Public Art, Activism and Intellectual Property

This event is devoted to discussing how to make a commitment to public art a reality. Lawyers, artists and cultural art administrators will discuss the challenges and triumphs from their past experience, with a special attention to the legal hurdles – and specifically the intellectual property conundrums – that public art raises for artists, municipalities, and private parties such as commissioning entities or investors.  Boston is a city on the brink of a public art explosion, with the welcoming of Julie Burros as city’s new Chief of Art and Culture and her (and the Mayor’s) commitment to bringing more public art to our communities.  We will meet at Northeastern University, which has its own explosion of public art in the past decade that reflects its commitment to social justice and community activism.  We welcome lawyers from the CSUSA community and anyone else who is interested in participating in this discussion, which will be part presentation and part brainstorming how to support the public art of the future.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free, but please register!

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Panelists

Tania Bruguera is an installation and performance artist, currently a Cashin Fellow in New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and a Fellow at the Radcliff Institute of Advanced Study. Bruguera researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life, focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education, and politics. Bruguera earned her MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder and director of Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School), the first performance studies program in Latin America. Bruguera’s work has been exhibited at documenta 11, the Guggenheim Museum, and Tate Modern and also at the Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, the Gwangju Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and Shanghai Biennale. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions around the world, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. From 2003 – 2010, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual Arts of The University of Chicago and is an invited professor at the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice, Italy. On January 2, 2015, she was freed from confinement in Cuba after having had three back-to-back detentions in three days, and after over a thousand artists worldwide signed an open letter to Raúl Castro calling for her release.

Andrew Epstein is a partner in the firm of Barker, Epstein & Loscocco, a full-service Boston, Massachusetts law firm. Drew represents hundreds of design and image professionals especially photographers, illustrators, design firms, advertising agencies, museums and other individuals and businesses involved in photography, art, illustration, and imaging. Drew also has an extensive knowledge of antiques and regularly represents antique dealers, appraisers and auctioneers. In addition to general business law and litigation, Drew’s practice focuses on copyright, trademark, contracts and licensing issues.

Drew is an accomplished trial attorney with over three decades of successful jury and non-jury trial and appellate court experience in both Massachusetts and Federal courts. Drew has successfully represented clients in a wide variety of cases, including multi-million dollar personal injury actions, $1.1 million for copyright infringement, and $1.2 million for damaging several works of art. He is a former president and long-time member of the Board of Directors of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, an influential photographic arts organization, and he is a corporator and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Griffin Museum in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Drew was an adjunct professor at Boston University for six years where he taught Legal Issues for Arts Administrators in the graduate school Arts Administration Program. Drew has been a frequent guest lecturer to academic, professional, business and legal groups on copyright and trademark law, art law and general business law. He writes frequently on copyright law, contract law and legal and business issues for photographers and artists. Drew was awarded the first annual Attorney of the Year Award by the Massachusetts Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in 2002.

Karin Goodfellow, Director of the Boston Art Commission, oversees all temporary and permanent public art projects on City of Boston property. She manages the care and custody of the over 500 existing artworks in the City’s collection, including Faneuil Hall and the Parkman House and spearheads the creation of educational and informational programming. Ms. Goodfellow coordinates with the board of the Art Commission, City departments, project proponents, community groups, and funders to bring world-class public art to the City of Boston. She is committed to developing accessible art resources for local communities through creative problem solving in policy development and operations management in city and state government. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ms. Goodfellow has a background in project management, community outreach, museum education, and visual arts.

Jules Rochielle is an artist, social justice advocate and, an educator. Jules believes that creative collaboration is at the root of change-making. Jules is the Creative Director at NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law. Jules is also the Project Director and Manager of Social Design Collective (LLC). She utilizes the following creative strategies: applied design, collaborative practices, public art, public pedagogies, civic engagement, social justice, storytelling, advocacy through the arts, participatory media, social media, GIS mapping, data collection, research, social media and storytelling. 

She in an Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Veterans’ Services and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.  And she recently was the 2016 Artist in Residency at with the Women Have Wings Residency, an international art residency functioning as a laboratory of conversation and engagement. Each year WHWr invites one global activist from the WHW Courage Awards and one United States-based socially engaged artist. This is a residency connecting artists with global activists creating networks that expand each year.

The New England Chapter Chairs would like to extend special thanks for the following for helping to put this event together:

Kiel Greene, ’17, Northeastern student, joint degree in Music Business and JD

Alvin Carter, ’18, Northeastern student, IP concentration

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