Richard Armstrong and Tom Hill with Helen Lee

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Tom Hill of the Hill Art Foundation, and Rail board member Helen Lee will discuss how art institutions and museums are adapting in our new social reality

As Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation since 2008, Richard Armstrong leads the Guggenheim Foundation and its constellation of museums, in addition to serving on the Guggenheim Foundation Board of Trustees. Previously, Armstrong was the Henry J. Heinz II Director at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1996-2008). He has also held curatorial positions at Carnegie Museum of Art (1992-96), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1981- 1992), and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California (1975-79). A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Armstrong graduated from Lake Forest College in Illinois with a BA in art history, having studied at the Université de Dijon and the Université de Paris, Sorbonne.

Over the last 30 years,Tom Hill has been involved in the museum world as an active board member of many art institutions across the country. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Friends of the High Line. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Lincoln Center Theater, where he is Chairman Emeritus, on the Investment Committee of the Smithsonian Institution; and on the Advisory Board of Christie’s. Previously, he served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, on the Board of Trustees of the Nasher Sculpture Center, and as a member of the Board of Trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Tom is an investor and has had a career in finance since graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Business School.

Tom and his wife, Janine, opened the Hill Art Foundation, a public exhibition and education space in the heart of Chelsea, in early 2019.

Helen Lee has had many roles in the art world, including collector, academic, art advisor, art book editor and auction house specialist. She has worked at Christie’s, Harry N. Abrams Publishing, the Robert Miller Gallery, and for James Wolfensohn, among others. Her passion for the arts derives from her belief that art and culture provide vital means of communication across cultural and political divides. All art forms, whether through music, theater, dance, poetry or literature, help us to make sense of the world and current events and can clarify how best to move forward. Art has the power to be eternal and has the unique ability to challenge and enrich our lives daily. Helen is an advisor to the Milken Institute for their art and culture programming. She is the Chairman of the American Foundation for the Courtauld Institute or Art, where she completed her post-graduate studies.

Helen is also a board member of the Brooklyn Rail.

The event will conclude with a poetry reading by Brandon Brown.

Brandon Brown is the author of five books of poetry and several chapbooks, as well as three collaborative volumes of Christmas poems with J. Gordon Faylor, most recently The Cloth Bag. His poems and prose have recently appeared in Art in America, Open Space, Fanzine, Art Practical, New American Writing, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Best American Experimental Writing. In 2015, he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2018 was awarded the inaugural Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing. He is an editor at Krupskaya and occasionally publishes small press materials under the imprint OMG! His newest full-length book is The Four Seasons (Wonder, 2018). He lives in El Cerrito, California.

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.