The Future Of Leadership
Shaun Leonardo and Allison Freedman Weisberg of Recess
June 8, 2021 | 4:00 - 5:00pm EDT

Recess, a nonprofit in Brooklyn partnering with artists to build caring and accountable creative communities, recognizes the work to make equity possible and acts on their collective vision, with the conviction that their decisions within the organization have a ripple effect into their surrounding ecosystem. Join Co-Directors Leonardo and Weisberg as they discuss the enactment of values-driven, embodied leadership.
We invite artists and arts workers from both the for-profit and non-profit art worlds to learn from their experiences, and use that knowledge to engage in a process of looking inward to develop structural changes in your communities.
About the Speakers
Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with accompanying notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for court-involved youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess where he is now Co-Director—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.
Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, is a recipient of support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass, and was recently profiled in The New York Times. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, with his solo exhibition, “The Breath of Empty Space,” is currently on view at the Bronx Museum.
Allison Freedman Weisberg is the Founder and Co-Director of Recess. She approaches all of her work through a racial justice lens, collaborating with radical thinkers who reimagine an equitable future. Prior to founding Recess, she worked in the Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has given lectures and presentations at colleges, universities, arts institutions, and Museums, and has curated performances for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Performa, and The Museum of Modern Art. She has contributed writing to publications ranging from artist books to Art in America. She is a Critical Dialogue Partner for the Studio Museum in Harlem, on the Board of The Van Alen Institute, and the Advisory Board of Art+Feminism. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MA in Visual Culture Theory from NYU.
Courses
Amy Whitaker
Author, Faculty Member at New York University
Holding an MFA and an MBA, Amy studies the friction between art and business and proposes new structures to support economic sustainability for artists. Her third book, Economics of Visual Arts, was published in the fall of 2021 with Cambridge University Press. Amy is also author of two other books, Museum Legs and Art Thinking. Serving on the arts administration faculty at NYU, Amy researches what would happen if artists retained equity in their work. Her work on fractional equity has appeared in Management Science (with Kraussl) in the "Fast Track" intended for "high-impact research that is of broad interest.”
Amy's work has been featured in The Guardian, Harpers, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Artforum, and The Art Newspaper. Her early work with the artists' cooperative project Trade School was covered in the New York Times and The New Yorker. She speaks widely including at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Meaning Conference (Brighton, UK), and The Conference (Malmö, Sweden). She has taught at Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and California College of the Arts, and is a past recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Image © Shieva Rezvani

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