Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Amy Whitaker is a writer, artist, and teacher who works at the intersection of creativity, business, and everyday life and is the author of Art Thinking, a “manifesto and a love story” for how creativity and business go together. A graduate of Williams College, she holds an MBA from Yale University and an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. She is an assistant professor at NYU in Visual Arts Administration.

Whitaker has worked for museums including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate as well as for international financial institutions. She teaches and lectures widely. Her first book, Museum Legs, was selected as the common summer reading assignment for the first year class at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) in 2010.

The premise of her most recent book, Art Thinking, is that if you are making a work of art in any field, you aren't going from a known point A to a known point B, but rather inventing point B. That process is exploratory and open-ended—and therefore sometimes at odds with the cultural pressures to succeed economically and professionally. The independent thinking behind inventing point B is closely tied to robustness of democratic exchange, to the values of a liberal arts education, and to interdisciplinary approaches to addressing the great problems of our day.

Professor Whitaker's Athenaeum talk is sponsored by the Mellon Creativity Roundtable, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), the Kravis Leadership Institute (KLI), and the Center for Writing and Public Discourse (CWPD).

Food for Thought: Podcast with Amy Whitaker