DIRECTOR 
Jo Farb Hernández
jofarbhernandez@spacesarchives.org

Jo Farb Hernández, a 30+-year veteran of the art world, is Director of the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University and Director of the SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments) archives. She earlier served as Director of the Monterey Museum of Art (1985-93), and concurrently as President of the statewide California Association of Museums (1991-92). She has also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1999-2000), directed the Triton Museum of Art (1978-85), and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Dallas Museum of Art (1975-76). She is a member of the International Editorial Board for Raw Vision magazine, the Executive Board of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, and the International Advisory Board for the Fred Smith art environment. She has served on the Advisory Board for the Fund for Folk Culture, and has been a panelist for the California Arts Council and the U.S. Information Agency. Since 1994 Hernandez has also pursued selected curatorial projects on a freelance basis through Curatorial and Museum Management Services, her consulting firm for nonprofit arts organizations.

Hernández’ curatorial efforts have been impressive and wide-ranging; she is equally comfortable with contemporary and modern as with outsider, folk, and ethnic/tribal arts. She has been particularly involved with the aesthetic genre of “outsider” or “self-taught” art since 1974, when she completed her Master’s degree project at UCLA on American art environments through the Folklore and Mythology program. She has done primary fieldwork on art environments across the U.S. and in Western Europe; and on Mexican, Spanish, and Balkan folk arts and performance events. She has authored or co-authored over thirty exhibition catalogues and books, and has published articles for a variety of international art journals; she has juried numerous national, statewide, and regional exhibitions, and has lectured widely at museums and universities internationally. She has recently completed the book Forms of Tradition in Contemporary Spain, accompanied by four DVDs, and, through support from a Fulbright Senior Scholar award, is currently pursuing a documentation/ interpretation project on Spanish art environments.

BOARD MEMBER 
Lisa Stone
lstone@saic.edu

Lisa Stone focuses on the documentation and preservation of artists’ environments, museums, and collections. She has been involved in the preservation of art environments since 1981, and has worked on the preservation of Fred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park since 1987. Working with Don Howlett, of Preservation Services, Inc., she writes preservation plans and manages site preservation projects for art environments and other sites. She has a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism. She’s co-author of Sacred Spaces and Other Places A guide to the Grottos and Sculptural Environments of the Upper Midwest (with Jim Zanzi, SAIC Press, 1993), and lectures and writes widely on the subjects of art environments and self-taught artists. She lives in Chicago and Spring Lake, WI where she works on a garden/ruin.



BOARD MEMBER 
John Foster
fosterdesign@charter.net

John Foster is a graphic designer, writer, artist, and passionate collector/scholar of folk, self-taught and outsider art. John founded and was president of ENVISION Folk Art of Missouri from 1995 to 2005, a not-for-profit arts organization; he also served during that time as editor of ENVISION’s Journal. He is on the Advisory Board of The Folk Art Society of America and was the 2004 recipient of their Award of Distinction.

John Foster organized and curated the exhibition “Accidental Mysteries” of vernacular photography which opened in 2005 at the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis and continues to travel throughout the United States, recently completing its fifth museum venue at the Peabody Essex Museum in Boston, MA. Over 77,000 visitors visited the exhibition during its seven-month display there. The exhibition has received numerous positive reviews and acclaim during its travel schedule, and Art & Antiques Magazine named the Foster collection of vernacular photography in its annual list as one of the Top 100 Art Collections in the United States (2005). John was invited to speak on vernacular photography at the American Folk Art Museum’s annual symposium Uncommon Artists: A Series of Cameo Talks during the Outsider Art Fair week in 2007. He is currently at work on a book on his collection of found photography.

John holds a BFA degree from East Carolina University and a MFA degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He is Director of Business Development at TOKY, a multi-disciplinary marketing and design firm in St. Louis, MO.

BOARD MEMBER 
Holly Metz
holly@hollymetz.net

Holly Metz is a writer and public historian. She’s been writing about social, legal, and cultural issues—and where they intersect—for over twenty-five years, and has been documenting American art environments for nearly as long. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of newspapers, journals, and magazines, including Metropolis, Preservation magazine, Raw Vision, Poets & Writers, Southern Art Quarterly, Threepenny Review, and the New York Times. For nine years she was a contributing writer for The Progressive and the American Bar Association publication Student Lawyer.  As a public historian, Holly founded the Hoboken Oral History Project. She serves as editor of its “Vanishing Hoboken” chapbooks series. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Recent Blog Entries by Holly Metz:
The Hedge Garden, Fishing Creek, New Jersey

BOARD MEMBER 
Peter Tokofsky
peter@email.com

Peter Tokofsky is the director of academic programs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and an adjunct professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA. He was previously executive director of the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles and visiting professor of folklore at UC Berkeley and UCLA. Tokofsky is a scholar of art and cultural traditions in Germany and the United States. He has published numerous articles on festivals, fairy tales, and other traditions. He is currently working to preserve John Ehn’s Old Trapper’s Lodge sculptures at Pierce College.

EMERITUS BOARD MEMBER 
Lyn Kienholz
lkienholz@gmail.com



EMERITUS BOARD MEMBER 
Allen Porter
Porter.enteract@rcn.com

Allen Porter has had an extensive career as designer, teacher, photographer and activist for the preservation of folk art environments and architecture. He met Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus while in high school and became exposed to the modern design movement for the first time; after his discharge from service in WW2, Porter entered the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design, expanding his interest in graphic/industrial design, architecture and photography. He moved to Los Angeles in 1950 and opened his first design office, serving architects, furniture and lighting designers, manufacturers, and showrooms; his practice grew to include a spectrum of industries in a range of design disciplines.