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Who stewards the work of an artist after they're gone? Benton director Victoria Sancho Lobis moderates a discussion among three active caretakers of artistic legacies for American women artists: 

Dennis Reed, Trustee of the June Harwood Charitable Trust
Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
Ian White, artist and head of the Charles White Archive

Reception to follow.

While admission to exhibitions and events are free and open to the public, we kindly ask you to .

About the Panelists

DENNIS REED is a curator, collector, artist and educator. He has organized over fifty exhibitions, large and small, for such institutions as The Huntington, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Japanese American National Museum. He has written for the Getty, Stanford University, Oxford University, and UCLA, among others. Works from his collection have been shown in museums nationally, and he has donated works from his collection to the Getty, LACMA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside. In 2019, the Getty acquired his collection of Japanese American photography. He has worked with the families of artists regarding the placement of their archives, and he now manages the June Harwood Charitable Trust. Before his retirement, he was the longtime Dean of Arts at Los Angeles Valley College, and the former chair of the Photographic Arts Council at LACMA.

ELIZABETH SMITH joined the New York-based Helen Frankenthaler Foundation as its first Executive Director in 2013. Previously she held curatorial positions at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has published and lectured widely on the work of Helen Frankenthaler and other artists whose exhibitions she has curated, including Uta Barth, Lee Bontecou, Jenny Holzer, Toba Khedoori, Kerry James Marshall, Donald Moffett, and Catherine Opie, among others. Smith’s latest essays have appeared in the 2021 monograph on Catherine Opie (Phaidon Press) and in the 2023 catalogue to the traveling exhibition Action/Gesture/Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970 (Whitechapel Gallery, London).

IAN WHITE is a visual artist, curator and educator who lives in Los Angeles. He is the director and chief executive of The Charles White Archives. His artistic practice includes narrative murals, abstract sculpture, installations and more. White was influenced by his father Charles White, a major figure in twentieth-century art and the community of artists, musicians, actors, and activists in which he was raised. White wrote and illustrated “Grandpa and the Library: How Charles White Learned to Paint,” for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York and curated an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Life Model: Charles White and His Students in conjunction with the traveling exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective. He was an assistant curator for Monumental Practice: Charles White at David Zwirner Gallery, New York and Charles White — Leonardo da Vinci at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.