The Bronx Museum

Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her scholarship attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production and to the study of race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. She has written on the work of Michael Richards for the Studio Museum in Harlem and is co-editor of a double-volume anthology entitled Abolition Feminisms (Haymarket Books, 2022) that includes abolitionist art practice as a crucial element of the books’ collective analyses.  

Moukhtar Kocache has over twenty five years of expertise in philanthropy, nonprofit management, curatorial practice and cultural and civil society development. Born in Beirut and raised in Paris, he has lived in Washington DC and Cairo and since 2012, divides his time between New York and Istanbul. From 2004 to 2012 he was Program Officer at the Ford Foundation’s regional office in Cairo. During his tenure, he worked on the development and sustainability of arts and culture spaces, networks and service infrastructure. He also programmed and managed a cluster of grants in support of alternative and emerging media platforms and media reform agendas, as well as a cluster of grants to support the development of local philanthropy in the MENA region. While at Ford, he also collaborated with colleagues on gender equity, HIV/AIDS and conflict/crisis management grantmaking programs.At the end of his tenure he managed a portfolio of grants that exceeded $15 million. From 1998 to 2004 he was Director of Programs and Services at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York, a leading arts council in the US where he initiated and developed residency programs, art in the public realm initiatives, exhibitions, publications, conferences and seminars as well as workshops and resources for individual artists and small arts organizations. He also closely collaborated with city departments such as MTA, Department of Cultural Affairs, Parks & Recreation, City Hall, Department of Transportation, Community Board 1 and the Port Authority of NY & NJ. He was a juror on various occasions for public works projects for Department of Cultural Affairs and MTA. During his tenure at LMCC, he directly supervised and nurtured the creative processes of hundreds of artists and small organizations.

Betti-Sue Hertz is the Director and Chief Curator at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery since 2019. Her curatorial and scholarly work focuses on the intersection of critical visual culture, transnational exchange and socially relevant issues. Trained as an artist and art historian, she is committed to the ideals of freedom of expression and the liberatory potential of the convergence of art and politics. Her curatorial projects at the Wallach include Uptown Triennial, The Protest and The Recuperation and Autumn Knight—Nothing #26: The Potential of Nothing is Everything (wallach). She was curator in residence at HOW Art Museum, Shanghai in 2018. Hertz was the Director of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 2008-2015, where she curated numerous large scale exhibitions often focused on global exchange and political agency including Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa (organized in collaboration with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Dissident Futures; Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us; Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams and Nayland Blake: Free!Love!Tool!Box! which received an award from the International Art Critic Association; among others. She was Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Diego Museum of Art from 2000-2008 where she managed the collection and curated special exhibitions including Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes, the pioneering feminist artist’s late work of parodies of Greek and Roman mythologies; and Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark, the first exhibition pairing father and son, emphasizing their early training in architecture. The traveling exhibition, Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, an in-depth consideration of cross-cultural regional developments, received the prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Award. Hertz was on the staff of the Bronx Council on the Arts from 1987-1998. While there, in 1991 she curated Las Casitas: An Urban Cultural Alternative, which was on view at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. before traveling to the Bronx Museum of Art. She was Director at the Councils’ Longwood Arts Project from 1992-1998. During that period she served as guest curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts for several exhibitions including Beyond the Border: Art by Recent Immigrants and co-curator of Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented since the 1960s. Hertz was the Executive Director of Bronx River Art Center and Gallery from 1984-1987. She has taught social art history and theory courses at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley. She was a member of Stanford Art Institute’s Creative Cities Working Group (2016-2019) and a founding member of RepoHistory (1989-2000). Hertz studied in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York with a focus on contemporary art and architectural theory, holds an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY and a BA from Goddard College.