The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced the election of board chair, Lawrence Rinder, as well as three new board members, artists Shana Berger and Deborah Kass, and financier John Taft.
Rinder is replacing longtime board chair Michael Straus. Warhol foundation president Joel Wachs said Rinder will “be an able and inspiring successor,” to Straus, “whose exemplary leadership over the past six years is largely responsible for the foundation’s preeminent position in the field today.” Wachs said “the addition of Ms. Berger, Ms. Kass, and Mr. Taft gives the board the strength of proven leadership in the foundation’s most important constituencies—artists and the art institutions that support them.”
The three new board members replace artist Cindy Sherman, J.K. Brown and Michael Straus, all of who just finished their terms (appointments are effective for four years and, if re-elected, another four years for a maxium of eight years).
Rinder, who is already a Warhol board member, is director of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He has previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum, where he served as chief curator of the 2002 Biennial.
Berger is an artist, writer, and curator who lives in York, Alabama, where she serves as co-director of the Coleman Center for the Arts. She is a co-founder of the group Your Art Here, and also recently co-founded Pop Start, an incubator for economic justice.
Kass is a senior critic in the Yale University M.F.A. painting program. Her work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Jewish Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, among others. Kass’s work was also the subject of a recent mid-career retrospective at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Taft is CEO of RBC Wealth Management, a retail brokerage firm. He has served as chair of the Securities Industry and Finacial Markets Association (SIFMA).