ICB Board Members
Jane Fortune
Vice-chair, Indianapolis City Ballet
Jane Fortune is associated with many prestigious arts organizations in the USA and in Italy. Her talent and advice are much sought after at all levels of the organizations she serves.
In Florence, Italy, Jane is the cultural editor of The Florentine, the only English language newspaper in the city. Until 2008, she wrote a bi-monthly page on Italian culture and art, but retains her position as its cultural editor. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Medici Archives Project (Florence and New York); the founder and chair of The Florence Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the former chairperson of the Board of Trustees of Studio Arts Center International (SACI), in Florence. She has personally underwritten the restoration of several works of art, by women, in the Florence museums, including a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi in the Palazzo Pitti, several paintings, lunettes and drawings by Suor Plautilla Nelli, the first known woman painter of Florence and a painting, in the Accademia, by Irene Duclos.
Jane is also on the Board of Governors at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the National Advisory Board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the National Advisory Board of Indiana University Art Museum; the Dean’s Advisory Board of Herron School of Art and Design; and is a founding member of the Women’s Philanthropy Council at Indiana University.
Jane’s tireless work has extended to USArtists, an American Fine Art Show and Sale to benefit Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as its co-founder, and to the same organization’s Special Needs program, as its founder. The outgrowth of this program was an establishment of a Women’s Board Endowed Scholarship at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for persons with disabilities to attend PAFA’s art school. She is a former member of the Board of Trustees at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She also served in many roles at the Deafness Research Foundation, New York, including its volunteer president/CEO and Chairman of the Board.
Jane has authored two books To Florence, Con Amore, 77 Ways to Love the City (2007) an insiders, behind the scene, cultural and art guide to Florence, published by The Florentine Press, Florence, Italy, and Invisible Women, Forgotten Artists of Florence (2009), also published by The Florentine Press. Invisible Women was presented to the Uffizi Library, in 2010, Florence, in perpetuity, an extreme honor for an American. She has also written the forward for The Restoration of a Masterpiece (2008), published on the restoration of Artemisia Gentileschi’s David e Betsabea, by Sillabe, Florence, Italy, and Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588) The Painter –Prioress of Renaissance Florence, published by Syracuse University Press/Florence, Italy (2008) and Orate Pro Pictora (Pray for the Painter), published by The Florentine Press, 2009, Florence, Italy. Her third book, Flood Ladies (publication September 2011) is about 41 women, who donated their works to the city of Florence, to replace works of art that was destroyed in the 1966 flood.
In 2009, Jane was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Indiana University. In 2008, she received the Indiana University Purdue University (IUPUI), Indianapolis, Spirit of Philanthropy Award, the Herron School of Art and Design Honoree, Indianapolis, and in 2007 Indianapolis Mayor’s Advisory Council on Disabilities, Accessibility Award for exceptional commitment to furthering accessibility, and inclusion, to persons with disabilities for a program she created, and funded, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.