New York, NY | ArtTable’s Annual Leadership Series | The State of American Art

Sarah Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the founder of Vision & Justice, a leading publishing and research initiative that serves as a key organizer, partner, and resource for artists, scholars, and leaders seeking to examine the foundational role of visual culture in America’s representational democracy. Lewis is also known for her landmark work on creativity and the gift of failure for innovation.

She has authored and edited over 60 publications including the award-winning book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024); the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster, 2014); and the award-winning volumes Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021) and “Vision & Justice” (Aperture, 2016), taught widely in universities in the United States and abroad and made required reading for incoming first-year students at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

A frequent speaker at universities and conferences, her mainstage TED talk, Embrace the Near Win, has received 3.1 million views. She has delivered keynotes, talks and commencement addresses for many universities and organizations. As founder of Vision & Justice, Lewis has organized landmark convenings and founded a Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from Vogue to The Boston Globe to The New York Times. Sarah was ArtTable’s 2006 New Leadership Awardee.

Eileen Kinsella is an arts and culture journalist who has been covering the international art market for more than 25 years. She has worked at The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, and Artnet News covering international auctions, high-profile legal disputes and legal developments that impact issues of provenance, ownership, and authenticity. She co-created and co-hosted the podcast Art World Infamy, and has appeared on CNBC, Reuters, and BBC television and was featured in art documentarites, Driven to Abstraction and For The Money.
More recently she has contributed stories to CULTURED, Art & Object, The Art Newspaper and Arthur Analytics.

Marcela Guerrero is the DeMartini Family Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Alongside Drew Sawyer, Guerrero is the co-curator of the eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. At the Whitney, Guerrero also curated no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria and Martine Gutierrez: Supremacy in 2022-23, among other exhibitions. From 2014 to 2017, she was the Curatorial Fellow for Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 organized at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Prior to joining the Hammer, she worked in the Latin American and Latino art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Guerrero’s writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues and in art journals. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Guerrero holds a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Marcela was ArtTable’s 2025 New Leadership Awardee.

Alexis Lowry is Curatorial Senior Director at Hauser & Wirth, where she develops and implements artist driven programming and collaborations across the gallery’s global network of locations. Recent projects include David Smith: No One Thing; Mary Heilmann: Daydream Nation (with Gary Simmons); Camille Henrot: A Number of Things; and Susan Rothenberg: The Weather.
Prior to joining Hauser & Wirth, Lowry was a curator at Dia Art Foundation, where she oversaw commissions, exhibitions, public programs, and the permanent collection across the institution’s sites and locations. During her tenure, she organized more than two dozen presentations by artists including Mel Bochner, Melvin Edwards, Charles Gaines, Rita McBride, Delcy Morelos, Charlotte Posenenske, Lucy Raven, and Dorothea Rockburne, among others. A curator and scholar with particular interests in Minimalism, Postminimalism, and Land art, Lowry also played a key role in the stewardship of Dia’s site specific works and in expanding the institution’s approach to land based practices.
Previously, Lowry served as curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University and worked as a freelance project manager for Creative Time.

Victoria Rogers is the Director of Strategy in the Office of the COO at Autodesk. She has also worked as an Advisor at X [Google X], where she focused on generative AI and , and as the Director of Arts at Kickstarter, where she raised over $9M for over 200 cultural projects from more than 90K people. Victoria holds an MBA from Stanford University, an MFA in Industrial and Civic Service Design from Parsons School of Design, and a BA in Art History from Yale University. Victoria is a board member of the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Terra Foundation, and co-chair and co-founder of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums. She serves as an Impact Fellow with BAG VC, where she is researching and developing strategies to reduce bias in AI.

Dare Turner is the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum and a member of the Yurok Tribe. In 2024, she co-organized Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which included nine exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the Museum, and a catalogue. At the Brooklyn Museum, she curated Nico Williams: Aaniin, I See Your Light and co-curated Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, a radical reinstallation of the American Wing guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and Black feminist theory. Her forthcoming exhibition and book, Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World, will debut at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2026.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.