Why Public Art Matters @ Parlor at The Battery
Join us for a dynamic panel exploring how public art shapes and impacts San Francisco’s cultural landscape. Moderated by Allison Arieff from the San Francisco Chronicle, this conversation brings together diverse perspectives from across the city's arts ecosystem. Panelists include Alison Gass, Founding Director and Chief Curator of ICA SF; artist Catherine Wagner, and Aliza Marks, CEO of Big Art Loop. These panelists represent leaders from prominent groups, both public and private, who engage directly with public spaces and creative initiatives across San Francisco. Together, they will discuss how critically significant art is to the future of our rapidly evolving city, and how public and private partnerships are powerful enablers of such art.
Allison Arieff
Allison Arieff is an opinion columnist and editorial writer for the SF Chronicle. She was previously editorial director of print at MIT Technology Review. From 2007-2020, she wrote an opinion column focusing on design, technology, and cities, for the NY Times. She was editorial director of the urban planning and policy think tank SPUR. She was editor in chief (and founding senior editor) of Dwell magazine.
Alison Gass
Alison Gass is ICA San Francisco’s Founding Executive Director. Her leadership in museums has reflected a sustained commitment to building globally-minded and community-engaged exhibitions programs and diversifying museums’ collections, exhibition programs, staff and visitorship. Gass was appointed the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago where she launched the Feitler Center for Academic Engagement. Previously, she was the Chief Curator at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and Assistant Curator at SFMoMA. ICA SF isn’t her first “startup” museum. After leaving SFMOMA, Gass served as Founding Chief Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, where she helped launch the new building, recruited a staff, and established a global contemporary art program. She holds degrees in Art History from Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.
Aliza Marks
Aliza Marks is the CEO of Big Art Loop, a 34-mile open-air gallery featuring up to 100 large-scale sculptures across San Francisco. She is growing Big Art Loop to bring art into neighborhoods citywide, engage communities, and create meaningful economic opportunities for artists. Previously, Aliza spent over 15 years leading strategy and operations across enterprise SaaS companies, most recently at Jebbit (acquired by BlueConic), and GetFeedback (acquired by SurveyMonkey). She began her career at Deloitte Consulting and holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Art History from Bowdoin College.
Catherine Wagner
Catherine Wagner's ambitious photographic practice spans more than four decades, observing architectural and archival spaces as metaphors for how we construct our cultural identities. She trains her eye on the “accidental landscapes” of classrooms, laboratories, building sites, and amusement parks, looking for evidence of our civilization. Wagner uses large-format film to render her subjects in lush detail, examining the visual style and psycho-social impact of “master narratives” around gender, place, and American history.
Catherine Wagner (b. 1953, SF, CA) has enjoyed recent solo shows at 500 Capp Street, SF; University of Kentucky Art Museum; and Crown Point Press, SF. She has been included in group exhibitions at the de Young Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Mills College, Oakland; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, SF; Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive; Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid, and Fundacion La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain, among others. Wagner is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Artadia Award, Dorothea Lange Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Wagner’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Bibliothèque National de Paris; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum of Modern Art/Morandi Museum, Bologna; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; LACMA, Los Angeles; San José Museum of Art; SFMOMA; de Young Museum; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, among others. Her large-scale granite and glass public art commission is permanently installed at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Muni Station, San Francisco. Wagner lives and works in San Francisco and is represented by Jessica Silverman.