Bay Area co-director of Art+Action, head of AK Art Advisory and former Sotheby’s gatekeeper Amy Kisch talks about :
Her organizing work to bring awareness to the Census in the San Francisco Bay Area, through various partnerships with organizations and artists, as her favorite hybrid of art and social justice coming together; her time working at Sotheby’s auction house in New York, first in the proposals division, followed by running Sotheby’s Preferred, their VIP program for top clients, which put her in a sort of ‘bouncer’ role; why she thinks her friends who have stayed at Sotheby’s have chosen to do so, whereas for Amy, having come from a social work background, it just wasn’t going to be a long-term fit; differences she’s encountering living in the Bay Area compared with the much more market-centric New York, where there’s much more “drafting FOMO” guiding how people collect; her love for the Bay Area, and yet her significant awareness of both the housing crisis and the homeless crisis, which she calls ‘post-apocalyptic.'