The World Stage Virtual Artist Talks

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego. A two time recipient of a NEA Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990.

Artist, activist, and educator, Mildred Howard received her MFA from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, CA. She is known for her sculptural installations and mixed-media assemblage work. In 2015 she received the Lee Krasner Award, in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement. She has also been the recipient of the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2017), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2004/05), a fellowship from the California Arts Council (2003), the Adeline Kent Award from San Francisco Art Institute (1991), and, most recently, The Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts and the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award at San Francisco Art Institute. Mildred Howard’s artworks are represented in the collections of SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Museum of Glass and Contemporary Art, Tacoma, the Oakland Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art.

JoAnne Northrup, Nevada Museum of Art Curatorial Director and Curator of Contemporary Art, earned her M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Southern California, and her B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to her time in Nevada, she was a Fulbright senior research scholar at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has worked in various curatorial capacities at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Musée de Grenoble in France, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

At age 14, Jordan D. Schnitzer bought his first work of art from his mother’s Portland, Oregon contemporary art gallery, evolving into his lifelong avocation as collector. He began collecting contemporary prints and multiples in earnest in 1988. Today, the collection exceeds 19,000 works and includes many of today’s most important contemporary artists. It has grown to be the country’s largest private print collection. He and his Family Foundation generously lend work from the collections to qualified institutions and has organized over 110 exhibitions and has art exhibited at over 150 museums. He is also President of Harsch Investment Properties, a privately owned real estate investment company based in Portland, Oregon, which owns and operates over 25 million square feet of office, multi-tenant industrial, multi-family and retail properties in six western states.