NEW YORK, October 19, 2017 — Nicholas Baume, Suhanya Raffel, Alex Poots, and Cassim Shepard discuss the vital need for creative public spaces in cities. This program was made possible by The Kai-Yin Lo Distinguished Program Series. (1 hr., 28 min.)

Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of the New York Public Art Fund
Alex Poots, Founding Chief Executive and Artistic Director of The Shed
Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director of the M+ Museum, part of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong
Moderated by Cassim Shepard, urbanist, filmmaker, and writer

“I’ve always believed the arts have a unique ability to benefit cities by attracting creative individuals of every kind, strengthening communities, and driving economic growth. The Shed will help New York achieve all three goals.” Michael Bloomberg

How do creative spaces empower and strengthen our cities? Leaders in the fields of art, architecture and urban planning discuss the vital need for creative public spaces, as well as the need to create opportunities for artists to share work in those spaces. Some of the most ambitious new projects in these areas have been in New York and Hong Kong, including The Shed, a project the New York Times calls a "feat of architectural engineering,” and West Kowloon District’s M+ Museum, a world-class facility for visual culture and the Public Art Fund, "mounting ambitious free exhibitions of international scope that offer the public powerful experiences."  Join Nicholas Baume (Public Art Fund), Alex Poots (The Shed), Suhanya Raffel (M+ Museum), and Cassim Shepard (urbanist, filmmaker, and writer) for an engaging conversation about the role of art in the community.

This program is made possible by The Kai-Yin Lo Distinguished Program Series which aims to create a platform to discuss the role of Asian arts and culture in contemporary society.

About the panelists:

Nicholas Baume joined the Public Art Fund as Director and Chief Curator in 2009. A native of Australia, his curatorial career began there with Kaldor Public Art Projects and later the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. He was Contemporary Curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, before moving to Boston to join the Institute of Contemporary Art as Chief Curator. Baume has curated more than 50 exhibitions with a wide range of significant international artists at different stages of their careers. Author of several major exhibition catalogs, he is a frequent public speaker on contemporary art and has contributed essays and interviews to numerous publications.

Alex Poots is the Founding Artistic Director and CEO of The Shed. For the last 20 years, Poots has commissioned and presented a wide range of leading artists. Prior to joining The Shed in 2015, he was CEO and Artistic Director of the Manchester International Festival, as well as Artistic Director of the Park Avenue Armory. Artists he has worked with include Steve McQueen; Abida Parveen; Gerhard Richter with Arvo Pärt, Björk; Steve Reich and Kraftwerk; Martha Argerich; Tino Sehgal; Igor Levit with Marina Abramovic; Paul McCarthy; John Eliot Gardner with Brothers Quay; FKA Twigs; Karlheinz Stockhausen; Trisha Donnelly; Kenneth Branagh; Kanye West; Gayle Ross; Matthew Barney; Anohni; The xx; Zaha Hadid with Alina Ibragimova and Piotr Anderszewski; La Monte Young; James Brown; Ken Kesey; Alice Walker; and Flexn.

Suhanya Raffel was appointed the Executive Director of M+ in November 2016. From 1994 to 2013, Raffel worked with Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. She has led the Gallery's flagship project 'The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' (APT) since 2002. She had worked with the APT project since 1994 as a curator. As Deputy Director of Curatorial and Collection Development, she was responsible for building up the Gallery's contemporary Asia Pacific collection, and took part in major curatorial projects such as the Andy Warhol exhibition in 2007-2008 and the China Project in 2009. Raffel is currently an advisor for the Yokohama Triennial 2017 in Japan. She is also a trustee of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and the Lunuganga Trust, Sri Lanka as well as a member of the Board of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM).

Cassim Shepard is an urbanist, filmmaker, and writer. As the founding editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, an online publication of The Architectural League of New York, he spent six years working with hundreds of local architects, designers, artists, writers, and public servants to share their stories of urban innovation. His video work has been screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Musem, and the United Nations, among many other venues around the world. Shepard teaches in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and has been a guest lecturer in the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics and a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He studied filmmaking at Harvard University, urban geography and Kings College London, and city planning at MIT. His first book, Citymakers: the Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism (Monacelli Press, 2017) is now available in bookstores.