Ursula Conversations: Annie Leibovitz, Amy Sherald & Darren Walker

On the occasion of the final day of ‘Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness,’ on view at Hauser & Wirth 22nd Street, ‘Ursula’ invites you to the historic Great Hall at The Cooper Union for an unforgettable conversation with artists Annie Leibovitz and Amy Sherald, moderated by President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker. 
‘Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness’ presents a group of works by the distinguished American artist. Foregoing a linear timeline or conventional thematic constraints, the exhibition is conceived to reveal glimpses into Leibovitz’s highly associative thought processes, creating a fluid visual dialogue among photographs that aren’t anchored in the moment they were made.
‘Stream of Consciousness’ includes landscapes, still lifes and portraits, including a portrait of artist Amy Sherald in her childhood home.
Reservations are required for this free event co-presented with The Cooper Union School of Art. 

About Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz became a working photographer while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. She began taking pictures in the summer of 1968 and two years later one of her photographs was on the cover of Rolling Stone, which was then a groundbreaking counterculture magazine based in San Francisco. She was Rolling Stone’s chief photographer by 1973. By 1983, when she left Rolling Stone to join Vanity Fair and then Vogue, her photographs had become widely recognizable and distinctive interpretations of the contemporary landscape.
Leibovitz was influenced early on by the personal style of photographic reportage developed by Robert Frank and by the photojournalism of Henri Cartier Bresson. The intimate engagement with her subjects evident in her journalism can be seen in the formal portraits of well-known people that she would later become known for. Intimacy remained a given in the work even as the range and approach of the photographs broadened. Over the years she would move from black-and-white to color, from covering rock concerts to making portraits of heads of state, from reportage to fashion, from graphically simple and straightforward composition to conceptually intricate digitally-based narratives.
She is the recipient of many honors, including the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, and the Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des beaux-arts—William Klein. She is a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the United States Library of Congress.
Several collections of her work have been published. They include Annie Leibovitz : Photographs (1983); Annie Leibovitz : Photographs 1970–1990 (1991); Olympic Portraits (1996); Women (1999), in collaboration with Susan Sontag; American Music (2003); A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 (2006); Annie Leibovitz at Work (2008 and 2018); Pilgrimage (2011); Annie Leibovitz : Portraits, 2005–2016 (2017); Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970–1983 (2018), and Wonderland (2021).Exhibitions of Leibovitz’s work have appeared at museums and galleries all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the International Center of Photography in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and LUMA Arles.
About Amy Sherald
Born in Columbus, Georgia, and now based in the New York City area, Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate Black life in American art.
Sherald received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University. Sherald was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., she also received the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman award and the 2019 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. In 2018, Sherald was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait as an official commission for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. Sherald’s work is held in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC.
About Darren Walker
Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy with offices in the United States and 10 regions around the globe. He chaired the philanthropy committee that brought a resolution to the city of Detroit’s historic bankruptcy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond in US capital markets for proceeds to strengthen and stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19.
Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing global and domestic programs including the Rebuild New Orleans initiative after Hurricane Katrina. In the 1990s, as COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation—Harlem’s largest community development organization—he led a comprehensive revitalization strategy, including building over 1,000 units of affordable housing and the first major commercial development in Harlem since the 1960s. Earlier, he had a decade-long career in international law and finance at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and UBS.
Darren co-chairs New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, and serves on the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and the UN International Labour Organization Global Commission on the Future of Work. He cofounded both the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy. He supported his friend Agnes Gund in creating the pioneering Art for Justice Fund and serves on many boards, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, the High Line, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. In the private sector he is on the boards of Ralph Lauren, PepsiCo and Bloomberg Inc. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and is the recipient of 16 honorary degrees and university awards, including Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal. In 2022, he was awarded France’s highest cultural honor, Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters for his leadership in the arts. In 2023 he was also appointed by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II to the Order of the British Empire for services to UK/US relations.
Educated exclusively in public schools, Darren was a member of the first class of Head Start in 1965 and received his bachelor’s and law degrees from The University of Texas at Austin, which in 2009 recognized him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award—its highest alumni honor. He has been included on numerous leadership lists, including TIME’s annual 100 Most Influential People, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, Ebony’s Power 100, and Out magazine’s Power 50. In 2020 Darren was named Wall Street Journal’s 2020 Philanthropy Innovator of the Year and 2023 Foundation Leader of the Year by Inside Philanthropy. In 2024, President Joe Biden awarded Darren the National Humanities Medal, which honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of and engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities subjects.
About The Great Hall of The Cooper Union
The Great Hall of The Cooper Union, located in The Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, has stood for more than a century as a bastion of free speech and a witness to the flow of American history and ideas. When the hall opened in 1858, more than a year in advance of the completion of the institution, it quickly became a destination for all interested in serious discussion and debate of the vital issues of the day.
The Great Hall was the platform for some of the earliest workers' rights campaigns and for the birth of the NAACP, the women's suffrage movement and the American Red Cross. To the Great Hall's lectern has come a pageant of famous Americans — rebels and reformers, poets and presidents. Before they were elected, Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama all spoke there. Besides Woodrow Wilson, two other incumbent presidents have spoken in the Great Hall: William Jefferson Clinton, who, on May 12, 1993, delivered a major economic address on reducing the federal deficit and Barack Obama, who, on April 22, 2010, gave an important speech on economic regulation and the financial markets.
During the past century's times of tremendous upheaval, it was through meetings in Cooper's famous auditorium that the politics and legislation necessary to build a humane city took shape.
About ‘Ursula’
Ursula is a quarterly magazine published by Hauser & Wirth, that celebrates the artistic achievement and creativity of the gallery's artists and those beyond. Through the printed magazine, digital content platform and live programs, Ursula champions artistic practices that challenge and interrogate the future, highlighting a diverse range of contemporary culture that Hauser & Wirth finds compelling. Featuring stories from the worlds of art, design, film, books, food, and sustainability, Ursula invites readers to think critically, ask questions, and engage with the ideas shaping our world. Written in a sophisticated yet accessible style, Ursula appeals to a broad, inquisitive readership, from dedicated insiders to curious observers. ‘It has always been our mission to make the gallery a home for our artists where other thinkers, writers, and visionaries can also gather and engage,’ gallery President Iwan Wirth told Artnet News. ‘Now Ursula will be an editorial home as well, a truly global magazine that reflects our philosophy.’

Annie Leibovitz, Self Portrait, New York City, 2017. Annie Leibovitz, Amy Sherald, Columbus, Georgia, 2022 © Annie Leibovitz. Courtesy the artist. 
Annie Leibovitz, Amy Sherald, Columbus, Georgia, 2022 © Annie Leibovitz. Courtesy the artist. 

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