What is an art museum? _SMAM_ Friday Panels

Santa Monica Art Museum is hosting a series of events, exhibitions and panels during Frieze Week.

RSVP MANDATORY for free museum entry.

Friday has 3 panels between 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm.

Immersive Art - 2:00 - 2:45 pm

The Santa Monica Museum of Art was created to stand at a crossroads of traditional presentations of art and immersive experience. This panel brings together artists, companies, and programs pushing boundaries in immersive space using VR and AR technologies. Imogen Hare, GAZELL.iO will discuss the state the future of immersive art with Vortic and artists.

NFTs with Physical Practices - 3:00 - 3:45 pm

Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR For Artists, artist Russell Young, and Casey Coyle, art advisor at SuperRare, discuss how artists with physical practices navigate the digital art market and what NFTs can offer to empower their careers.

The Future of Art Museums - 4:00 - 4:45 pm

Join us at the Santa Monica Art Museum for an exciting discussion about the future of the museum with Christoph Rahofer, Corey Madden, Merel van Helsdingen, Tom McLeod and Jesse Damiani.

More About the Panelists on The Future of Art Museums

Christoph Rahofer develops new spaces, technology, and interfaces for audiences to understand and emerge into artist-driven cultures. He is the director of the Santa Monica Art Museum. SMAM is not only a traditional art museum but rather an “artist museum,” providing space, technology, and resources for artists to express, conceptualize, and prototype their work. The museum embraces the cultural blur and the many aspects of the classic institutional model while using these forms and expectations to expand its potential. Creating something new involves risks and experimentation. SMAM learns these virtues from its artists and views the role of the art museum as a creative practice. Christoph is also the Founder and CEO of EMS entertainment, a producer of innovative interactive attractions and exhibitions.

Corey Madden is the executive director at the Monterey Museum of Art. She has served as Executive Director of the Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Founding Artistic Director of L’Atelier Arts in Los Angeles, and Associate Artistic Director of Center Theatre Group at the Music Center of Los Angeles. She has taught at UCLA, California Institute of the Arts, and other leading universities and colleges, and has developed programming and consulted with the Getty Museum and Villa, North Carolina Museum of Art, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and other arts institutions.

Merel van Helsdingen founded Nxt Museum in 2020 as the first museum dedicated to New Media Art in The Netherlands bringing together Arts & Technology. She is on a mission to constantly push the boundaries of what a museum can be in the digital age by bridging the gap between the digital & physical world and offering a space for research, education, experiment and creation. Previously she worked at Apple, Bartle Bogle & Hegarty and PVH on digital marketing strategy, business development and cultural partnerships with music and entertainment companies such as Disney, YouTube, Rovio and Universal Music in London and Amsterdam.Merel is active in the Dutch cultural scene as part of the advisory board of several digital and cultural initiatives in The Netherlands: Digital Arts Festival Schemerlicht and company Stichting Door.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and producer who writes about art, media, and emerging technology on Forbes. He is Founder and Director of Postreality Labs, a new media and emerging technology strategy and curatorial studio. He is Curator & Director of Simulation Literacies at Nxt Museum, an Affiliate of the metaLAB at Harvard, and a Research Affiliate at Institute for the Future. Recent curated exhibitions include Brief Histories of Simulated Life at Vellum LA, Uncannyverse at SXSW, Synthetic Wilderness at Honor Fraser Gallery, and PROOF OF ART at Francisco Carolinum Linz, the first museum retrospective on the history of NFTs.

Tom McLeod is a 5x serial entrepreneur. Currently he is building Arkive, the world’s first distributed museum curated by the people. Prior to Arkive he was the CEO and Founder of Omni (exited to Coinbase in 2019). Along with a passion for tech and the arts, Tom has a dedicated interest in service and supporting diverse communities. He sits on the board of the Camelback Ventures as well as advising numerous founders and startups.

Host or Publisher Santa Monica Art Museum