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the subjects

 John Armaly
John Armaly, president and CEO of Armaly Brands, has taken the multi-generation family enterprise into its second century of business. Armaly grew up in the home-cleaning products company started by his grandfather, who began harvesting and selling natural sponges in the Caribbean in the early 1900’s. Armaly Brands has a long history of innovation in sponge technology having developed the Estracell® sponge in the 1960’s. Over the years, the Michigan-based company’s product lines have expanded to include well-known brands such as CAMEO®, SNOBOL® and PARSONS’® and, of course, Brillo®. Brillo® is considered to be one of the world’s most recognized cleaning brands as well as the inspiration for the iconic Andy Warhol sculpture.


Laura Paulson

Laura Paulson is Chairman, Americas at Christie's. Ms. Paulson is not only instrumental in guiding Christie’s global sale strategies for Post-War and Contemporary Art but also driving the company’s success across numerous departments including Impressionist and Modern Art, Old Masters, American Paintings, and Decorative Arts to name a few. In addition, Ms. Paulson has long-term relationships with museums and institutions worldwide and continues to cultivate and support partnerships for their curatorial and development projects. Over the past 30 years, Laura has built her career on establishing longstanding relationships with clients, helping them preserve their and their family’s art legacies. Ms. Paulson graduated from the University of Oregon in 1980, with a B.A. in Art History and moved to New York the same year for graduate studies in Post-War and 20th Century Art at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  A native of Portland, Oregon, Ms. Paulson lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

 

Irving Sandler
Renowned American art critic Irving Sandler has been writing about art and artists since 1956. As a writer, he is best known for a four-volume examination of post-modern art, which followed up in 2009 with a fifth major work, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience. He curated several acclaimed exhibits in the mid-20th century, and in 1972, he co-founded Artists Space, a gallery that launched the careers of numerous artists, including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari.

Kenny Schachter
Kenny Schachter has been curating contemporary art exhibits in museums and galleries for nearly 30 years. He has been the recipient of a Rockefeller supported grant, and contributed to books on Paul Thek, Zaha Hadid, Vito Acconci and Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Kenny Schachter deals in international art from Impressionist and Modernism to the art and design of today. A regular contributor to Artnet, British GQ -- and on occasion The Art Newspaper and New York Magazine, among others -- he is currently teaching a graduate seminar at the University of Zurich in art and economics.​

Nancy Mozur
Nancy Mozur is an artist, living in Los Angeles. She has also worked at Gemini GEL in 1970-1 and was co-director and curator of the Litho Shop and the art studio of painter Sam Francis from 1971-1989. Currently she is on the board of the Sam Francis Foundation and serves as an art consultant for Psychological Perspectives, a journal published by the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles.

Phung Huynh
Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice is primarily in drawing and painting. Her work investigates notions of cultural identity from a kaleidoscopic perspective, a continual shift of idiosyncratic translations. Huynh is currently represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in countries such as Germany and Cambodia. She has also completed public art commissions for the Metro Orange Line, Metro Silver Line, and the Los Angeles Zoo. Phung Huynh is Associate Professor of Art at Los Angeles Valley College. She completed undergraduate coursework at the University of Southern California, received her undergraduate degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and received her graduate degree from New York University.

Rita and Martin Skyler

Rita and Martin Skyler began collecting art in the early days of SoHo.  Rita worked as a special education teacher in the New York Public School system, while Martin worked as an assistant DA before building a career in private law practice. Beside their oldest daughter Lisanne, they also had another daughter, Tristine, who is a film producer and screenwriter, and a son, Edward, who served as the Deputy Mayor in the Bloomberg administration. During their collecting years, Rita and Marty Skyler built a collection of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and Photorealism, including artists such as Andy Warhol, Peter Young, Roy Lichtenstein and Cy Twombly.

Eric Shiner

Art historian and curator Eric Shiner began his art education as a small child, going through his grandparents’ unusual collections from books to bear and lynx skins. He studied medieval Japanese architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and interned at The Andy Warhol Museum. After graduate studies in Japan, and at Yale University, where he received an M.A.  in art history, he returned to The Andy Warhol Museum as the Milton Fine Curator of Art. He subsequently became Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, a position he held for six years. In late 2016, he was recruited by Sotheby’s to join their fine art division as senior vice president with a focus on private sales of 20th and 21st century art.  

Jessica Todd Smith
Jessica Todd Smith is the Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Prior to her arrival at the PMA, she was the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. During her tenure at The Huntington, Smith worked on three major expansions of the American galleries, in addition to exhibitions, publications, and collection development. She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Yale University.  

Daniel Wolf 
Daniel Wolf began dealing in photographs in the 1970's. He is one of the driving forces behind the rise of the photography market, and has been deeply involved in art collecting since boyhood, when he began collecting National Geographic maps. On behalf of The Getty Museum, he assembled the largest collection of important photographic works in a single institution.  Daniel Wolf is the producer of the acclaimed 2006 PBS documentary Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, directed by Ric Burns.

Charles Lutz
Charles Lutz (born 1982 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a contemporary conceptual artist. Lutz received his BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Lutz has been exhibited and done major projects with The New Museum, New York, NY, The Armory Show, New York, NY, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Artipelag Museum, Stockholm Sweden amongst others. Lutz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Peter Young
Peter Young has been described variously as the first post-modernist painter, as well as a minimalist and an abstract surrealist. Young’s paintings have continuously defied categorization since his early New York years showing with Leo Castelli and Richard Bellamy. Young was born in 1940 in Pittsburgh and grew up in Los Angeles. He studied at Pomona College for two years before moving to New York in 1960.

Peter Young's work has been included in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Guggenheim, New York; Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom; Rolf Ricke, Cologne; and Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at PS 1 and MOCA Tucson. Peter Young’s work is featured in collections in such institutions as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; University of Texas, Austin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.  Peter Young is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco.
 

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