VIRTUAL GALA

JUNE 23rd | 7:30 - 8:30 PM

HONORING:

RITA and WALDO FALKENER

AGNES DENES

BENJAMIN LEV

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

MARC MORIAL

President and CEO of the National Urban League

MC:

TIM HALPERN

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ONLINE ART AUCTION WITH ARTSY THROUGH JUNE 24th, 5pm

ABOUT OUR HONOREES

For over 15 years Rita and Waldo Falkener have been members of the Friends of Education (“FOE”) committee with MoMA, whose purposes are to assist in expanding MoMA’s collection of art by African American artists and in increasing the attendance of African American visitors to the museum. Artists whose works have been exhibited at MoMA through the efforts of FOE include Roy De Carava, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White among a great many others.

Together, Rita and Waldo have collected art for a period of more than 40 years, where they have focused primarily, albeit not exclusively, on works of art created by African American artists and indigenous African art. The preeminent artist in their collection is Edward Clark, a pioneer abstract painter of the New York School who is represented by Hauser & Wirth and a very close personal friend of theirs who recently passed in 2019.

In December of 2018 Rita and Waldo contributed a painting by Michael Nedjar entitled “Bellville” and 8 African sculptures to the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, Waldo’s alma mater. In addition, they have contributed many paintings and other art objects to the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club over many years.

As a child growing up, Rita became interested in art and would later pursue these interests by studying fashion design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, followed by a focus in the fine arts at Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France. After working independently as a fashion designer and thereafter as a fashion illustrator, she became an interior designer and has continued in this profession for over 30 years, combining her love for interacting with people with her love for art by leading her clients to more fully enjoy the environments they live in. Waldo, who completed his studies in Law at Columbia University and works as a real estate attorney, found great inspiration in Rita’s creative background and her interests in art, which have contributed to their lives as a very active art collecting team.

For Rita and Waldo, education and arts education were the cradle and the spirit on which they grew up to love and cherish. Waldo’s father, who served as a City Council member in public service, was honored in 2002 by having a pre-K and elementary school in Greensboro, NC named after him as the Waldo C. Falkener Elementary School. Waldo’s mother, Margaret Falkener, Waldo’s sister, Margaret De Lorme (she incorporated art education as a part of the teaching process), Rita’s mother, Vivian Johnson, and Rita’s sister, Harolyn Ivy, were all educators. Rita and her fellow members of the Metro-Manhattan Links, through mentoring and other programs, have fostered the broad-based education of minority youth in Harlem that has impacted many young people and will continue to do so for years to come.

Agnes Denes, a primary figure among the concept-based artists who emerged in the 1960's and 1970's, is internationally known for works created in a wide range of mediums. Investigating science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music, Denes's artistic practice is distinctive in terms of its aesthetics and engagement with socio-political ideas.

As a pioneer of environmental art, she created Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York, acknowledged as the first site-specific piece with ecological concerns. In 1982, with the support of the Public Art Fund she planted and harvested two acres of wheat in the financial district in Lower Manhattan creating the internationally acclaimed Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Lower Manhattan, which has been called "one of Land art's great transgressive masterpieces." Among her many other achievements is Tree Mountain–A Living Time Capsule, a monumental earthwork, reclamation project and the first man-made virgin forest, in Ylöjärvi, in western Finland. She is currently proposing A Forest for New York, envisioned to occupy the 120 acres of barren land that comprises the Edgemere landfill in Queens.

Born in Hungary in 1931, Agnes Denes was raised in Sweden and educated in the US. She has completed public and private commissions in North and South America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and participated in more than 600 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world including, among others, solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); the ICA, London (1979); the Kunsthalle Nürnburg (1982); the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY (1992); Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA (2003); the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2008); the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2012); and FirstSite, Colchester, UK (2013). Her work has also been featured in such international surveys as the Biennale of Sydney (1976); Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977); the Venice Biennale (1978), and Documenta 14, Kassel and Athens (2017). Her works are represented in the collections of an extensive list of major institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Denes is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); M.I.T's highly prestigious Eugene McDermott Achievement Award "In Recognition of Major Contribution to the Arts" (1990); the Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome (1998); the Watson Trans-disciplinary Art Award from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); the Ambassador's Award for Cultural Diplomacy for Strengthening the Friendship between the US and the Republic of Hungary through Excellence in Contemporary Art (2008); a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2015). She will be an Arts Innovation, Impact honoree at The Phillips Collection Gala this spring in Washington, DC.

