Bettina Korek (born 1978 in Chicago) is an American museum director and cultural producer. Since 2020, she has served as CEO of Serpentine in London, where she lives and works. [1] [2] Prior to that, she lived and worked in Los Angeles, founding ForYourArt in 2006 as an organization whose goal is to expand the place of art in everyday life. [3]
Korek was raised in the Van Nuys and Westwood neighborhoods of Los Angeles. [4] [5]
After studying Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, she returned to Los Angeles that same year and began her career at LACMA, working in the Prints and Drawings Department under Kevin Salatino. [4] She later moved to the Development and Communications departments, and remained at the museum until 2005.
Speaking about her time at LACMA, she told Gagosian Quarterly in 2021: “We’d done a lot of research about audiences and on how hard it can be to get people interested in something new. As a result, I became really interested in encouraging temporary public art in LA.” [6] This early realization about the challenges of audience engagement and the potential of public art inspired Korek to create her own platform for cultural participation in Los Angeles.
In 2006, Korek founded ForYourArt, a platform designed to connect the public with Los Angeles’s growing arts ecosystem through publications, events, and partnerships. At this time, the contemporary art world of Los Angeles was entering a period of notable expansion in terms of infrastructure and visibility.
Beginning in 2012, the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative brought together an unprecedented number of organizations to celebrate the region’s art historical significance.Via ForYourArt, Korek organized the Participating Gallery program for both the 2012 (Art in L.A. 1945–1980) and 2017 (LA/LA: Latin American and Latino Art) editions of Pacific Standard Time.
In 2011, Korek was appointed to the Los Angeles County Arts Commission by the Board of Supervisors, and served as its president from 2016 to 2017.
ForYourArt began in 2006 with a weekly newsletter that aggregated art-related events and other cultural happenings across Los Angeles, continuing in various formats for the next fifteen years.
Korek told an interviewer in 2021, “while I was working at LACMA, people would ask me about what art to go and see. I began ForYourArt very informally from these conversations as an email newsletter.” Writing in The Wall Street Journal , Kevin West said that by 2014 ForYourArt had “become the city's premier clearinghouse for information about what to see at museums, galleries and nonprofit arts spaces.” [7]
Begun in 2006, ForYourArt’s first public art initiative was a collaboration with LAXART called Los Angeles Public Domain (LAPD), which programmed an artist billboard on La Cienega Boulevard and situated projects by artists like Doug Aitken and Piero Golia around the city.
In 2008, ForYourArt worked with curator Eli Fontana’s organization West of Rome to produce Women in the City, a citywide public art festival featuring female artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman.
In 2012, ForYourArt produced a series of original projects by artists for ArtsMatter, an arts education initiative and fundraising campaign presented by the LA Promise Fund and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The first of these was the wrapping of 12 city buses by the artist Barbara Kruger with her signature phrases like “Belief + Doubt = Sanity.” [8] John Baldessari’s iteration of the project used the phrase “Learn to dream” which also appeared in Spanish as “Aprende a soñar.” Nearly 85 additional artwork billboards, bus shelters, wall-postings, mall media, and bulletins provided ArtsMatter with a high-visibility citywide profile, marking the largest moving public art project in Los Angeles history. [9]
Korek would collaborate with Kruger again on public artworks for the 2020 edition of Frieze Los Angeles. In 2024, under Korek’s directorship, Serpentine presented the first solo institutional exhibition of Kruger’s work in London in more than 20 years.
