Gallery Climate Coalition is delighted to announce the launch of its New York chapter, to coincide with Earth Day 2023. By bringing together leaders of New York’s art world, GCC aims to galvanize the industry's response to the climate crisis and encourage alignment on environmental responsibility and collective action.
At a special event hosted by the Guggenheim on Friday 21st April, Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Wendy Fisher, President, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, co-hosted representatives of the city’s art institutions, galleries, advisories & art-sector businesses to introduce GCC’s Managing Director Heath Lowndes and Co-founder & Trustee Victoria Siddall and to officially launch GCC in New York.
GCC now issues an open call for New York’s galleries, artists, non-profits & institutions, art sector business and individual professionals to join the coalition and commit to collective climate action.
On Tuesday 30th May 10am EST GCC NY’s founders will host a Zoom event to share further information about the initiative with the wider art community. Event registration via this link.
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GCC NY Founding Committee
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Ales Ortuzar is an art dealer based in New York City and founded his own gallery Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca in 2018. Ortuzar Projects is dedicated to promoting a diverse and cross-generational group of artists who have played a significant role in the development of 20th and 21st-century art, but have not recently received critical exposure in New York. His program has received widespread international critical acclaim.
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Chiara Repetto co-owns Kaufmann Repetto, a contemporary art gallery based in both Milano and New York, alongside her sister Francesca Kaufmann. Chiara received her degree in Italian Contemporary Literature and a Masters in Publishing, and worked as a freelance writer and in a literary agency in Milano, all before joining Francesca Kaufmann Gallery in 2005. In 2013 Chiara moved to New York to open Kaufmann Repetto’s American outpost and second space in Chelsea. The gallery now proudly resides in the ever-changing and vibrant Tribeca neighborhood. She loves to get around by bike.
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Haley Mellin is an artist and land conservationist with a studio located in upstate New York. She founded the artist-run non-profit, Art into Acres to support new permanent protected areas. The initiative has supported millions of acres of new land conservation through the creation of locally-led community and Indigenous-protected areas. Mellin co-founded the Environmental Council at MOCA, Art + Climate Action and Artists Commit. She initiated the first educational museum carbon emissions studies in the United States, funded by support from the Teiger Foundation. Mellin has a PhD from Steinhardt School of Education at NYU and a BA from UC Berkeley and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is the 2023 Max Beckmann Distinguished Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Berlin.
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Laura Lupton is an art and climate consultant and the co-founder of several collaborative ventures at the intersection of art and climate: Galleries Commit, Artists Commit, Barder, and the Visual Arts PACT. With over a decade of experience working directly with some of contemporary art’s leading galleries, museums and artist studios to produce large scale projects, Laura has a robust inside knowledge of what it takes to catalyze action from within. Projects she has been part of have been presented by Creative Time, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Venice Biennial, Tate Modern, and The Shed, among others.
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Loring Randolph is the Director of the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection, a private collection of contemporary art which includes artworks on public view at NorthPark Center, Dallas TX, a top 20 public shopping center in the USA. Previously, she served as a Director of the International Art Fair organization, Frieze Inc., where she led Frieze New York and public art programming in New York City. Prior to that, she was the former Partner of Casey Kaplan gallery in New York, where she worked closely with internationally renowned contemporary artists. She is additionally the Director of Talking Galleries NY, a biannual two-day symposium with 50+ speakers from the international art world in the Gilder Lehrman Hall at the Morgan Library & Museum. Talking Galleries NY premiered in 2022 and will take place again in 2024 in collaboration with Schwartzman&.
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Matthew Wood is the founder of Mendes Wood DM. Established in São Paulo, Brazil in 2010, the gallery now has additional locations in New York, Paris, and Brussels. He is also the co-founder of JA.CA, one of Brazil’s first artist residency programs which has supported and hosted over one hundred artists, curators, and researchers since 2010. In 2022, he helped to create a research and residency initiative in upstate New York that aims to reflect critically on the relationship between contemporary art practice and nature.
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Stefanie Hessler is the Director of Swiss Institute (SI) in New York. As a curator, writer and editor her work focuses on ecologies and its various social intersections. At SI she and the team are centering environmental consciousness in all facets of the institution, ranging from changes that reduce the organization’s carbon footprint to its artistic programming, with the understanding that this process is imperfect but urgent. Hessler has worked with over three hundred artists, fifty organizations, and dozens of researchers across all continents. Most recently she co-led the exhibition "Sex Ecologies" at Kunsthall Trondheim, co-curated “Rising Tides / Down to Earth” at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, curated the 17th Momenta Biennale "Sensing Nature" in Montreal, and edited several volumes published by The MIT Press as well as authored the book “Prospecting Ocean”.
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Whitney McGuire. Esq. (she/her/hers) is an attorney, sustainability consultant, strategist, and co-founder of Sustainable Brooklyn, where she works to concretize equity in the sustainability movement. Whitney is a fierce advocate for the sustainability of communities first and most impacted by environmental and social degradation due to the climate crisis. Whitney is the inaugural Associate Director of Sustainability at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and she currently teaches various sustainable business classes at Parsons School of Design.
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