Sarah Schrank joins us as the new Co-Chair of PAD. Sarah will be succeeding Cher Krause Knight. Sarah is an Associate professor of history at California State University, Long Beach and the book review editor of Southern California Quarterly. She has recently authored Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles. Public art concerns and controversies have been an important component to Sarah’s professional and community service in southern California; she has been involved with the preservation of the Watts Towers, the Noah Purifoy Desert Museum, and Long Beach Navy Memorial Trust’s historic sites for the better part of the past decade.
Jennifer Favorite joins us as Archivist/Historian of the organization. In this new role, Jennifer will keep record of the activities, news, and initiatives pertaining to the organization, working in tandem with all officers and committees of PAD by receiving minutes of the annual meeting, record of nominations and voting for the annual award, and review of proposals for the PAD-sponsored session at CAA. Jennifer K. Favorite is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center living in Brooklyn while working on her dissertation, "Added Museums at U.S. War Memorials and the Reinterpretation of National History." Her research interests include public art in the U.S. after 1945, twentieth-century architecture, memorials in the U.S. and abroad, and the cultural and political uses of public space. This past October, along with fellow PAD members Marisa Lerer and Renee McGarry, she co-organized the POPS Art Project, an event conceived in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street that asked a group of artists to come together in a privately-owned public space to make and exhibit work for an afternoon.
PAD member Sierra Rooney joins us as Secretary, filling the vacancy left by Mary Tinti, who continues as Journal Assistant for Public Art Dialogue. In this role, Sierra will record the minutes of each meeting and distribute them before the annual meeting. She will also represent PAD at a variety of other events and meetings. Sierra Rooney’s research interest includes expanding the dialogue between museology and public art practice. She graduated in 2010 from City College of New York with a MA in Museum Studies. For her master’s thesis she examined Vita Brevis, a public art initiative at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as a successful example of the role public art can play in a museum. Sierra has interned at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Percent for Art Program, and Creative Time. Currently, she is teaching as an adjunct at City College.
PAD member Marisa Lerer joins us as Public Relations/Marketing Coordinator. In this new role, Marisa will send information regarding meetings, activities, or events to individuals and organizations outside of the PAD membership, including the College Art Association. Marisa Lerer is a Ph.D. candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is writing her dissertation, “30,000 Reasons to Remember: Artistic Strategies for Memorializing Argentina’s Disappeared.” Her research interests include art in the public sphere, spatial politics, the material culture of memory, and modern and contemporary art in Latin America. This past fall, along with fellow PAD members Jennifer K. Favorite and Renee McGarry, she co-organized the POPS Art Project, which used a Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) as an artist’s studio and gallery to create and display ephemeral artworks in solidarity with the Occupy Everywhere movement. She teaches the history of art and design at Parsons The New School for Design, and is currently a fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics.