Arts and Diplomacy
The extracurricular seminar “Arts and Diplomacy” by Ambassador Randi Charno Levine focuses on the arts in the framework of diplomacy and brings renowned artists, curators and leaders to take part in the conversation.
Upcoming sessions
25 May 18:30 UCP (CLSBE, 511)
Institutional Decision-Making: Ethics, Risk, and Public Impact
Adam Weinberg
(Director Emeritus, Whitney Museum of American Art)
Hank Willis Thomas
(Artist)
Philippe Vergne
(Director, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art)
Chair: Amb. Randi Charno Levine
26 May 15:30 UCP (CLSBE, 511)
Curatorial Power: Selection, Visibility, and Narrative
Rujeko Hockley
(Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art)
Alfredo Jaar
(Artist)
Aliza Nisenbaum
(Artist)
Chair: Amb. Randi Charno Levine
On 25-26 May 2026, The Lisbon Consortium hosts the Art and Diplomacy seminar by Amb. Randi Charno Levine, the former US Ambassador to Portugal and Honorary Professor in Art and Diplomacy at UCP. The series of lectures over the past two years will now continue with the welcoming of renowned artists, curators and leaders to UCP for two panel discussions that focus on institutional decision-making and curatorial practices.
The first panel, “Institutional Decision-Making: Ethics, Risk, and Public Impact” features Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of Whitney Museum of American Art, Philippe Vergne, Director of Serralves Museum of Contemporary art, and artist Hank Willis Thomas. The conversation focuses on how museums and cultural institutions make high-stakes decisions involving ethics, funding, governance, public trust, and social responsibility.
The second panel “Curatorial Power: Selection, Visibility, and Narrative” features curator Rujeko Hockley and artists Alfredo Jaar and Aliza Nisenbaum. It examines curatorial decisions by discussing what is collected, exhibited, framed or omitted and how these decisions actively construct cultural meaning and historical narratives.
The seminar is open to the academic community and the public.
Registrations: lxconsortium@ucp.pt
Invited speakers
Adam Weinberg
Adam D. Weinberg is the Director Emeritus and an Honorary Trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art; beginning in 2003, he served for 20 years as the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. During his tenure, the Museum presented some 300 exhibitions on diverse emerging, mid-career and senior artists—from Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe to Frank Stella and Carmen Herrera to Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu—as well as nine editions of the Whitney Biennial. Under his leadership the Whitney created award-winning, educational programs, experienced exponential growth of its permanent collection, dramatically expanded its performance and conservation programs and increased its attendance threefold.
In 2015 the Whitney realized a new 220,00 square-foot building in New York’s Meatpacking District designed by Renzo Piano. Other major capital projects realized under his direction were Day’s End, a permanent, monumental, public sculpture by artist David Hammons on the Hudson River waterfront (2021), and the renovation of the former home and studio of artist Roy Lichtenstein for the site of the Whitney’s renowned Independent Study Program (2023).
Among the posts Weinberg held before his Whitney directorship were: Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art; Senior Curator and Curator of the Permanent Collection at the Whitney and Director of Education and Assistant Curator at Walker Art Center. Throughout his career he has curated exhibitions on dozens of 20th and 21st-century artists, authored numerous catalogues, lectured internationally, and is recognized for scores of interviews he has conducted with artists.
He serves on boards and advisory boards of many arts organizations among them: the American Academy in Rome, The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, The Menil Collection, Mass MoCA, the Art Mill Museum (Doha) and Magazzino Italian Art, Storm King Art Center. He has had an abiding involvement in teaching museums; accordingly, he has served on the Board of Governors at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College; the Board of Governors of the Colby College Museum of Art and as Chair of the Visiting Committee at the Harvard Art Museums.
His honors include: the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Insignia of the Order of Arts and Letters from the government of France; a Presidential Fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Resident Critic at the American Academy in Rome. Weinberg holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop, SUNY Buffalo.
Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar is an artist, photographer, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in Lisbon. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).
Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020); SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2023), and KINDL, Berlin (2024).
The artist has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over eighty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020. In 2024 he was awarded the IV Albert Camus Mediterranean Prize. In 2025 he was selected as the recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal and received the 11th Prix Pictet.
