2003. She joined the Eiteljorg Museum in 2016. .
In June 2022, the Eiteljorg opened its reconstructed Native American Galleries, which encourages visitors to experience Native art in compelling new ways in a space where Native peoples themselves are the authority of their own stories. Red Cloud’s goal: to make Indigenous peoples feel welcome. “For the longest time,” she says, “museums have been thought of as ivory towers where Native peoples couldn’t see themselves.” She is one of the newly recruited Native curators who are changing the narrative of American Art across the country.
Joanna Sikes
Joanna Sikes has over 25 years experience as a seasoned museum professional and is currently serving as Director of Development at the Museum of Northwest Art. Located in La Connor, WA, the museum collects, preserves, interprets, and exhibits art created in the Pacific Northwest, supports artists, and strives to integrate art into the lives of all people.
Previously Sikes was part of the senior management teams with The Imagine Museum, St. Petersburg, FL, Museum of Glass in Tacoma, the Dale Chihuly Studio in Seattle, the Seattle Art Museum and at the Port of Seattle. Her association with Chihuly included positions as studio manager, marketing/client relations and director of special projects. Sikes’ career also includes earlier posts at the Phoenix Fine Arts Museum, the Crocker Museum of Art, and the American Federation of Arts.