A Tribute to Alain Kirili

Real estate developer, literary agent, author, philanthropist, and activist Francis Greenburger is founder of Time Equities Inc., Art Omi, Inc., and the Greenburger Center for Social & Criminal Justice. Mr. Greenburger is the Chairman of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates (SJGA), a literary agency founded by his father in 1932 that represents many world renowned and best-selling authors. In 1992 he founded Art Omi, a sculpture and architecture park and arts center which provides residencies for visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians, and architects from all over the world. He was awarded the insignia of chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government because of his commitment to the arts and his founding of the Omi International Arts Center.

Skilled and expressive dancer Maria Mitchell has shared the bill with such jazz greats as Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, Billy Bang, and other innovative musical improvisers. Capturing the eye of international audiences, Mitchell’s expressive style, fierce energy, and sensitive timing display an impressive range of dance training and other influences on her work. These include modern and jazz techniques, traditional West African movement, the healing arts, and a long-standing passion for African American literary work. Her many years as a gifted educator working with children, teachers, and community social workers has earned her a reputation as an intuitive and highly effective educator.

Writer, artist, critic, art historian, curator, and educator Robert C. Morgan PhD is knowledgeable in the history and aesthetics of both Western and Asian art, Morgan has lectured widely, written hundreds of critical essays (translated into twenty languages), published monographs and books, and curated numerous exhibitions. His writing has been published in Art in America, Arts, Art News, Art Press (Paris), Sculpture Magazine, and Hyperallergic. He is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of several books, published in the United States and in Europe and Asia. He writes about art for the Brooklyn Rail and is regarded by some as a hard-edge painter.

Critic, poet, and author Carter Ratcliff has written books on Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Marisol, Gilbert & George, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Bacon, and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975. His writings on art have appeared in exhibition catalogues, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is a contributing editor of Art in America and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, and the 2013 Annual T-Space Poetry Award.

Artist Dorothea Rockburne was born in Montréal, and lives and works in New York. She attended Black Mountain College, Ashville, NC (1950-1954) where she studied with Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg among other contemporaries. In the last decade, Rockburne has been the subject of three significant survey exhibitions, including the preeminent Dorothea Rockburne, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY (2018-ongoing); Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself, MoMA, New York, NY (2013-2014); and In My Mind’s Eye, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY (2011); among others.

Artist Rebecca Smith was born in Glens Falls, NY and is the daughter of the writer Jean Freas and the artist David Smith. She grew up in Washington, D.C. and Bolton Landing, and attended Sarah Lawrence College and The New York Studio School. First exhibiting in 1977, she has been making art since the late 1970s, in various media including painting, performance, sculpture and tape drawing installations. In 2018, she joined the David Smith Estate as co-president. Since 2005 Smith has explored ways to render global warming through visual languages. Fifteen years of sculpture and drawing inspired by climatic forces was presented in a 2018 survey exhibition at the Maier Museum, Randolph College, Lynchburg, Virginia.

Artist, writer, and independent curator Phong H. Bui is Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. Among many other awards, Bui received The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize for Arts Writers in 2017, was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021.