Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, and an International Center Of Photography Infinity Award in Critical Writing And Research. He has written for frieze, BOMB, OnCurating, and Art21, been interviewed by the New York Times, Artforum, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton and NYU. He is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.

The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program awards rent-free non-living studio space to 17 visual artists for year-long residencies in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Its mission is to provide working studio space and community for artists. Artists are selected annually based on merit from a competitive pool of applicants by a professional jury comprised of artists and members of the SWSP Artists Advisory Committee.

The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program is the new face of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, developed for artists, by artists in 1991. In 2014 the program was renamed the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program to honor the legacy of Marie Walsh Sharpe and reflect the new sponsorship and commitment of the Walentas Family Foundation.