Carmen Wiedenhoeft, Director & Co-Owner
Carmen began her work in the Visual Arts in 1993 when she interned at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. She worked with Catherine Coleman, the Curator of Prints & Drawings and later Photography. From the beginning Carmen was interested in the concerns of living artists. She had earlier explored intellectual property concerns of artists during an internship with the estate of Tennessee Williams at the law firm of Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwody and Cole in Miami, Florida. In 1994, she interned at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the International Program Department.
In 1995, she entered the graduate Program in Arts Administration at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. She completed her coursework and thesis on The Internet as Public Art Space: Communication, Access and Policy in 1999. In this work she looked at the Internet as a public space and used this framework to discuss online public art, access to the arts, and the issues that arise for nonprofit arts organizations seeking to use public spaces on the Internet as a tool for fulfilling their organizational missions.
During that time she also worked for two years at the Research Center for Arts & Culture at Columbia University on the study Information On Artists II exploring the living and working conditions of artists. In 2005, Carmen served as a Video Conference Coordinator for the Open Exchange project between 12 museums of Modern & Contemporary Art in New York and Madrid as they explored issues in Museum Education.
For nine years, until 2007, Carmen worked in disseminating the photographic work of her father-in-law, Ron Wiedenhoeft, to art history programs across the country. The collections represented images from 200 museums around the world, were in use by 500 universities and museums, and served millions of students. The database grew to serve 3,000 educators and 5,000 registered users (educators, art historians, librarians, administrators, students) of the web site representing 2,100 institutions. After a four-year pause for the birth of her two sons, in 2011 she founded the Gallery, to continue her work in exploring the concerns of contemporary artists.
Carmen has been an active participant at the conferences of the College Art Association, the Visual Resources Association, Art Libraries Society of North America, Museums and the Web, Museum Computer Network, and American Association of Museums.
Kurt Wiedenhoeft,
Co-Owner
Kurt began his career as a network engineer and then moved on to software development. He worked for numerous corporate clients including Scholastic, Armani, mortgage.com and others. He served for eighteen years as the Vice President for Business Development of the family archive of 32,000 slides and medium format film that was scanned to produce the digital archive of the photographic work of his father, Ron Wiedenhoeft.
Kurt then went on to found an educational company that offered the services developed earlier to other image collections. In August of 2007, Kurt and his wife Carmen sold their interests to new owners.
Over the last twenty years Kurt has been an active participant at the conferences of the College Art Association, the Visual Resources Association, and the Art Libraries Society of North America.