EventsCommon Ground

Al Held Foundation & River Valley Arts Collective

Featuring Alyson Baker, Daniel Belasco, Olga Dekalo, Gabriela Salazar, and Jessica Holmes

Thursday, September 30, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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River Valley Arts Collective Founder Alyson Baker, Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation Daniel Belasco, curator Olga Dekalo, and artist Gabriela Salazar join Rail ArTonic Editor Jessica Holmes for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Louis Block.

In this Talk

Read more about the Al Held Foundation and the River Valley Arts Collective.

Gabriela Salazar: Holding Patterns is on view through October 10, 2021.

Alyson Baker

A photo of Alyson Baker on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo by Christopher Baker.
Before establishing River Valley Arts Collective in 2018, Alyson Baker was the executive director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Prior to her position at The Aldrich, she served for over eleven years as Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park. Alyson was Director of Pat Hearn Gallery (1987–1992), an Associate Director of Gagosian Gallery (1992–1997), Curatorial Assistant in the Contemporary Art Department at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and Assistant to the 1999 Carnegie International exhibition (1998–2000). Alyson is a co-founder and former President of the Long Island City Cultural Alliance. She recently served as Vice President for Programs on the national board of ArtTable. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, she graduated magna cum laude from Brown University.

    Daniel Belasco

    A photo of Daniel Belasco on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Art historian Daniel Belasco is Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation. A specialist in postwar and contemporary art, he has published essays and curated exhibitions on the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mary Reid Kelley, and many more. He previously served as Henry J. Leir Associate Curator of The Jewish Museum and Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. In 2010 Belasco co-curated (with Sarah Lewis) The Dissolve: SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial. He holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

      Olga Dekalo

      A photo of Olga Dekalo on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Photo by Darcie Abbatiello.
      Curator and educator Olga Dekalo is based in Germantown, New York. Formerly, she was Associate Curator at the University Art Museum at University at Albany. From 2016 to 2018 she was Assistant Curator at the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester, New York, where she curated and co-curated LandEscape: New Visions of the Landscape from Early 20th and 21st Centuries (2019), Object Out Loud: Arman and Nick Cave, and Affecting Images: Photography’s Pursuit of Intimacy (2017). From 2013 to 2016 she was Curatorial Associate at the non-for-profit, alternative space PARTICIPANT INC, and was involved in organizing the first New York retrospective of Greer Lankton (2014) and presented rarely seen work and ephemera by Martin Wong (2016).

      Gabriela Salazar

      Born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico, artist Gabriela Salazar examines the relationship of the built environment and material histories to our sense of self and place. She has had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart, The Bronx River Arts Center, among many others. On October 10, 2021, Salazar’s commissioned work Low Relief for High Water will be presented in Washington Square Park (NYC) by The Climate Museum (postponed from 2020). Salazar currently has a solo show curated by Olga Dekalo with River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, in Boiceville, NY.

      Jessica Holmes

      A photo of Jessica Holmes on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

      Jessica Holmes, a co-editor of the Artseen section for the Brooklyn Rail, has also contributed to its pages for over a decade. Her writing has also featured in BOMB, Hyperallergic, The New York Observer, Vanity Fair Spain, among many others, and has been included in over two dozen exhibition catalogues and monographs. Previously, Jessica worked for the Calder Foundation for nearly two decades, including six years as its Deputy Director.

      The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

      Dao Strom

      A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

      We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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