Agnes Denes holds honorary doctorates from Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin and Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. She has lectured extensively throughout the US and abroad and participates in global conferences. She is the author of six books and is featured in numerous other publications on a wide range of subjects in art and the environment.

A highly critically acclaimed, comprehensive survey including newly commissioned sculptures by the artist opened at The Shed, New York through March 22, 2020.

Agnes Denes is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. Please visit the artist's website and read her full bio

Benjamin Lev listens to the same music he did in 1994, when he was a middle school student in Las Vegas, Nevada (think “Electric Relaxation” by A Tribe Called Quest). This, and the cognitive science that supports the idea that our passions borne in adolescence follow us into adulthood, is the impetus behind the 21 different school day electives, and 20 different after school clubs, that he supports as the Founding Principal at Hamilton Grange Middle School on Harlem’s 138th Street. Lev believes that middle school is the time when we begin to determine who we are, who we want to be, how we want to see ourselves, and how we want others to see us, and therefore, exposure to a vast array of opportunities at this time is central in building curious, and passionate New Yorkers. It is this belief that led Lev to seek out CITYarts as his after school arts partner.

Lev is the son of a devout Catholic mother and an observant Jewish father whose weekly trips to both church and temple during his childhood led him to literally fear G-d. He credits that fear as a major factor in helping him survive, and thrive even, during his turbulent, middle school years in Las Vegas, Nevada. But even more than religion, Lev notes that between 0 and 3 years of age, the most formative period of growth in our lives, he likely received the type of care and attention necessary to foster the development of executive functioning skills, or what he sees as the most foundational attributes necessary for success in school, relationships, and more generally, life.

He graduated from UCLA in 2004 with a degree in English, and moved to New York City as a member of Teach for America on the day of his commencement ceremony in Westwood. He taught in elementary and middle schools for seven years, in both Bedford Stuyvesant and Manhattan. While teaching in Washington Heights in 2009, Lev's students nearly doubled the Citywide proficiency rate for Blacks and Latinos, when 86% scored at the proficient level or higher on the 8th grade New York State math exam (in a year when just 44% of Black and Latino students Citywide earned that same distinction).

Lev joined the administrative ranks in 2011, becoming the assistant principal for curriculum and instruction at PS 192 in Harlem, where he authored a curriculum across all subjects in grades 3 -5 that in just two years, saw the school increase its rank by test scores from the 30th to the 70th percentile citywide. He then took advantage of a Bloomberg-era program that encouraged visionary thinking in designing new, district schools within the Department of Education and founded the Hamilton Grange Middle School in the summer of 2014. Harkening back to his own middle school days, Lev made it a central tenet of Hamilton Grange to explicitly teach the same executive functioning skills that he saw as the essential ingredient to success in school and in life, skills whose development is often retarded by stressors induced by poverty. He also did away with traditional approaches to school discipline such as detentions and suspensions, instead choosing to collaborate with students in building the lagging skills that manifest in challenging behaviors in the classrooms.

Now in its sixth year, Hamilton Grange Middle School has been recognized at the City, State, and National level for its innovative and successful approach to educating the children of Upper Manhattan. In 2018, the school was recognized by the New York State Department of Education as the #1 middle school in the entire state, for the progress its students made on their state exams, and it has twice been named a NYC Department of Education Showcase School (1 of just 43 schools to receive this honor across 1,800 schools citywide) for its novel approach to school discipline. In the 2018-19 school year, Hamilton Grange was just 1 of 4 schools nationwide to be named a School to Learn From by Teach for America. The school has been visited by dignitaries and educators from over 24 states and 4 countries, by both Chancellors of the NYC Department of Education who have presided over the City’s schools since its founding, by numerous politicians, and by heads of educational and leadership organizations.