Curatorial Council

Each year our National Curatorial Council of experts in their disciplines selects more than 70 artists for Hermitage residencies. Members of the Curatorial Council are connected to some of the most renowned American cultural institutions.

2020 CURATORIAL COUNCIL

Eric Booth, Arts Education Author and Speaker

Christopher Burney, Artistic Director of New York Stage and Film

Daniel Byers, Director at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Claire Chase, Flutist, Avery Fisher Award Winner, MacArthur Fellow

Jennifer Clement, President, PEN International

Kimberly Drew, Writer, Activist, and Curator of Black Experiences

Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director of Williamstown Theater Festival

Emily Mann, longtime Artistic Director of The McCarter Theater, Princeton University

Christopher Merrill, Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Iowa

Emily Nemens, Editor of The Paris Review

Kiki Petrosino, Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Louisville

Robert Spano, Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

Limor Tomer, General Manager, Live Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art

EMERITUS:

Dan Cameron, art curator

Michael Bigelow Dixon, Assistant Professor of Theater, Transylvania University, Lexington, KY

Linda S. Golding, Founder/Director, The Reservoir

Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Executive Director, Arizona State University Gammage, Tempe, AZ

Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), New York, NY

PRIOR MEMBERS:

Darrell Ayers, retired Vice President for Education and Jazz, The Kennedy Center, Washington, DC; now in Sarasota, FL

Dr. Anthony Bannon, Director, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY

Anne Cattaneo, Dramaturg and Director, LCT Directors Lab, Lincoln Center, New York, NY

Kenneth Fischer, retired President, University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Josip Novakovich, Writer; Professor, Department of English at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Christopher Offutt, writer, formerly with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

Carey Perloff, retired Artistic Director, American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, CA

Franklin Sirmans, Director, Perez Museum of Art, Miami, FL

George Steele, at the time with the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, New York, NY

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Apr

Fri

“From Creation to Production” with Tom Kirdahy @ Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach

Tickets

Apr 23 @ 6:00 pm

“From Creation to Production: Where It All Begins”
A Conversation with Broadway Producer Tom Kirdahy

Friday, April 23, 6:00 p.m.

Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223

Broadway producer Tom Kirdahy, a Tony Award-winning champion of new work, will speak with Hermitage Artistic Director Andy Sandberg about the inextricable link between theatrical development and production, and the multi-year creative journey from an idea to production.

Registration ($5 per person) is required.

Tom Kirdahy is a Tony and Olivier Award-winning producer whose projects have spanned Broadway, Off-Broadway, and the West End, as well as national and international tours. Select New York/London credits: Hadestown (8 Tony Awards, including Best New Musical), The Inheritance (11 Tony nominations, including Best Play), Little Shop of Horrors (Drama Desk Award, Best Musical Revival), Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (2 Tony nominations, including Best Revival). Additional Tony nominations: The Visit, Mothers and Sons, After Midnight, Ragtime, Master Class. He is the recipient of Robert Whitehead Award for Outstanding Achievement in Commercial Theater Producing. Kirdahy serves on the Broadway League Board of Governors and the Board of Trustees of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. As an attorney, he spent nearly two decades providing free legal services to people living with HIV/AIDS and served for many years on the Executive Committee of the NYC LGBT Center. Graduate Studies: New York University School of Law, NYU CAS.

Capacity is limited to accommodate safe social distancing. Early reservations are recommended. Masks required at registration, and the Hermitage requests that masks be worn for all live programs, including outdoor events. Audience members are invited to bring their own beach chairs and blankets.

Apr

Fri

“Conveying Meaning” @ Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach

Tickets

Apr 30 @ 6:00 pm

“Conveying Meaning”
With Kristen Miller, Michelle Lopez, and Kathleen Driskell

Friday, April 30, 6 p.m.

Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223

Visual and interdisciplinary artist Michelle Lopez will share how she conveys what social justice means to her through visual mixed media. Kristen Miller translates poetry, conveying meaning from the original language. Learn about this delicate transfer of meaning between cultures. Writer Kathleen Driskell will show how the punctuation you learned in English class can be used to enrich prose and deepen literary meaning.

Registration ($5 per person) is required.

Capacity is limited to accommodate safe social distancing. Early reservations are recommended. Masks required at registration, and the Hermitage requests that masks be worn for all live programs, including outdoor events.Audience members are invited to bring their own beach chairs and blankets.

Kristen Renee Miller’s poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Common,Guernica, and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of Spawn (2020), by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Literary Translators Association, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande.

Michelle Lopez is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist. As a builder, conceptualist, and manipulator of materials, Lopez inventively explores cultural phenomenon, stretching to their limits the industrial processes that craft consumerism in its many forms: she bends plywood to make body-sized wilted skateboards, mirrors glass to build smoke clouds out of silver nitrate, manufactures heavy gold thrones out of slender lead tendrils. Lopez’s gimlet eye examines collapsed political and social structures by inverting cultural tropes through the process of building, exploiting industrial materials to expose the hidden boundaries of embedded societal constructions. Lopez was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia (September 2019 – May 2020). ‍She has taught at University of California Berkeley, Yale School of Art, the School of Visual Arts, and is director of Sculpture & Installation in the Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Kathleen Driskell is chair of the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University, and the author of the poetry collections Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, a Kentucky Voices selection by the University Press of Kentucky and winner of the 2018 Judy Gaines Young Book Award; Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller; Laughing Sickness, and Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem. Her awards include grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and she has received prizes from the Associated Writing Programs and Frankfort Arts Foundation. She currently serves as chair of the board of directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Driskell received her MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kathleen Driskell’s residency made possible by the Annette Dignam State College of Florida Residency in Literature at the Hermitage.

May

Fri

“Artists and Writers, Thinking Out Loud” @ Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach

Tickets

May 14 @ 6:00 pm

“Artists and Writers, Thinking Out Loud”
With Crystal Wilkinson, Hari Kunzru, and Lucy Kim

Friday, May 14, 6 p.m.

Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223

Author Crystal Wilkinson will discuss and read from her latest work, Perfect Black, a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a black girl becoming. Visual and multidisplinary artist Lucy Kim will discuss her transition from traditional painting and photography to her less vison-centric, more visceral, three-dimensional work. Novelist Hari Kunzru will introduce and read from Blue Ruin, his third novel in a trilogy about music, literature, and visual art. Listen to the thinking that went into their work and join them in a Q&A afterward.

Registration ($5 per person) is required.

Capacity is limited to accommodate safe social distancing. Early reservations are recommended. Masks required at registration, and the Hermitage requests that masks be worn for all live programs, including outdoor events.Audience members are invited to bring their own beach chairs and blankets.

Crystal Wilkinson, a USA Artist Fellow, is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for the John Dos Passos Award, the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and others. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Her fourth book Perfect Black is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in August 2021. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is associate professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Crystal Wilkson’s Hermitage artist residency generously sponsored by Jane and Bill Knapp.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, and White Tears, as well as a short story collection, Noise, and a novella, Memory Palace. His new novel Red Pill was published in September 2020. He is an honorary fellow of Wadham College Oxford and has received fellowships from the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. He is the host of the podcast Into The Zone and lives in New York City.

Lucy Kim is a visual artist working in sculpture, painting, and biological media. Her work is grounded in the mechanics of visual representation through sculptural paintings that combine casting with oil painting. Since 2019, her work has expanded into the biology lab, where she is developing a project (Melanin Images Via Genetically Modified E. coli) using bacteria. In her sculptural paintings, Kim uses oil painting both for its plasticity as a material, as well as its history as an image technology prior to photography, both of which have to do with its illusionistic capability. Her use of mold-making and casting stems from an interest in photography as a form of indexical documentation, but through touch. While a photograph records the light reflecting off the surfaces within its frame, a cast, being a direct imprint, records the surface terrain. It still retains the authority of a record, but it does so in a very material, visceral, and less vision-centric way.

May

Thu

“Hermitage Sunsets @ Selby Gardens” with Rona Siddiqui @ Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Downtown

Tickets

May 27 @ 6:00 pm

Hermitage Sunsets @ Selby Gardens
Featuring Musical Theater Composer Rona Siddiqui

Thursday, May 27, 6 p.m.

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Downtown, 1534 Mound St, Sarasota, FL 34236

Following her inspiring and uplifting performance on the Hermitage Beach this past fall, Rona Siddiqui continues her residency at the Hermitage and will present a sneak peek into her work.

Registration ($5 per person) is required.

Rona Siddiqui is an award-winning composer, lyricist, orchestrator, and music director based in New York City. The recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant and Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award, Siddiqui was named one of Broadway Women’s Fund’s “Women to Watch.” Her show, Salaam Medina: Tales of a Halfghan, an autobiographical comedy about growing up bi-ethnic in America, had a reading at Playwrights Horizons. Other of her musicals include One Good Day, The Tin, and Treasure. Siddiqui is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Mary Rodgers/Lorenz Hart Award and the ASCAP Foundation/Max Dreyfus Scholarship. She has written pieces for Wicked‘s 16^th-anniversary commemoration, 24 Hour Musicals, Prospect Theater Company, The Civilians, the NYC Gay Men’s Chorus, and 52nd St Project, and has performed concerts of her work at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Feinstein’s/54 Below. Siddiqui has also orchestrated for Broadway Records, Broadway Backwards, NAMT and Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera. For more information, visit RonaSiddiqui.com.

Nov

Sat

2021 Artful Lobster: An Outdoor Celebration! @ Hermitage Artist Retreat

Tickets

Nov 13 @ 11:30 am – 2:00 pm

The highly popular Artful Lobster is our signature fundraising event, and the only benefit to take place on our historic Gulf front campus on Manasota Key. With a luscious lobster feast catered by Michael’s On East and live entertainment featuring a celebrated Hermitage Fellow, the Artful Lobster is anticipated as the season kick-off for many across our community.

To learn more about Artful Lobster, click here.

Tickets will go on sale a later date.

April – November 2021 Apr – Nov 2021

Curatorial Council

Hermitage Artists Respond to COVID-19.

Engage Creativity