Jimmy Castillo
Houston Arts Alliance

Jimmy Castillo currently serves a dual role as Collection Manager and Project Manager for the City of Houston’s Civic Art Collection, through the Houston Arts Alliance. He is responsible for scheduling and managing conservation projects.  He manages new art commission projects, temporary art projects, and assistant manages the Alliance Gallery.

In 2012 Mr. Castillo developed the website PublicArtHouston.org, an interactive map of the Civic Art Collection, with the intent of expanding the content to include other public, privately-owned, or independent works of public art in the Greater Houston Area.

Mr. Castillo received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Houston with a minor in Mexican-American Studies.  He previously worked as Assistant Director for Exhibitions and Programming at the Lawndale Art Center, and as a website developer for Idea Integration.  He lives in Houston with his wife Sarah and their two children.

Megan Crigger
City of Austin

Megan Crigger serves as the Cultural Arts Manager for the City of Austin, Texas, working within the Economic Growth and Redevelopment Services offices. In 2012 her department was awarded an NEA grant for a Cultural Tourism Plan. She oversaw the development of the city’s artwork donation and loan policy, adopted by Council in 2012, and completed a market survey for creative businesses and individual artists.

Megan has worked with the City of Austin as the Art in Public Places Administrator, an AIPP Coordinator and Gallery and Education Manager. She currently is co-chair of Any Given Child Development & Communications board, and on the Austin Independent School District Annual Academic and Facilities Task Force. She serves on the Executive Board of Texans for the Arts and is a member of the United States Urban Arts Federation.

Ms. Crigger earned her Master of Arts in Arts Education and two Bachelor degrees, in art history and psychology, all at the University of Texas at Austin.

Patricia Gomez
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Pat Gomez is a Creative Services Manager for LACMTA.  Since 2012 she has managed public art projects in rail and bus facilities, among other responsibilities. For 11 years, she managed the Art Collection, Private Art Development Fee, and Murals programs for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. At DCA, Ms. Gomez was responsible for a 3 year independent appraisal project, cataloging, interdepartmental loan program, and conservation treatments for collection comprised of 1,600 diverse objects with a Fair Market Value of over $20 million.

Ms. Gomez is a noted presenter and thorough collection researcher. Her case study on Los Angeles art collection appraisals was featured at the American Society of Appraisers national conference in 2007.  She has worked with non-profit contemporary art as well as municipal programs, including her work as Associate Director for Self-Help Graphics & Art, a Chicano arts organization noted for the production and archiving of serigraph editions.

Pat Gomez earned her Master and Bachelor degrees in visual art both from California State University at Fullerton. She is an independent curator and artist. Her work is included in private and public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She resides in northeast Los Angeles.

Keith Lachowicz
Regional Arts and Culture Council

Keith Lachowicz is the Public Art Collections Manager for the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) in Portland, Oregon.  He’s responsible for the care and management of all public art owned by the City of Portland and surrounding Multnomah County.

The small collections department that Keith supervises, which consists of a Registrar and Preparator/Maintenance Technician, oversees a collection of 1900 works—from delicate prints and drawings in the City/County Portable Works Collection to more than 500 permanently sited works situated throughout the Portland metropolitan area.

The job requires daily juggling and problem-solving to reconcile “best practice” with “funds and resources available.”  Keith and his team have become the on-point staff for organizing and supplying the data that public art search and access applications are constructed with.

A member of the RACC staff since 2007, Keith has 25+ years of experience in arts management.  He has a Bachelor’s of Environmental Design and a B.F.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder; and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from San Francisco State University.

Helen Lessick
Structural Expressionism

Helen Lessick is a civic art activist who has led public art programs, collections, commissions and projects on staff in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Houston. She consults nationally on public art policies, projects and collection management issues. She was 2010 co-juror for the PAN Year in Review and has served on public art selection panels across the country.

Ms. Lessick has written for diverse national arts journals including Public Art Review, Fiber Arts and Sculpture. In 2012 she wrote the public art chapter for Art for Community Change edited by Dr. Doug Borwick. She co-founded Web Resources for Art in Public (WRAP), a grassroots metadata effort for public art online. In 2013 she moderated Public Art and the Visual Resource Challenge for the Visual Resources Association conference in Providence, Rhode Island.

