ArtTable’s 2021 Annual Benefit
ArtTable’s 2021 Annual Benefit and Award Ceremony took place virtually on Friday, April 16, 2021. ArtTable members and supporters from around the world tuned in to celebrate our amazing honorees, ArtTable’s impactful work, and each other! We heard heartfelt messages from both 2020 and 2021 Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts Awardees, Susan Unterberg and Barbara Tober; gained fresh perspectives from the 2020 New Leadership Awardees, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Erin Christovale, Lauren Haynes, and Jami Powell as well as our 2021 New Leadership Awardee La Tanya S. Autry; welcomed special guests; and made new connections at the virtual networking event.
Our benefit was a wonderful culmination of our 40th Anniversary celebrations. After a year that taught us the value of supporting one another, it was an affirmation of the importance and power of the ArtTable community.
There is still time to give! Please consider making a fully tax-deductible contribution.
Media Gallery
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ArtTable is a place for connection. ArtTable is supportive. ArtTable is a space for women to grow and collaborate. ArtTable is necessary, important, strong, and fearless. ArtTable is belonging. ArtTable is fun. ArtTable is a place where women always have a seat at the table.
2020 Digital Benefit Program Journal
Although we were unable to join together in person to celebrate our 2020 Benefit, the digital journal is now available for viewing as a digital publication!
2021 Benefit Co-Chairs
Helen Drutt English
Susan K. Freedman
Lowery Stokes Sims
2021 Benefit Host Committee & Supporters
Fellowship Program Supporters
Agnes Gund
Barbara Tober and the Acronym Fund
40th Anniversary Supporters
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Gold Supporters
BNY Mellon
Citi
Susan Unterberg
Bronze Supporters
Estrellita Brodsky
Carol Cole Levin
Marieluise Hessel-Artzt
Leadership Supporters
Ellen Cantrowitz
Paula Cooper
Carol Goldberg
Raymond Learsy
Sheila McDaniel
Robert and Joyce Menschel Family Foundation
Executive Supporters
Anonymous
Arlene Bascom
Catherine Behrend
Annette Blaugrund, PhD
Marna Clark
Helen W. Drutt English
First Republic Bank
Cynthia Manocherian
Kathie Foley-Meyer
Milly Glimcher
Nohra Haime
Ms. Donna Harkavy
The Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder Foundation
Maria Eugenia Maury
Katie Adams Schaeffer
Ellen Taubman
Friend Supporters
Peg Alston
Ms. Brooke Davis Anderson
Julie Armistead
Felice Axelrod
Laura Blanco
Amelia Brankov
Ms. Sylvia Brown
Dorothy Davila
Karen DeTemple
Elisa Glazer
Kat Griefen
Lesley Heller
Julia P. Herzberg
Charles Howard
Elizabeth Madigan Jost
Kathryn Keane
Corina Larkin
Mrs. Regan Lynn Larroque
Ms. Kirsten D Shilakes
Jessica Silverman
Patricia Specter
Masha Turchinsky
Katherine Wilson-Milne
About the Honorees
2021 Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts Awardee

Susan Unterberg is a New York-based photographer and philanthropist, whose poetic photographic and video work explores the psychological complexities of intimate relationships, especially familial ones, as well as nature and broader political themes. She has been represented by the Lawrence Miller Gallery, and later Yancey Richardson Gallery,and her work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and abroad at such institutions as the New Museum, the International Center of Photography, and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Unterberg is represented in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artists Program, the American Academy in Rome, and Bogliasco. In 2019 she was awarded NYU’s Distinguished Alumni Award, as well as being honored at the Skowhegan Awards Dinner.
2020 Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts Awardee

