A Conversation with Adam D. Weinberg, Helen Lee, and Joachim Pissarro

Curator and museum director Adam D. Weinberg became the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum in 2003. During his tenure, the Whitney has presented dozens of exhibitions on emerging, mid-career, and established artists; offered award-winning educational programs; dramatically expanded its performance program; and experienced exponential growth in the permanent collection. Under his leadership, the Museum opened its new 220,000-square-foot Renzo Piano-designed building in 2015 in the Meatpacking District. From 1999 to 2003, Weinberg served as the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover. Prior to that, he was director of education and assistant curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Collector, academic, art advisor, art book editor, and auction house specialist Helen Lee has had many roles in the art world. 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. Helen is an advisor to the Milken Institute for its art and culture programming. She is the Chairman of the American Foundation for the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she completed her post-graduate studies after earning a BA from Harvard. Helen is a board member of the Rail.

Art historian, theoretician, curator, and educator Joachim Pissarro is director of the Hunter College Galleries and Bershad Professor of Art History at Hunter College. He has held positions at the Dallas Museum of Art, Kimbell Art Museum, MoMa, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Academy of London, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Notable exhibitions Pissarro curated include Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865–1885 (2005) and Out of Time: A Contemporary View (2006, with Eva Respini), which have toured internationally. Pissarro has served as the Editorial Director of Wildenstein Publications and is the author of numerous books, most recently, Wild Art, with art critic David Carrier and published by Phaidon Press. Pisarro is Consulting Editor of the Rail.