OPA Live! with Ann Tarantino and Jennie Lamensdorf

Ann Tarantino will take over OPA’s Instagram account to host OPA Live! with her guest Jennie Lamensdorf. They will discuss Lamensdorf’s work as an arts worker, activist, curator, throughout her career. The conversation will explore how the arts can catalyze community engagement, how major institutions can support artists and communities, and the intersection of creative placemaking with the visual arts.

About Ann Tarantino

Ann Tarantino is an artist working across drawing, painting, installation, and site-specific works of public art. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US and overseas and has appeared in settings ranging from museums and galleries to botanical gardens and city streets. Recent exhibitions and projects include commissions for the Pittsburgh International Airport, collaborations with the Borough of Millvale, PA and Pittsburgh’s Office of Public Art; Cloud Countries, a new installation created for the Pittsburgh International Airport; a public-scale painting commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s DotART program; and a solo exhibition of new paintings with Davis Editions (Phoenix, AZ).

She has twice been featured in New American Paintings, and was a 2016- 17 recipient of a Fulbright Core Scholar Award for artistic practice in Brazil. Tarantino earned an honors degree in Visual Arts from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting from The Pennsylvania State University.

About Jennie Lamensdorf

Jennie Lamensdorf is an arts worker based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. Her work focuses on expanding audiences for the art of our time by bringing challenging and engaging work to non-traditional exhibition spaces because art has the power to encourage thoughtfulness, empathy, and creative problem solving.

Jennie is the Bay Area Lead of the global Facebook Art Department. The program includes the Artist in Residence (FB AIR), Analog Research Lab (ARL), and Creative Engagement programs, which have a collective mission to build community through creativity. Facebook’s Art Department also presents public-facing programs and supports projects that bring together diverse communities in real life and encourage the exploration of creative and critical thinking.

From 2012 – 2019, Jennie was Director and Curator of Time Equities Art in Buildings. She is also an independent curator and writer; her most recent project, Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape, opened at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in 2018 and traveled to the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.

In 2016, Lamensdorf co-founded Forward Union, a coalition-building initiative connecting social justice organizations with artists and creative communities.
Lamensdorf is a Trustee of the San Jose Museum of Art and a Board Member of Art Omi in Ghent, NY. She received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.