After fifteen years as Chairman of the Museum of Arts and Design, Barbara Tober is now Chairman Emerita and head of MAD’S Education Commitee and International Council. She is President of The Acronym Fund, a firm that invests in art-related projects such as CODAworx, a global online hub for commissioned artwork where Mrs. Tober serves on the Advisory Board. She is an active member of the Amati group at the Metropolitan Museum, Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, Central Park Conservancy, Friends of Wethersfield, and the Dutchess Land Conservancy. Prior to her career in the world of design and craftsmanship, Mrs. Tober spent over four decades in corporate advertising and magazines, the majority of which was at Conde Nast Publications where she was Editor-in-Chief of BRIDES Magazine for 30 years. She atended the Traphagen School of Fashion, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and The New York School of Interior Design. She has traveled extensively throughout the world and collects works by established as well as emerging artists, such as Dale Chihuly, Bernar Venet, Michelle Oka Doner, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Oterness, Olga de Amaral, William Morris, Bety Woodman, and Lino Tagliapietra.
2021 New Leadership Awardee

As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, La Tanya S. Autry centers collective care in her liberatory curatorial praxis. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public discussion about the Black liberation struggle and engenders fighting anti-Blackness through the collective imagining of public art interventions, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums, and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography. Her latest project, the Black Liberation Center, is an experimental series of exhibitions, workshops, and programming spotlighting arts and culture that envision and strategize paths toward the freedom of all Black people, and, thus, all people.
Read More About La Tanya S. Autry
La Tanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at moCa Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, and other institutions. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, La Tanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation “The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America,” analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment and concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.
2020 New Leadership Awardees

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, where she has organized Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, Bethany Collins: Chorus, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Eartwitness Theatre, Guan Xiao: Fiction Archive Project, Hayv Kahraman: Acts of Reparation, Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Re-Evolving Door to the Moundverse and SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte. Prior to her position at CAM, Al-Khudhairi was the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art where she organized the first large-scale exhibition of the museum’s contemporary collection, Third Space / shifting conversations about contemporary art. She was invited to be a Curator for the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan in 2017 and Co-Artistic Director for 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea in 2012. Serving as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Al-Khudhairi oversaw the opening of the Museum in 2010 and co-curated Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab.

Erin Christovale is a Los Angeles–based curator and programmer who currently works as a curator at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Together with Hammer Museum Senior Curator Anne Ellegood, Christovale curated the museum’s fourth Made in L.A. biennial in June 2018. She also leads Black Radical Imagination, an experimental film program she co-founded with Amir George. Black Radical Imagination tours internationally and has screened at MoMA PS1; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museo Taller Jose Clemente Orozco, among other spaces. Christovale is best known for her work on identity, race and historical legacy. Prior to her appointment at the Hammer Museum, Christovale worked as a curator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

Lauren Haynes is an American curator who is head curator of Governors Island, in New York City.
Before assuming her current position in 2024, she was director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas; senior curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art; and director of curatorial affairs and programs at the Queens Museum.

Jami Powell serves as the Hood Museum of Art’s first associate curator of Native American art and was recently appointed as a lecturer in Native American Studies at Dartmouth. Jami is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to working at the Hood, she was a faculty lecturer at Tufts University. Jami’s research examines representations of Indigenous peoples in museums as well as the interventions contemporary Indigenous artists make through creative acts of self-representation.
Press Releases & Media Coverage
ArtTable to Host Virtual Benefit on April 16, 2021, Honoring Barbara Tober & La Tanya S. Autry
Susan Unterberg Honored with ArtTable’s Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts Award
ArtTable’s 40th Anniversary New Leadership Awardees Announced
April 12, 2021 – artnet News
Editors’ Picks: 12 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Celebration of Historian Maurice Berger to a Talk With Wade Guyton
April 20, 2021 – Broadway World
Barbara Tober & La Tanya S. Autry Honored at ARTTABLE Benefit
April 20, 2021 – New York Social Diary
The Ins & Outs
May 2, 2021 – New York Times Style Section
Arianna Huffington Binge-Watches TV on the Treadmill. And how Barbara Tober and Peter Pennoyer have fared during the pandemic.
May 2021 – Fashion Mannuscript
ArtTable Salutes Barbara Tober, La Tanya S. Autry
40th Anniversary Limited Editions
Did you miss your chance to purchase one of our wonderful 40th Anniversary limited editions? There’s still time! Visit the ArtTable Store to purchase an edition and support women in the arts.