Art Basel Awards Summit

Patronage as a force for change: a fireside chat with Joel Wachs and Ann Goldstein

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Joel Wachs, President of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York City Ann Goldstein,&nbsp;Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Large at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

In a moment when public trust is eroding and cultural narratives are fiercely contested, can patronage help build something more enduring? This exchange between Joel Wachs, President of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Ann Goldstein, Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Large at the Art Institute of Chicago, explores how philanthropic models are evolving in response to an increasingly changing artistic landscape. Goldstein will engage Wachs in a conversation about his remarkable decades of bold advocacy and leadership.
 
What does meaningful support look like? How can philanthropic initiatives, including artist-endowed foundations like the Warhol Foundation, best nurture the cultural ecosystem? Looking beyond legacy-building or symbolism, this session considers how patronage centers artists, fosters and supports experimental practices, addresses historical omissions, and helps institutions adapt to a world in flux.
This panel is part of an hour-long session exploring the agents shaping the culture of tomorrow.
Joel Wachs has been nominated in the Art Basel Awards’ Patron category. He was appointed President of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2001 after serving for 30 years as an elected member of the Los Angeles City Council, where he was a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and gained a nationwide reputation as a champion of the arts. Under Wachs’s leadership, the foundation manages an innovative grants program which has given over USD 300 million to nearly a thousand arts organizations and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 arts institutions worldwide.
Ann Goldstein is Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Large at the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining the Art Institute in 2016, she served as director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and as senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She serves on the boards of the Michael Asher Foundation, the Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation, and Primary Information, and is a member of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Fellows Forum and the Serralves Museum Advisory Committee. She received the 2012 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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