Aliza Nisenbaum and Jane Panetta
Anderson Ranch's Summer Series

Artist Aliza Nisenbaum joins Jane Panetta, Aaron I. Fleischman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a conversation that considers how the artist’s approach to portraiture is not only rendered through the act of image-making, but through a process of collaboration, relationship-building, and exchange. This event is presented by Anderson Ranch Arts Center as part of its annual Summer Series lecture series, featuring contemporary artists, curators, and cultural figures.

About Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s Summer Series
The Summer Series: Featured Artists and Conversations program includes some of the most influential artists of our time, explores the work of world-renowned creators and curators, and hosts conversations with today’s most significant critics and collectors in both lecture and Q&A formats. The lectures are held in Schermer Meeting Hall on the Anderson Ranch campus and are free, open to the public, and available in person or via livestream.

Aliza Nisenbaum is a painter whose portraits emerge from sustained, reciprocal exchanges with her subjects. Working in close collaboration with communities—immigrant families, dancers, subway, airport, and health workers—she uses the attentive practice of observational painting to create the conditions for close looking. Her richly detailed compositions, often lushly decorated with patterned textiles found in her sitter’s homes and tiles from workplace settings, make visible the relationships, material conditions, and friendships that shape her sitters’ worlds. Nisenbaum’s recent projects include a 70-foot mural for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (2026), a series developed with performers and staff at the Metropolitan Opera (2023–24), and a large-scale mosaic at LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal C (2024). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Queens Museum (2023) and Tate Liverpool (2020), and has been included in major exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial and the Gwangju Biennial.

Jane Panetta is the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2023, where she has ushered in major acquisitions, recently curated the Genesis Facade Commission, Jeffrey Gibson: The Animal That Therefore I Am (2025), and is working closely on the forthcoming Tang Wing. Previously, Panetta served as the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator and Director of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she oversaw acquisitions and collection displays, and codirected long-term planning for the collection. At the Whitney, she served on the curatorial team for America Is Hard to See (2015), co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and organized solo presentations of the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Willa Nasatir, Juan Antonio Olivares, Jennifer Packer, and Rose B. Simpson. Prior to this, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art on monographic exhibitions including Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (2006), Richard Serra: Forty Years (2007), and James Ensor (2009). Panetta received her BA from Haverford College and her MA in art history from Hunter College, and serves on the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Public Art Consortium.

This dialogue between Aliza Nisenbaum and Jane Panetta is curated and presented by Anderson Ranch Arts Center as part of the organization’s Summer Series.