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This timely gathering produced by the Brooklyn Rail, in collaboration with The Willem de Kooning Foundation, marks the 25th anniversary of de Kooning’s passing. Join us for a conversation and festive celebration of the artist’s remarkable life and work, with an opening remark by the Foundation’s Executive Director Amy Schichtel, and personal reflections by renowned curator John Elderfield. We conclude with a poetry reading by Erica Hunt.
John Elderfield is Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, where he organized de Kooning: A Retrospective in 2011.
Artist and musician Joan Levy Hepburn worked closely with Willem de Kooning until the end of his life. He was her personal mentor, and guided her through art degrees at Rhode Island School of Design and Kansas City Art Institute.
Artist David Reed is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.
Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin, and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism.
Mark Stevens is the former art critic of Newsweek, The New Republic, and New York magazine. Together with Annalyn Swan, he is the author of de Kooning: An American Master, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2005.
Robert Storr is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Charles Stuckey has served as curator in major US museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, where he organized highly acclaimed retrospectives for Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and others.
Annalyn Swan is the former arts editor of Newsweek and an award-winning former music critic. She is the co-author, with Mark Stevens, of the biography de Kooning: An American Master.
Artist Flora Yukhnovich completed her MA at the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2017. In 2018 she completed The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia.

Phong H. Bui is the Publisher & Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail.
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Artwork © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / ARS, NY.
Photograph © 2022 The Estate of Dan Budnik. All Rights Reserved.
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The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poem, and on this day we were fortunate to have Erica Hunt reading.
Poet and scholar Erica Hunt is the author of numerous publications including VERONICA: A Suite in X Parts (selva oscura press, 2019) and Jump the Clock (Nightboat, 2020), a collection spanning from the 1980s to the present. With Dawn Lundy Martin, she is co-editor of Letters to the Future: Radical Writing by Black Women from Kore Press. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy.
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