SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- At its June meeting, the Board of Trustees of the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) elected Larry Sultan as the museum's second Artist Trustee. Sultan joins six others who were elected earlier in fiscal year 2009, including Jim Breyer, Adrianne Iann, Bradley James, Andy Pilara, Norah S. Stone, and John Walecka.
The role of SFMOMA's Board of Trustees is to support the museum's director, embrace the mission of the museum, and contribute to its stability and vitality, while sharing a long-term vision to ensure its enduring excellence. Trustees are advocates for the museum within the larger community and seek out opportunities to expand audiences.
Larry Sultan joins the Board per the recommendation of Director Neal Benezra as SFMOMA's second Artist Trustee, following painter Robert Bechtle. The Artist Trustee is elected to represent the artist community and give counsel to the Board from an artist's perspective. The Artist Trustee serves for a fixed term of three years, and the position is nonrenewable. The Artist Trustee is selected from a community of artists who represent the areas of SFMOMA's collection—painting and sculpture, photography, architecture and design, and media arts.
Sultan is a leading figure in the Bay Area art community, both as an artist and a teacher. For more than 30 years, he has explored the boundaries of documentary practice. His first major work was Evidence, a book of appropriated photographs that was a collaborative project with artist Mike Mandel; a subsequent exhibition was organized by SFMOMA in 1977. He grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, which has become a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. In 2004, SFMOMA organized the exhibition Larry Sultan: The Valley, which examined the adult film industry and the Valley's middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Sultan's seminal book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade-long project that took his mother and father as its primary subjects. SFMOMA holds some 20 of Sultan's works in its collection, as well as several joint works by the artist and his wife Kelly. He received SFMOMA's Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005.
Jim Breyer is a managing partner at Accel Partners and has been an investor in over 30 consumer internet, media, and technology companies that have completed public offerings or successful mergers. He currently serves on the boards of Wal-Mart Stores, Marvel Entertainment, Dell Inc., BBN, Brightcove, Etsy, Facebook, Global Grind, ModelN, and Prosper. Prior to Accel, Breyer was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York and worked in product marketing and management at Apple and Hewlett-Packard. He is the former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, former president of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, and on the boards of the Associates of the Harvard Business School, Pacific Community Ventures, Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Technet, and The Menlo School. In December 2005, he was appointed an honorary professor at the Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, China. He graduated with a bachelor's degree with highest distinction from Stanford University and with an MBA from Harvard University, where he was named a Baker Scholar. He is passionate about contemporary art, film, wine, travel, education, and environmental initiatives, and music ranging from Bach to Nirvana.
Adrianne Iann has varied interests in the arts and architecture and design. She served on the board of the San Francisco Art Institute and has had affiliations with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, Access Institute for Psychological Health, and California College of the Arts. Iann has a passion for modern German art and at SFMOMA has served on the main accessions committee, the media arts accessions committee, and the Director Circle committee.
Bradley James graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with bachelor's degrees in international relations and marketing and a minor in Spanish. In 2001 she moved to San Francisco, where she currently resides with her husband and their two sons. She is cofounder of the James Family Foundation, which focuses on conservation, poverty, education, and the arts. In 2006 the James Family Foundation provided a grant to SFMOMA supporting free admission to students from local art schools San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Academy of Art University.
Andrew Pilara is the president and senior portfolio manager of the RS Value Group. He has managed the RS Partners Fund and the RS Global Natural Resources Fund since their inceptions. Prior to joining the firm in 1993, he was president of Pilara Associates, an investment management firm he established in 1974. He has been involved in the securities business for more than 30 years, with experience in portfolio management, research, trading, and sales and is often interviewed about the investment sector. He holds a BA in economics from St. Mary's College. Pilara has been a member of SFMOMA since 1986 and most recently a member of SFMOMA's Chairman's Circle. He has an extensive photography collection including works by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and Thomas Demand and a long philanthropic history with the San Francisco Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, California College of the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tipping Point, and De Marillac Academy.
Norah Sharpe Stone and Norman Stone began collecting art in the mid-1980s with a focus on contemporary art. The Stones' homes display works by artists including Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol, Robert Gober, Matthew Barney, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Sarah Lucas, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Joseph Beuys, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra, Mike Kelly, and Sigmar Polke. The Stones own a Napa Valley winery where they have installed part of their art collection. A five-thousand-square-foot art cave features rotating selections from their extraordinary collection and a site-specific James Turrell piece is installed outside. Stone, a former corporate attorney, has served as co-chair of SFMOMA Director's Circle and is currently the chair of museum's 75th Anniversary Celebration Gala in May 2010.
John Walecka is a founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, where he focuses on investments in leading-edge companies in semiconductor, software, e-commerce, next generation broadband internet, and enterprise infrastructures. Previously he was a general partner with Brentwood Venture Capital. Prior to joining Brentwood, he worked at Hewlett-Packard and Stanford University's Smart Product Design Laboratory. He also helped build Documentum, which was sold to EMC, as well as publicly traded companies Multilink and Netflix. He is currently a director of the Stanford Business School Venture Capital Trust, an advisor to the Stanford Engineering School, and on the Investment Committee of Sacred Heart School in Menlo Park. Walecka received a BS and an MS in engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
