A Conversation with Mark Bradford, Artist & Co-Founder, Art + Practice, and Ann Philbin, Board Member, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
Leaders of AEFI member foundations will gather in Los Angeles in October 2026 for an in-person, invitation-only event presented by AEFI and hosted by Hauser & Wirth Downtown LA art gallery reflecting on artists, legacy, and philanthropy. The program will feature a conversation with Mark Bradford, artist and co-founder of Art + Practice, and Ann Philbin, Hammer Museum director emerita and board member, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles and grew up deeply connected to its Leimert Park neighborhood, where his mother was a small-business owner and where he still pursues his own creative practice. He is recognized internationally for a creative practice that transforms paper and everyday materials into monumental paintings, installations and sculptures that explore how socioeconomic and political forces converge to shape the lived experiences and physical environments of marginalized communities. Widely exhibited internationally, his work is included in the collections of institutions such as New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, London’s Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award in 2009 and the High Museum’s David C. Driskell Prize in 2016, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and joined the board of the Ford Foundation in 2025.
In 2015, he co-founded Art+Practice, a private operating foundation in Leimert Park, dedicated to supporting the local needs of transition-age foster youth, as well as children experiencing displacement worldwide, through its collaborations with nonprofit social service providers, including First Place for Youth and Nest Global, while also providing the community with free access to museum-curated contemporary art, organized by such institutions as the California African American Museum.
Ann Philbin served as the director of the Hammer Museum at UCLA from 1999 until 2025. During her tenure, she built the Museum’s international reputation for scholarly excellence and cutting-edge programming, launched the acclaimed Hammer Projects series showcasing young and emerging artists as well as the museum’s signature Made in L.A. biennial, and spearheaded development of the Hammer’s robust public programs calendar spotlighting many of the most provocative and creative thinkers of our time. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and serves currently on the boards of the Foundation for Arts Initiatives and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. In 2025, she was awarded the prestigious Getty Prize.
As a reminder, this AEFI collegial program is open, with no-fee registration, to leaders, senior staff, and board members of AEFI’s member foundations as well as our individual Seminar alum members. Not yet an AEFI member foundation or Seminar alum member? It’s not too late. Check out the membership info here.
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