Independent curator Lance Fung (MFA 1990 Fine Arts) has been selected by the newly formed Atlantic City Alliance to present a five-year program of large-scale exhibitions in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Fung will help highlight the unique features of the resorts by transforming underused land into public art available for the community’s use year-round.

“When the public thinks of art, they usually think of the world’s great museums, but moving art into the urban environment and transforming…Atlantic City into a blank canvas can be a catalyst to reshape how people think about our city,” said Liza Cartmell, president of the Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reinvigorating the city’s tourism base with a emphasis on cultural programming.

Throughout his career, Fung has focused on the intersection of curatorial vision and civic enhancement. In 1999 he founded Fung Collaboratives to explore original approaches to art making for a range of audiences. The 2004 project “The Snow Show” paired seventeen artists with seventeen architects to create collaborative artworks using ice and snow. His exhibition “Wonderland” (2009) resulted in a multi-sited event that responded to the rich diversity of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. These and projects like them demonstrate Fung’s knack for collecting the creative resources of diverse groups of artists and civic institutions for the public good.

“I am over the moon to be working in such an exciting and inspiring city such as this,” Fung said of the Atlantic City project. “The partnership…is amazing; we all have a common goal of bringing leading artists to work here as well as introducing a whole roster of emerging artists.”

To learn more about the project, visit fungcollaboratives.org or atlanticcityalliance.net.