First Round of 2019 City-Wide Open Studio Curators Announced!
Once again for City-Wide Open Studios 2019 Older But Younger, Artspace has invited curators for each festival weekend to visit select artists in their studios or exhibition spaces. Every participating artist will be considered for a studio visit.
Our current lineup of 2019 Curators include: Sarah Baker, Benjamin Chaffee, Connie H. Choi , Eva Mayhabal Davis, Alva G. Greenberg, Dana Karwas, Cybele Maylone, George Scheer. Visit our curator page for future announcements.
Curator Bios
Sarah Baker is the editor-in-chief of Art New England Magazine. Prior to ANE, she was a freelance radio producer for the NPR show, “On Point with Tom Ashbrook” and a freelance writer. Prior to her freelance work, she produced for The Connection on WBUR and The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC. Before all of that, she was an editor at Viking/Penguin Books and Simon & Schuster in New York City where she worked with authors Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gloria Steinem, Bob Woodward, Pagan Kennedy, Lauren Slater and many others.
Benjamin Chaffee is the Associate Director of Visual Arts in the Center for the Arts (CFA), Wesleyan University. Prior to joining the CFA, Chaffee worked as the Director of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, Illinois where he managed all aspects of the contemporary art gallery from 2012-2017. Originally from New Hampshire, he holds a BA in Earth and Environmental Science from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Studio Art: Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He previously was the Director of the Tony Wight Gallery in Chicago and has also worked at Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston. He has also worked as a freelance curator, visiting lecturer, critic, instructor, and exhibiting artist.
Connie H. Choi is the Associate Curator, Permanent Collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she has worked on the exhibitions Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Fictions, Regarding the Figure, and Their Own Harlems. Prior to joining the museum in February 2017, Choi was the assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum. She has a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University and received a B.A. in the history of art from Yale University and an Ed.M. in arts education from Harvard University.
Eva Mayhabal Davis has organized exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Bronx ArtSpace, En Foco at Andrew Freedman Home, Expressiones Cultural Center, MECA International Art Fair, and Ray Gallery. In 2020, she will be the Curator-in-Residence at Brooklyn’s Kunstraum, LLC. Eva Mayhabal was born in Mexico, raised in the United States, and studied art history at the University of Washington. She is a founding member of El Salón, a meetup for cultural producers based in NYC. Eva Mayhabal’s personal immigrant narrative drives her work in advocacy to advance equity and social justice values through the arts and culture.
Alva G. Greenberg is a 1974 graduate of Kenyon College with a major in drama. She has served on the board of the College as well as the Kenyon Festival Theater, Kenyon Review and the Gund Art Gallery. Alva started her postgraduate career as the co-owner and editor of a weekly newspaper in Old Lyme, Connecticut called The Gazette. She founded and ran the ALVA Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in New London, Connecticut and continues to work as an independent curator.
Dana Karwas, formerly of New York University (NYU), is the new director of the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCMA). Before coming to Yale, Karwas was on the NYU faculty as an Industry Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media (IDM). Galleries, museums, and festivals have also shown her work, among them the Federation of Canadian Artists’ Federation Gallery; The Helix Center NYC; the Caracas Contemporary Art Museum; the London Festival of Architecture; the Museum of the Moving Image; the Boston Museum of Science; the Chelsea Art Museum; Exit Art; and the DUMBO Arts Festival. Karwas holds a Master of Professional Studies degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Kansas’ School of Architecture, Design, and Planning.
Cybele Maylone joined The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in September of 2018 as the Executive Director. Prior to joining the Museum she was the Executive Director of UrbanGlass, an organization that supports artists creating with glass, in New York City, and held positions at apexart and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She lives in Ridgefield, CT with her husband and two daughters.
George Scheer is the co-founder and Director of Elsewhere, a living museum and artist residency set in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. George is a writer, scholar, and artist who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. Other projects include Kulturpark, a public investigation of an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin, and South Elm Projects, a curated series of place-based public art commissions for downtown Greensboro. George holds an MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications.