Seven New Trustees Join Aperture Board
Aperture is pleased to announce seven new appointments to its board of trustees: Julie Bédard, Kwame Samori Brathwaite, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lindsay McCrum, Colette Veasey-Cullors, Casey Taylor Weyand, and Deborah Willis.
The new trustees, who will join in April, come to Aperture with a breadth of expertise from a variety of fields, and they all share a long-standing commitment to the medium of photography.
Cathy M. Kaplan, chair of the board, welcomes the new roster, saying: “We are honored to have such an amazing group of individuals join the board of trustees of Aperture. They bring a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, including deep knowledge of the history and practice of photography, and of education, to our already terrific board. At this juncture, when we have just announced our new executive director, Sarah Meister (succeeding Chris Boot, after ten years of tenure), our new trustees will add to Aperture’s momentum, and ensure it remains front and center in dialogues about photography.”
Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas and Vasant Nayak also recently joined the Aperture board, in April and July 2020, respectively. Together with the new elected slate, they add to a group of eighteen existing members formed by Peter Barbur, Dawoud Bey, Allan Chapin, Stuart Cooper, Kate Cordsen, Elaine Goldman, Michael Hoeh, Julia Joern, Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Cathy M. Kaplan, Philippe Laumont, Andrew Lewin, Anne Stark Locher, Joel Meyerowitz, Helen Nitkin, Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Lisa Rosenblum, and Thomas Schiff.
Aperture was founded as “common ground for the advancement of photography” in 1952 by photographers, editors, and educators, including Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, and Minor White, among others. A multiplatform publisher and global community, almost seventy years later, Aperture advances photography as vital to society and contemporary culture, connecting audiences to visionary photographers and visual thinkers who shape our perceptions of the world.
Julie Bédard is head of Skadden’s International Litigation and Arbitration Group for the Americas. She is a member of Skadden’s policy committee, the firm’s governing body. Fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, Bédard practices in four languages in complex international litigation and arbitration matters. Trained in both civil and common law, Bédard has a doctorate in conflict of laws, and represents clients in connection with litigation and arbitration proceedings throughout the world, raising disputes on governing law, jurisdiction, the enforcement of arbitration agreements, extraterritoriality, and international judgment enforcement. In 2020, Bédard was named arbitrator for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s dispute settlement mechanism. She has been repeatedly recognized for her work in leading legal publications, including Chambers, Global Arbitration Review, and the Best Lawyers in America.
Kwame Samori Brathwaite, son of photographer Kwame Brathwaite, is director of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive. Brathwaite authored a chapter in the book Mod New York: Fashion Takes a Trip (2017) and has lectured at numerous institutions, including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Courtauld Institute of Art, London; and Museum of the City of New York. He cocurated Celebrity and the Everyday at Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; and curated Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, a touring exhibition, in partnership with Aperture Foundation. Also a real-estate professional, Brathwaite graduated from Amherst College, Massachusetts, in 1996 with a BA in law, jurisprudence, and social thought; and from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in 2018 with an MBA. He lives in San Marino, California, with his wife and three children.
Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Harris is represented in the permanent collections of renowned institutions and has been widely exhibited internationally including, most recently, in Photography’s Last Century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story and Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Harris lives and works in New York, serving as professor of art at New York University.
Lindsay McCrum is a California-based fine-art photographer. She received her undergraduate degree from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Trained as a painter in oils, she switched exclusively to portrait photography in 2003. For close to two decades, she has created work that explores issues of self-image, gender, and popular culture. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and Europe. Her work has been reviewed and featured in US publications and media such as Time, the New York Times, NPR, Wired.com, NPR’s All Things Considered, the Los Angeles Times, Juxtapoz, Today.com, W Magazine, and HuffPost, among others.
Colette Veasey-Cullors is founding associate vice president of the Center for Organizing, Representation and Empowerment at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Throughout her career, her photographic work has investigated themes pertaining to socioeconomics, race, class, education, and identity, with a particular focus on social and creative engagement with historically underinvested and underrepresented communities. Veasey-Cullors’s photography is represented in the Photographic History Collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Washington, DC, and has been widely exhibited. Her work is also included in the publications MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and BLACK: A Celebration of a Culture (2004). Veasey-Cullors received her MFA in photography from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1996, and her BFA in photography from the University of Houston in 1992.
Casey Taylor Weyand, CFA, is managing director at Morgan Stanley in New York City. He has worked as an advisor in the investment-management industry since 2005. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in 2016, he was managing director at J. P. Morgan Private Bank from 2007–16. He sits on the photography acquisitions committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and on the advisory board of RxArt, a New York–based nonprofit organization whose mission is to help children heal through the power of visual art. Weyand was born and raised in Roeland Park, Kansas. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2001 with a BFA in photography. In 2012, he earned his CFA designation.
Deborah Willis, PhD, is university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and is author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (2021) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), among other books. Willis has curated exhibitions including Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits at the International Center of Photography, New York; Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Reframing Beauty: Intimate Visions at Indiana University Bloomington.
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