Board of Directors
George H. Waterman III – President and Treasurer
George graduated from Harvard College where he studied Art History. He was on the first board of directors of the Dia Art Foundation. He has been a member of the Harvard Overseers Committee to Visit the Art Museums, the Collection Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Library Committee of The Museum of Modern Art. He has been a trustee of the Archives of American Art and the Rhode Island School of Design. For most of the last 40 years, he has been and continues to be a member of the Museum Committee of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Susan P. Firestone – Director
Susan is a practicing artist and art psychotherapist in private practice in New York. She received a MA in painting from American University. She was active at the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, and exhibited her work at Gallery K.
After relocating to New York, Susan completed a graduate degree in art therapy from New York University. After 9/11 she worked for FEMA and the Red Cross with traumatized patients and students, after the completion of training in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at The Institute of Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Finding that the work in art therapy was valuable in healing, Susan did research on the creative process with women artists who had life threatening illnesses, for her PhD in Expressive Therapy at Lesley University. She currently is an adjunct professor and continues her research on PTSD and the history of medicine.
Susan is a trustee of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Jorie Marshall Waterman – Director
Jorie Waterman is VP, Internet Marketing and Customer Acquisition at Shutterfly.Inc. She is a recognized leader in her space and has experience working with some of the World’s largest companies, including: eBay, ExxonMobil, the U.S. Army, J.P. Morgan Chase, Toys R Us, and more. An adept manager, educator, and public speaker with a history of achievement growing global operations, Jorie has launched and driven initiatives that enhance positioning and ignite growth through content, technology, and analytical strategy. Jorie graduated from Harvard in 1996 with a degree in comparative religion and grew up in the contemporary art world.
Board of Advisors
Frieda Arth – New York
After a few years of federal government experience, and many years of retail, event planning, nonprofit management, and general business experience, in the Washington DC area, Frieda moved to Santa Fe in the ‘90s and became actively engaged on boards and committees of organizations including SITE Santa Fe, Marion Center for Photographic Arts, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, National Hispanic Cultural Center, and New Mexico Women’s Foundation.
Elizabeth C. Baker – New York
Betsy Baker, was Editor of Art in America for 34 years from 1974 until 2008. Under her leadership Art in America grew from a bimonthly publication with a circulation of around 45,000 to a monthly with a circulation of more than 75,000, featuring the writing of many influential critics. During her tenure, Art in America secured a place for itself as a thorough, scholarly yet accessible journal devoted, despite its name, to art of broad geographical and historical scope. Baker studied art history at Bryn Mawr and Harvard (B.A. & M.A., respectively), and was a Fulbright scholar in Paris. Before joining Art in America, she was associate editor and then managing editor of Art News where she was a protégé of veteran Art News editor Thomas B. Hess. She has taught history of art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City; Wheaton College in Norton, Mass.; and Boston University, and has written on a wide range of contemporary artists.
Erró
Erró is an Icelandic Pop artist known for his work in collage. He reassembles imagery from a variety of popular sources including advertisements, comics, and posters, earning him comparisons to earlier Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist. He was born Guðmundur Guðmundsson in 1932 in Ólafsvík, Iceland and studied engraving, fresco, and painting at the Academy of Oslo. He began exhibiting his work in the mid-1950s, and in 1989 he donated his archives to the City of Reykjavik, establishing the Erró Collections within the Reykjavik Art Museum. In 2000, the Icelandic Parliament awarded him the Honorary Artists Stipend, and the following year, a museum dedicated to his work opened in Reykjavik. A major retrospective of 50 years’ worth of his collages was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2010.
Helen Frederick – Fairfax VA
Helen is recognized as a distinguished artist, curator, educator, coordinator of international projects, and as founder of Pyramid Atlantic, a center for contemporary printmaking, hand papermaking and the art of the book. She has served on the directorial boards of alternative art spaces in Washington, national boards including the College Art Association, and national peer-review panels. Her work has been exhibited at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Henie-Onstad Museum, Norway, the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, the collections of the Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others. She is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Art at George Mason University, and has fulfilled speaking engagements around the world, always emphasizing collaboration across disciplines. Her passion for diverse cultures and histories has led her to observe many societies, their skills, and ideas, and to make connections among disparate cultural traditions. Helen’s private Reading Road Studio in Silver Spring, MD, provides collaborative opportunities for artists interested in works in and on paper, constructions, artist books, and critical conversations about social justice, cultural and visual literacy. In 2008, Helen received the Southern Graphic Council International Printmaker Emeritus Award and was invited into the Feminist Art Base archive, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Gunnar Kvaran – Oslo
Gunnar was born in Reykjavik, Iceland. He took his PhD in history of art in 1986 from the University of Provence, in Aix-en-Provence. From 1983-86 he was director of the Asmundur Sveinsson sculpture museum in Reykjavik; from 1986-97, of the Museum of Modern Art in Reykjavik; and from 1997-2001 of the Museum of Art in Bergen, Norway. Gunnar was the curator of the Iceland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale from 1984 to 1990. Since 2001 he has been director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. Recent exhibitions he has curated and organized include In the Name of the Artists: exhibition From the Astrup Fearnley Collection at the São Paulo Biennial in 2011; exhibitions by Ernesto Neto, Nate Lowman, Charles Ray and Richard Prince; and also retrospectives of Yoko Ono and Jeff Koons.