An artist, sculptor and creative catalyst, Helen’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Getty Research Institute, Sackner Archive for Conceptual and Concrete Poetry and numerous public art collections.  Originally from Philadelphia, Helen earned her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California Irvine and BA in Art from Reed College. She maintains her practice, Structural Expressionism, in Los Angeles.

Rosa Lowinger
Rosa Lowinger and Associates

Rosa Lowinger is Principal and Chief Conservator of Rosa Lowinger and Associates, a firm based in both Los Angeles and Miami. Rosa has been working on conservation of 20th century mosaic and composite murals and artworks for three decades. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation.

Ms. Lowinger was the consulting conservator for many significant and valued art restoration projects including Simon Rodia’s towers in Watts, CA; Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Dream Garden in Philadelphia, PA and the Life of Christ mosaic mural in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale CA. Helen Lundeberg’s History of Transportation petromosaic in Inglewood, CA; and Athos Menaboni’s 40 meter long and 3 meter high smalti wall in Atlanta, GA. She was a featured speaker in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Finishing Touches: Conserving Wall Paintings and Other Architectural Surfaces in 2010.

A Cuban-born American conservator, Ms. Lowinger holds a M.A. in conservation and art history from New York University. She writes frequently about art, culture, preservation, and things Cuban for a broad variety of national print media. Rosa is the author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub, a critically acclaimed account of Havana's nightclub scene in the era of the Cuban Revolution published by Harcourt in 2005.

Sara Pasti
Dorsky Museum of Art
SUNY New Paltz

Ms. Pasti is The Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, located at the State University of New York at New Paltz.  As part of her regional initiative she coordinated five Hudson River Valley visual art organizations including the Dorsky, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Women’s Studio Workshop to form the ad hoc Hudson Valley Visual Art Collections Consortium.

The Consortium, funded through consecutive Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grants, collaborated to connect the organizations’ permanent visual art collections online. The group addressed challenges in accessing and preserving permanent visual art collections, inadequate storage facilities and best practices for storage of specific types of art objects. The Consortium is consolidating five stand-alone databases to allow access across collections for purposes of scholarly and curatorial research.

Prior to the Dorsky, Sara worked in arts and community development specializing in start-up projects, institutional and capital project management, and capital and annual fund development. She has held executive leadership posts in visual and performing arts organizations including the Henry Art Gallery and On the Boards in Seattle, Washington, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY.

Sara is Past President of the Beacon Arts Community Association and served on the Beacon City Council from 2008-2013. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art from Wesleyan University and her Master of Fine Art in Painting and Printmaking from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Karen Rudd
City of Norfolk Cultural Affairs

Karen Rudd is the Manager of the Bureau of Cultural Affairs for the City of Norfolk, Virginia. On staff since 2006, Ms. Rudd established permanent public art funding through city ordinance and developed policies and procedures, procurement process, contracts and work plan for yearly $500K public art budget with an 11 member Arts Commission. Additionally Karen manages the Selden Arcade and opened the Selden Gallery, a community exhibition space.

Ms. Rudd previously worked with the City of Albuquerque Art in Public Places/Urban Enhancement Trust Fund as Associate Manager to develop and manage public art projects.  She coordinated over 400 statewide public art capital implementation projects as AIPP staff for the state of New Mexico. Karen earned her BFA from the University of New Mexico. She maintains a studio practice and lives in Norfolk with her husband and cat.

Abby Suckle
cultureNOW

Abby Suckle is the founder and President of cultureNOW, the non-profit organization dedicated celebrating the cultural environment as a gallery that exists beyond museum walls. Through cultural tourism and arts education, CultureNOW believes that online mapping, interviews and research of art, architecture and history empowers the public to better visualize the place they live. CultureNOW’s online information is a powerful tool to understand the richness and diversity of a community.

Ms. Suckle has designed and distributed over 650,000 cultural and historical maps of New York. Her articles have appeared in the Architects Newspaper and she published the book "By Their Own Design" with the Whitney Library of Design. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, she is the 2009 recipient of the New York State Fellows Award and serves as Vice President for Outreach at the NY Chapter of the AIA.

Ms. Suckle earned her Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to opening her own architectural firm, she practiced architecture with Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Sert Jackson Associates and SITE. At Pei, her major projects include the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the San Francisco Main Library. She has a long commitment to sustainability and has collaborated with the Harvard Green Campus Initiative since 2005 (outreach efforts including BuildBoston, AIA NY committee on the environment). She maintains her practices and residence in New York City.