LAND ART FORWARD
Alan Sonfist
One of the pioneers of the Land Art movement in 1960s and 1970s. His artworks have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Alan continues to create land art that celebrates and preserves the memory of the ancient flora and fauna that once existed in cities. His art has been inspired by his passion to reintroduce indigenous nature to urban areas in New York and throughout the world. Alan's works have been in the collections of over 100 esteemed museums and institutions, including MoMA, The Met, Whitney, JP Morgan Chase Art Collections, and many more. Alan Sonfist was a fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
Gedeminas Urbonas
Currently a professor at MIT, Gediminas has established an international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic, social, and political conditions in the countries and situations that are in flux. Urbonas uses art platform to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups, evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination. Urbonas’ works have been represented in Venice Biennial multiple times, including edition of 2023.
Gaël Forget
Dr. Forget is a research scientist at MIT specializing in oceanography and climate. His work focuses on ocean modeling, analyzing global ocean data sets, and utilizing the MIT general circulation model for ocean state estimation. They contribute to the development of MITgcm and collaborate with the NASA Sea Level Change Team. Dr. Gael's research interests include ocean circulation, climate variability, tracer transport, bio-geochemistry, and global cycles of heat, water, and carbon. Their expertise lies in observational statistics, forward and inverse modeling, and advancing our understanding of Earth's oceans.
Alejandro Carosso
Alejandro is an Art Advisor based in New York, with a career spanning over 30 years. His expertise lies in collaborating with international Art Museums, Institutions, and private collections. Alongside his professional endeavors, Alejandro actively engages with private and corporate clients, co-investing and inspiring dynamic cultural transformations through the arts and technology. His vision extends beyond traditional boundaries as he curates exhibitions and initiatives that challenge perspectives, foster inclusivity, and stimulate meaningful conversations. Alejandro's dedication to artistic excellence and social impact shapes the art world, leaving a lasting impression on both local and global communities.
Jay Lu
Jay Lu is an entrepreneur with extensive experience in art media and art business management across the United States and Asia. Among his many executive roles, he served as the founding Managing Director of the China branch of The Cultivist (thecultivist.com), a renowned global art collectors club based in New York and London. Furthermore, Jay Lu also served as the Chief Representative, Director in Asia for Artnet Global, a prominent online platform for the art world (artnet.com, news.artnet.com, artnetnews.cn). Jay also once served as COO for Meta Media Art Platform (0072.HK) and CEO for Cathay View Culture and Arts Co. Ltd, (871383.NEEQ).
Lorenzo Béatrix
Lorenzo Béatrix is a French writer, researcher, and curator specializing in contemporary art. Based in Paris, he supports a range of projects related to the history of the Earth art and land art movements. As an independent researcher, Lorenzo focuses on deepening the contextualization of land art and the submovements that emerged alongside or followed it. His recent writings critically examine the work of American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, commonly associated with Earth art or land art. Through collaborations with anthropologists and musicians, Lorenzo aims to recontextualize the significance of land art, considering the temporal and cultural conditions surrounding its creation. His recent publications and exhibitions have explored the intersection of earth-based artistic practices and the evolution of electronic sound experimentation since the 1960s. Lorenzo is a member of the Land Art Forward Foundation in New York City, and has collaborated with galleries and institutions in France and the U.S. He recently curated the exhibition of American land art pioneer Alan Sonfist, titled Songes Telluriques, in Paris. Lorenzo holds a B.A. in Art History from McGill University (Montréal, Canada) and has worked as a research assistant in the Contemporary Art Department at McGill University.
Michelle Y. Loh
Michelle Y. Loh is a New York based art director, advisor, and curator. She leads curatorial and strategic initiatives with a global perspective. Loh currently also serves as the Strategic Director of the gallery BANK in New York City, represents the gallery at prominent international art fairs, including The Armory Show in New York, Frieze Los Angeles, Art Basel Miami Beach/Paris, positioning BANK at the forefront of the contemporary art market. A respected voice in the discourse on contemporary Asian art, Loh has lectured at leading academic and cultural institutions including Columbia University, Pace University, and the New York Academyof Art. She also lends her expertise as a member of the Board of Directors at the Silvermine ArtsCenter in Connecticut.
Keith B. Wagner
Dr. Wagner is an internationally recognized scholar with expertise in the intersection of globalization with various forms of humanitarian, cosmopolitan, multicultural, ecological, and platform media. He is currently an Affiliated Researcher at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Lappeenranta, Finland and the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. He was formerly an Assistant Professor at University College London. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (Routledge 2011), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, and Interaction (Phaidon Press 2020), Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (Rutgers University Press 2022) and Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Visions of a Superdiverse City (Manchester University Press 2023). His peer-reviewed publications have also appeared in New Global Studies, World Art, Globalizations, Media, Culture & Society, Radical History Review, Journal of Cultural Geography, Visual Communication, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Race and Class, Journal of Film and Video, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Critical Arts, Labor History, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Third Text, among others.