Edward Lucie-Smith – London
Edward is a poet, art critic and prolific art-book writer, Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at in Kingston, Jamaica. He studied at King’s School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford. He is an internationally known art critic and historian, who also is a published poet and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, an anthologist, and a practicing photographer. He has published more than a 100 books, including Movements in Art Since 1945, and Visual Arts of the 20th Century. He has been curator of multiple exhibitions and his work as a photographer is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio, the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, the Frissiras Museum, Athens, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, and the City Art Gallery, Helsinki.
Peter Nagy – New Delhi
Peter, born in Bridgeport, CT, and currently represents many of the top 20 contemporary artists in India. He was trained and worked as an artist and gallery owner in the U.S. Peter’s art was exhibited throughout America and Europe during the 1980s. He was co-founder of Gallery Nature Morte with artist Alan Belcher.
Hans Ulrich Obrist – London
Hans was named art’s most powerful figure in 2009, by Art Review, and second most powerful in 2010. He is co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. Prior to this he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. In 2012, he co-curated Jonas Mekas, Thomas Schütte, Faces and Figures, Yoko Ono, TO THE LIGHT, Herzog & de Meuron, Ai Weiwei Pavilion, and the Memory Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Also, To the Moon via the Beach, LUMA Foundation, Arles; Lina Bo Bardi, Casa de Vidro, Sao Paolo; a call for unrealized projects, DAAD and e-flux, Berlin. Hans recent publications include: A Brief History of Curating, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks with Rem Koolhaas, Ai Weiwei Speaks, along with new volumes of his Conversation Series.
Park, Seo-Bo – Seoul
Park is a South Korean painter. At 83, he is regarded as a leader of Korean modernism, and a father figure of Korean contemporary art, along with Lee Ufan and Kim Tschang Yeul. Park was born in 1931 in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, South Korea. He studied at the Hong-Ik University, Seoul before graduating in 1954, and in 2000 he received an honorary doctorate from the same institution. He founded the Seo-Bo Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul, in 1994 and remains its president.
Special Thanks to Special People
Visual Art Library’s Team
Hoyt, Filippetti, Malaghan, LLC Certified Public Accountants
Don Allen, Bookkeeper
Donna Ruggs, Operations Manager
Building Assistance:
Dan Atkinson
Jay Brennen
Dan Lynch
Tom McGonigal
Gary Mastrandra
Andy Jones, firebrandDESIGNS
Mike Marchand, Ajar Communications
Besides the cultural value I feel in my doing so, I also sense the thrill of participating in a quiet unremitting discourse that will last longer than my lifetime.
Lucio Pozzi,
Artist/Painter
It is remarkable in this day and age that people still have a profound passion for real books.
It is even more remarkable that someone would take the time and go to great expense to
collect, and to preserve them. And yet just occasionally these wonderful books can find
themselves in the hands of someone, at exactly the right time and place in their lives. And the
opening of just one book can start them on an endless journey for the rest of their lives. The
book covers open as doors to rooms of unimaginable interest and beauty, leading you further
and deeper into the greatest palace of the entire world, that of knowledge.
Needless to say I have an absolute passion for books, and a profound belief in the power of
them to transform lives. This passion was nurtured in a free library, and still continues today.
With each new publication of a book or catalogue about my work, I donate copies to George
Waterman’s exceptional library. And each time that I do this I am reminded of myself as a child
discovering my passion in life at my small local library in London.
Paul Harbutt,
Artist, Hudson, NY
I’ve donated catalogues and cash to the Visual Art Library project which I think is way cool.
Ron Cooper,
Artist
I learned to read and write when I was three years old, playing games with my father. Since then I have never quit reading. Omnivore. Fairytales, fiction, history, comics. I even read advertising bulletins before throwing them away. Certainly, today, the computer has taken over with the Internet’s convenience and speed, giving information and enticing us to surf even more. But a physical book is irreplaceable for deep reading. And for me, it’s my first love. I have known George Waterman and his commitment to art and surroundings for many years. I consider the work he has done to build the “biggest” library of books and catalogues of art from around the world just great. Congratulations George!
Carmengloria Morales,
Artist, Italy