Ways of Seeing: The Jack Shear Drawing Collection

Photographer, curator, and art collector Jack Shear lives and works in Spencertown, NY. He previously collaborated with Anne Philbin on Drawn from Artists’ Collections at The Drawing Center in Spring 1999, and co-curated Twice Drawn at the Tang Teaching Museum with Director Ian Berry. Shear’s collection has previously been on view in the exhibition Borrowed Light: Selections from the Jack Shear Collection at the Tang Teaching Museum. Most recently, his drawings were on view at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. His own photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Shear is also President of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, and serves on the Drawings & Prints Committee at the Museum of Modern Art.

Artist Arlene Shechet lives and works in New York. A critically-acclaimed twenty-year survey of the artist’s work, All At Once, was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2015. Shechet has designed and curated exhibitions including Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnhold Collection at The Frick Collection, and From Here on Now at The Phillips Collection. Her large-scale public project Full Steam Ahead featured monumental porcelain and mixed media sculptures installed in Madison Square Park. Shechet’s first solo show at Pace Gallery, Skirts, opened in New York in February 2020. Shechet currently has work on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design.

Writer and curator Jarrett Earnest has contributed to publications including What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), the Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America, among many others. He has recently curated exhibitions including The Young and the Evil at David Zwirner and Closer as Love: Polaroids 1993–2007: Breyer P-Orridge at Nina Johnson. Earnest was also the editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988–2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, June 2019), TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD: Artist Interviews from the Brooklyn Rail (with Lucas Zwirner; David Zwirner Books, 2017), and FORBILL, ANYTHING: Words and Images for Bill Berkson (with Isabelle Sorrell; Pressed Wafer, 2015).

Curator and art historian Claire Gilman is Chief Curator at The Drawing Center in New York. She has organized projects that range from the first solo museum shows of artists like Torkwase Dyson, Natalie Frank, Eddie Martinez, and Curtis Talwst Santiago, to new considerations of work by established artists such as Cecily Brown, Rashid Johnson, and Terry Winters, as well as conceptually-driven group shows by Elijah Burgher, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Gilman holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has written for Art Journal, CAA Reviews, Documents, Frieze, October and has authored numerous essays for art books and museum exhibitions. Her book Drawing in the Present Tense, co-authored with Roger Malbert, is forthcoming from Thames and Hudson.

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.