His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.
Aliza Nisenbaum
Born in Mexico City, Aliza Nisenbaum makes portrait paintings that are manifestations of exchanges with her subjects over time. Collaborating with communities, she employs the focused attention of observational painting to create the conditions for close-looking. Distinct social groups are foregrounded, including immigrant communities, dancers, members of grassroot organizations, subway, airport, and health workers. Nisenbaum engages with these groups on various levels, sharing resources, skills and ultimately, through the intimacy of portraiture as social representation. Through lengthy engagement with her subjects, the artist gains a deeper understanding of individual and collective histories, and accords a dignity to the exchange– that exceeds the space of portraiture. Often lushly decorated with patterned textiles found in her sitter’s homes and tiles from workplace settings, Nisenbaum makes visible the material conditions, friendships and alliances of particular work and leisure environments.
Aliza Nisenbaum earned a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2001, and an MFA from the same institution in 2005.
Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include The Barack Obama Presidential Center (June 2026) Des Moines Art Center (2025–2026); The Metropolitan Opera, New York (2023–2024); Queens Museum, New York (2023); Delta Air Lines x Queens Museum at LaGuardia Airport, New York (2022); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2022); Tate Liverpool (2020); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2017–2018)
Nisenbaum’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums and public institutions worldwide including Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Allentown Art Museum; Arts Council, Dublin; Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara; The Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; KRC Collection, Voorschoten, Netherlands; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum Sander Darmstadt; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery; The Perimeter, London; Queens Museum; Tate, UK; Toledo Museum of Art; University of Chicago Booth School of Business Art Collection; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Nisenbaum is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award (2024); and has been a Gala Honoree of the Hirshhorn Museum (2021) and The Phillips Collection (2019). She is a Tate Americas foundation honoree (2019), the recipient of a Provost’s Junior Faculty Diversity Development Award from Columbia University (2017), a Fellowship for Immigrant Women Leaders and Women’s Cabinet from the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (2015), and a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2013).
Hank Willis Thomas
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is a conceptual artist whose work examines themes of identity, perspective, commodity, media, and popular culture. Thomas’ interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, photography, retroreflectives, quilt-based works, film, and more, often challenging the viewer to critically engage with the complexities of contemporary culture. Thomas has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, including The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR (2019) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH (2020); the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. (2021); and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2024).
His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.
His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males; In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth); The Writing on the Wall; The Gun Violence Memorial Project; and For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse & direct action.
Thomas was the 2022 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts honoree from the Office of Art in Embassies, Washington DC. Additionally, he was the Harmer/Eisner Artist-in-Residence in for Aspen Institute Arts Program (2024-2025) and the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is a former member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.
Thomas’s public art practice includes permanent artworks around the country, including The Embrace (2023) on the Boston Common in Boston, MA; With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited (2025) at Davidson College in Davidson, NC; REACH (2023), made in collaboration with Coby Kennedy, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL; Duality (2023) at The Underline in Miami, FL; and The Truth is I Love You (2023), at the Austin Public Library, Austin, TX. Additional permanent public artworks include Unity (2019) in Downtown Brooklyn, NY; Love Over Rules (date) at Yerba Buena in San Francisco, CA; and All Power to All People in Opa Locka, FL.
Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from MASS Art, MA, CCA the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA in 2025; CCA the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA in 2024 as well as honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Philippe Vergne
Philippe Vergne has been serving as director of Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, since April 2019.
He was director of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) from 2014 to 2018.
Prior to his appointment at MOCA, Vergne served for five years as director of the Dia Art Foundation, New York.
Before his tenure at the Dia Foundation, Vergne was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
From 1994 to 1997, Vergne was Director of the MAC, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille, France.
Rujeko Hockley
Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025), Inheritance (2023), 2 Lizards (2022), Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021), Julie Mehretu (2021), Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017) and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017 (2017). Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as contemporary artists. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and travelled to three U.S. venues in 2017-18. She serves on the Boards of Art Matters and Museums Moving Forward, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess.
The Lisbon Consortium 