Monday, January 22nd, 2024
7:00PM - 8:30PM
Panelists
Lori Antonacci, co-founder and founding president of Artists Talk on Art
Albert Dépas, artist, poet and educator, founder of Fessings Coaching Service
Vernita Nemec, director of Viridian Artists Gallery, former director of Artists Talk on Art
Moderator
Doug Sheer, co-founder and president of Artists Talk on Art
Lori Antonacci is a co-founder of Artists Talk On Art. She served on the ATOA board from 1974-1990 and 2001-2011, was its founding president, treasurer and executive director, and currently co-chairs the ATOA Archives Committee. Antonacci has a BA in visual art, film and video from Bradley University. She served on the Artist’s Certification Committee Appeals Board of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and as an officer and board member of the Artists Housing Coalition, Foundation for the Community of Artists, Artists Community Federal Credit Union, New York Women’s Agenda, and Women’s City Club of New York. She was also an adjust academic advisor and instructor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University for 25 years.
Antonacci began her career in New York City as a video producer and documentary filmmaker, and is now an independent marketing and development consultant whose clients have included American Express, Scientific American, University Magazine Network, the United Nations, Canon USA, Toshiba, Zeiss International, South Orange Performing Arts Center, 1M1B Foundation, and the Spark Fund. She also served as director of development for Heights and Hills, fundraising and events executive for LiveOn NY, director of marketing and events for Chief Executive Group, sales development specialist for Forbes, and promotion director for Crain’s New York Business.
Albert Dépas is a Haitian-American, visual-artist, poet and educator. Through the creative process, Dépas explores the notion of self, identity and consciousness. In this search, he considers the individual self as well as the different constructs of identity within our society.
Dépas’ artworks have been exhibited, mostly, in the United States. His works have, also, been shown in Haiti, Canada and Europe. His artworks and poetry have been published in several publications. He is the author of Metamorphosis of Joy, a collection of poetry, published in 1996 by Mega Press. He is also the creator / founder of Fessings, a process for self-coaching, that offers the opportunity for maximizing one’s potential.
Dépas holds a Bachelor Degree in Visual Studies from the New School for Public Engagement, in New York City, a Master Degree in Special Education, from (CCNY) –City University of New York, and a Master Degree in International Education, from (NYU) New York University.
Vernita Nemec served as director of Artists Talk On Art, interviewing art world luminaries and creating evenings of artists presenting 5 minute performances. In 2001 she became and still is, the director of Viridian Artists Gallery in Chelsea.
Nemec has independently curated exhibits since 1994, first at Henry Street Settlement Art Center. She has continued to independently curate extensive group exhibitions of art from recycled materials, entitled Art from Detritus for which she received both a Kaufmann Foundation Grant and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Nemec also organized one of the first feminist exhibits in 1969, X-12, and in 2022 co-curated an exhibit of NYC women artists from the 70’s who are still making art at Carter Burden Gallery in Chelsea.
Vernita Nemec completed her BFA cum laude at Ohio University, receiving a NDEA Grant to finish her Master’s work at New York University. Since then, she has presented more than 30 solo exhibitions of her visual art and over 60 performance artworks, receiving grants from the Jerome Foundation, Artists Space, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, Movement Research at Judson, The Field, Artist’s Space, NEA & others. Her visual and performance art has been presented in the U.S. and internationally in Mexico, Hungary, Germany, Japan, Ireland and France. She continues to write poetry, sometimes incorporating it into her visual & performance works. Her most recent art has been environmentally motivated, first, creating art from junkmail and currently sculptural works from plastic discards which she will be presenting in a solo exhibit in February 2024.
Doug Sheer is the only child of two painters who were WPA artists, Artist Union members and Hans Hofmann students in NYC and Provincetown and he grew up in New York's Greenwich Village. He was educated in NYC including Rhodes School where Pop artist Jim Dine was his art teacher and at Rhode Island School of Design.
A painter, he was a pioneering video artist who ran the Egg Store video facility in Tribeca in the 1970s and served fellow video artists including Nam-June Paik, Charlotte Moorman,Twyla Tharp, Bill Viola, Merce Cunningham, Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono. Some of his recent paintings can be seen at www.douglasisheer.com and background on his art life and the history of Artists Talk on Art can be viewed on the Woodstock Library YouTube channel in a talk delivered on October 29th, 2022. Just visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXisevryJgQ to watch it.
In 1974 he was a co-founder of Artists Talk on Art, www.atoanyc.org the art world's preeminent forum which has featured 8,500 artists in over 1,000 recorded panels and dialogues. He was board chairman and became chairman emeritus in 2019. He currently serves as its president. The ATOA archive resides at Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution of which Sheer was archivist. https://www.aaa.si.edu/search/collections?edan_q=ATOA
He has shown his abstract paintings widely. He has served as a board member of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and currently serves on its exhibition committee. He is also a member of the education committee of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. He created and ran the Byrdcliffe Forum during the pandemic period and was the producer of its Zoom programs including its ten part "Woodstock Masters" series events (found on the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild channel on YouTube) and curated an exhibit of those artists called "Sense of Place" in August and September of 2022.