Savona Bailey-McClain
Executive Director and Chief Curator, West Harlem Art Fund

Sherwin Banfield 
Artist and Hip Hop Sculptor

Tom Finkelpearl
Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence, CUNY

Denise Markonish
Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park

Mia Pearlman
Artist and Moderator

Seph Rodney
Writer, Editor and Curator

Please join us on October 15th at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum in Harlem for this informal and fun community building event. Sugar Hill is a gorgeous space for contemporary art, conveniently located right above the 155th Street C train stop.

Artists, fabricators, public art administrators, real estate developers, private art consultants, public art curators and more are welcomed to meet, talk and make friends. It’s a little bit of panel, and a whole lotta schmooze.

“Hot Topics in Public Art” is an interactive and irreverent conversation with experts from across the field. Prepare to ask and answer questions!

Click for more info and tickets

Savona Bailey-McClain
Executive Director and Chief Curator, West Harlem Art Fund
https://westharlem.art

Savona Bailey-McClain is a Harlem based curator and arts administrator. She is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, which has organized high-profile public arts exhibits throughout New York City for the past 20 years, including Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island and Harlem.

Her public art installations encompass sculpture, drawings, performance, sound, and mixed media, and have been covered extensively by the New York Times, Art Daily, Artnet, Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post, among many others.

She is host and producer of "State of the Arts NYC," a video podcast program on several platforms. She is a member of ArtTable, Advisory Board member of NYC's Dance in Sacred Places, Governors Island Advisory Council and new Board member of NY Artists Equity Association.

Sherwin Banfield
Artist and Hip Hop Sculptor
https://www.sherwinbanfield.com

Sherwin Banfield is a Queens, NY based mixed-media artist with recent work attempting to explore journeys of identity and ancestry. Sherwin's creative practice tends to deconstruct the imaginative and physical journey of identity within his preferred subject matter, the human experience. 

Recent projects build upon experimental ideas of encompassing various mixed materials with traditional sculpture; lighting, sound and solar power that he refers to as Sustainable Sonic Sculpture. His public sculpture “Sky's the Limit in the County of Kings’ fused the identity of Brooklyn Hip-Hop Legend The Notorious B.I.G., with his musical legacy into a sonic monument including light and a dedicated audio mix by his mentor DJ Mister Cee. The intention is to combat future erasure of black genius and legacy by reintroducing the multi-dimensional contributions of Hip-Hop Legends, through a multi-sensory experience of Monumentality.

Banfield holds a BFA with honors from Parsons School of Design and studied figurative sculpture at The Art Students League of New York. He is a recipient of the Augusta Savage Grant with the National Sculpture Society, the Harlem Sculpture Garden Fellowship, the Downtown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fund Grant, the AnkhLave Public Artist-In-Residence Fellowship, the NYC Art in the Parks: Alliance for FMCP Grant, the Socrates Annual Emerging Artist Fellowship, the Fantasy Fund Fellowship at Modern Art Foundry and the Art Students League of New York’s Works in Public Fellowship (formally Model to Monument Fellowship). 

(Sherwin’s work was the subject of the last issue of INSIDE/OUTSIDE - read it here)

Tom Finkelpearl 
Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence, CUNY
https://socialpracticecuny.org/about/

Tom Finkelpearl has been a curator, writer, museum director and public official. As Public Art Program Director of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), Finkelpearl managed over 100 public art commissions in the 1990s. He organized fifteen shows at PS1 in the 1980s, spearheaded a 50,000 square foot expansion as Director of the Queens Museum (2002-2014), and oversaw the city’s cultural funding when he returned to DCLA as Commissioner (2014-2020). Recently he co-curated a show of Christine Sun Kim’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Currently he is working on his third book, an assessment of the challenges facing North American art museums in collaboration with Pablo Helguera, while teaching part time at CUNY. His previous books are Dialogues in Public Art (MIT Press, 2000) and What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press, 2013). Finkelpearl is Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence at City University of New York. He earned a BA at Princeton University, and an MFA Hunter College.

Denise Markonish
Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park
https://madisonsquarepark.org/art/

Denise Markonish is the Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park, starting in June 2025. For the previous 18 years, she was at  MASS MoCA where her exhibitions include Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream...(co-organized with the Contemporary Art Museum Houston); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT; Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham?; Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow; Suffering from Realness; Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass; Nick Cave: Until (co-organized with Crystal Bridges and Carriageworks); Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder; Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below; Oh, Canada; and Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum. 

She has worked on long-term projects with Laurie Anderson, and commissioned works by Sarah Oppenheimer, Stephen Vitiello, Julianne Swartz, Mark Dion, and many others. Markonish has produced numerous exhibition catalogues and edited Teresita Fernández: Wayfinding (DelMonico) and Wonder: 50 Years of RISD Glass, and co-edited Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (Yale University Press). She has taught at Williams College and the Rhode Island School of Design and was a visiting curator at Artpace, San Antonio, and Haystack School of Craft, Deer Isle, Maine. 

Mia Pearlman
Artist and Moderator
https://www.miapearlman.com

Mia Pearlman has exhibited internationally in numerous galleries, non-profit spaces and museums, including the MSU Broad Art Museum (Michigan), Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Goyang Aram Gallery (South Korea), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC), and the Manchester Art Gallery (UK).

Permanent commissions include large scale, site specific sculptures for Liberty Mutual's headquarters (Boston), the 80th Street A Train station for MTA Arts & Design (Queens, NY), MGM Springfield (Springfield, MA), Zhongshan Huafa Plaza (Zhongshan, China), and Baptist Medical Clay (Fleming Island, FL), as well as paper installations and sculptures for Leon Max (London) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (NY).

Her work has been featured in over 25 books on contemporary art, and in both international and domestic press, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New York Post, and The Boston Globe. Pearlman has also appeared on PBS Thirteen’s SundayArts, the Smithsonian Channel, Spain’s TV3, and NY1.

Pearlman lives and works in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and artistic collaborator, Catalan pianist and composer Albert Marques, and their two children.

Seph Rodney
Freelance writer, editor and curator
https://www.sephrodney.com

Seph Rodney, PhD is a regular contributor to The New York Times and a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic. In 2020, he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism prize and in 2022 won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. After beginning to curate shows in 2017, he last co-curated Get in the Game, the largest show mounted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which reopens at Crystal Bridges Museum in September of 2025 and at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2026. He is also a co-editor of "Artists as Writers: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life."

(Seph is the author of the article “Are We Asking Too Much of Public Art,” a question we will discuss during the panel!

Looking forward to seeing you on October 15th!

Mia Pearlman
http://miapearlman.com