Panel Discussion: A League of Nations

Sue Williamson emigrated from the United Kingdom to South Africa with her family in 1948. Trained as a printmaker, Williamson also works in installation, photography and video. In the 1970s, she started to make work which addressed social change during apartheid and by the 1980s Williamson was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle. In 2018, Williamson was Goodman Gallery’s featured artist at the FNB Joburg Art Fair, where she exhibited her work Messages from the Atlantic Passage, a large-scale installation of shackled, suspended glass bottles engraved with details taken from 19th century slave trade documents. This installation was also exhibited the previous year at Art Basel in Switzerland and at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India in 2018. Williamson’s works feature in numerous public collections across the globe, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, Tate Modern, London, UK, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA, Wifredo Lam Centre, Havana, Cuba, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, and Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa. Williamson has received various awards and fellowships such as the Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship 2011, Italy, Rockefeller Foundation, the Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship 2007, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship 2005, Montalvo Art Center, California, USA. In November-December 2023, Williamson will hold an artist-in-residence fellowship at Yale Center for British Art at Yale University. Concurrently, her work will be on view in the exhibition Landing at Goodman Gallery, New York (November 1, 2023 - January 6, 2024). Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Bruce Dorfman has been teaching at the Art Students League since 1964, including the League summer school in Woodstock, NY, 1964-1972. Dorfman has also taught at the New School, Syracuse University, the Everson Museum, and was Artist-in-Residence at the Norton Museum, Fl. He was a guest-artist and lecturer at museums, and art institutions in Venezuela, Portugal and France from 1993 to 1996. Dorfman studied at the Art Students League with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Arnold Blanch and Charles H. Alston. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa, where he studied with Stuart Edie, Mauricio Lasansky and art historian Roy Seiber.

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Bruce Dorfman has had fifty-nine solo exhibitions in New York, the United States, and abroad. His work is part of numerous public collections, including most recently (2023) Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Norton Museum of Art. Dorfman received a major Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award/Grant for 2017.  He was also the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award/grant in 2008. Dorfman is the recipient of many other additional awards, grants and fellowships including: New York State Council on the Arts; Fulbright Fellowship; Rockefeller Foundation; U.S. Department of State; Arts East Foundation, Washington, DC; New York World’s Fair Invitational; National Academy of Design; Des Moines Art Center; Butler Institute of American Art; and Atelier Mourlot, Paris, France.

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Midori Yoshimoto is professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. As art historian, Yoshimoto specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and its diaspora with a focus on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia. Her 2005 book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, led to numerous publications including an essay in Yoko Ono One Woman Show (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015). Yoshimoto co-curated a major survey exhibition of Japanese American artist Shigeko Kubota, which traveled three museums in Japan in 2021-22. Its catalog, Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha and received the Ringa Art Encouragement Award in Japan. She is also a co-editor and author of Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021). Yoshimoto is the guest curator of the current exhibition, Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus at the Japan Society Gallery.

Ksenia Nouril has been the Gallery Director and Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Art Students League of New York since September 2022. Previously, Nouril was the Jensen Bryan Curator at The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA). She also has worked at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT); Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY); Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); and Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, New Jersey). Nouril is co-editor of and contributor to Carmen Winant: A Brand New End (The Print Center, 2022); editor of and contributor to Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves (Rutgers University Press, 2019); and co-editor of and contributor to Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018). Her research has been published in numerous exhibition catalogues and magazines worldwide. Nouril received her BA in Art History from New York University and her MA and PhD in Art History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick.

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