EventsThe New Social Environment#761
Director's Series: Sumayya Vally and Aya Al-Bakree
Featuring Vally, Al-Bakree, Joachim Pissarro, and Jennifer Stockman, with Precious Okoyomon
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Architect Sumayya Vally and Thunaiyat Ad-Diriyah Foundation CEO Aya Al-Bakree join Guggenheim President Emeritus Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Precious Okoyomon.
In this Talk
Sumayya Vally

Sumayya Vally is Principal of the award-winning architecture and research, Counterspace. Vally’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions—both rooted and diasporic. Her process is often forensic and draws on the oral, aural, sound, ritual, supernatural, and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. In 2022, Vally was selected by the World Economic Forum to be one of its Young Global Leaders, and, as a TIME100 Next list honoree, has been identified as someone who will shape the future of architectural practice and canon. In April 2022, Vally was appointed to the curatorial team for the first Islamic Arts Biennale.
Aya Al-Bakree

Aya Al-Bakree is a contemporary culture specialist with over 10 years of experience in the arts in Europe and Saudi Arabia. She is CEO of the new Thunaiyat Ad-Diriyah Foundation, chaired by Saudi Culture Minister Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan, which held its first biennale of contemporary art in 2021. Al-Bakree holds a bachelor’s degree in global communications from the American University of Paris.
Jennifer Stockman

Jennifer Blei Stockman produces feature length documentary films on artists and the art world. Her current film Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV premiered at Sundance in January 2023. Stockman is President Emeritus of the GUGGENHEIM and was its President for 15 years. She is a Founder of DMINTI which brings digital and web3 fluency to the more traditional art world. Stockman is a partner of Global Museum Strategy Group. Priorly, she worked as an executive for decades in business (IBM, Sears World Trade and running her own firm, SAI) and was actively involved for years as an activist for women’s rights. She has been an avid collector of contemporary art, including NFTs, since the 90s.
Joachim Pissarro

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

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 🌈✨