Another project with John Baldessari in 2013 called Still Life 2001-2010 invited online users to create their own still life images by arranging 38 onscreen objects created by the legendary conceptual artist. [10]
In March 2011, ForYourArt organized the first Benefit Edition exhibition, at Soho House West Hollywood, featuring over 120 works for sale to benefit 22 local non-profit organizations. Priced between $35 and $10,000, the editions collectively raised more than $200,000. [11]
In November 2013, ForYourArt presented Give Good Art in a vacant storefront on Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, as part of the Hammer Museum’s Arts ReSTORE LA urban renewal initiative. The project was a retail holiday market stocked with artist-made objects and artworks, several of which were previously presented at 6020 Wilshire. Los Angeles Magazine wrote that “the gallery is [Korek’s] attempt to revitalize the street while also making art more accessible—a calling that she’s turned into a career.” [12]
Hosted by Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artists Read Baldessari (February 2014) was held at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, with Meg Cranston, Suzanne Lacy, Jim Shaw, Allen Ruppersberg, Williams Leavitt, Dawn Kaspar, Sam Falls, and more. [13] Everbooks (February 2016) was another event hosted by Obrist, produced in collaboration with Printed Matter’s Los Angeles Art Book Fair and held at The Geffen at MOCA, with Lisa Anne Auerbach, John Baldessari, William E. Jones, Adam Linger, Kori Newkirk, Aram Saroyan, Mungo Thomson, Mary Weatherford, amongst others. [14]
In March 2012, ForYourArt opened a brick and mortar space at 6020 Wilshire Boulevard across from LACMA, launching the venue with a program tied to the museum’s screening of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film “The Clock.” The event, titled “24 Hour Donut City,” offered doughnuts from well-known vendors across Los Angeles all throughout the day and night. 6020 Wilshire’s debut reflected ForYourArt’s interests in cultural mapping, generosity, and the use of whimsy to shift public perception of contemporary art spaces from intimidating to fun. [15]
6020 Wilshire went on to host a range of installations and live events—including New. Artisanal. Now. (July 2012) and The Planter Show (September 2012)—describing itself as “a pop-up for pop-ups.” [16] [17]
The space presented Win Pacific Standard Time in Print: The Catalogue Show, which independently commemorated the Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 initiative with an exhibition of more than forty catalogues and other publications produced for Pacific Standard Time. At the end of the day, ForYourArt gave away the complete collection of publications to a visitor via lottery drawing. [18]
In 2018, Korek was named the founding Executive Director of Frieze Los Angeles.
Under her leadership, the organization established an annual art fair in Los Angeles that affirmed the city’s growing stature as a global art center, while honoring its legacy as a haven for artists, artist-run spaces, and extra-commercial activities. [19] Writing in W Magazine , Abby Aguirre noted that “Korek’s encyclopedic passion for L.A. helped ground the city’s new international fair.” [20]
In 2019, she led the launch of Frieze Los Angeles’s first edition at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times , Deborah Vankin described Frieze’s plan for the Backlot as “essentially fabricating an urban art utopia on the fake streets of New York,” quoting Korek as saying “we’re creating this fantasy of a city with public art at the center.” As part of this vision, several independent Los Angeles organizations—including the Women’s Center for Creative Work and the Acid-Free Book Market—were offered free booth spaces to promote their work and connect with new supporters.
Korek returned for Frieze Los Angeles’s second edition in 2020, the last to take place at Paramount Studios. It featured an expanded “Artist Street Fair” on the Backlot, which introduced Frieze’s more than 35,000 attendees to more local artist organizations and opportunities to support them.
Prior to the fair’s opening, Frieze and the Getty Center co-hosted a panel at the museum highlighting the work of the Art for Justice Fund, a criminal justice reform initiative founded by philanthropist Agnes Gund. The event built on the previous year’s fundraising initiative at Frieze Los Angeles, in which artist Mark Bradford’s limited-edition print depicting a police body camera raised over $1 million in support of the Fund.
The Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award was another initiative launched by the fair in 2020. Ten finalists were selected from an open call for LA-based filmmakers and took part in an intensive source led by the non-profit Ghetto Film School. Each finalist produced a short film and Silvia Lara received a $10,000 prize as the winner.
In December 2019, Serpentine announced that Korek would assume the role of Chief Executive in March 2020.
Since Korek’s arrival, Serpentine has initiated new collaborations with technology and brand partners.
In 2022, the exhibition KAWS: NEW FICTION, produced with the VR and AR company Acute Art, was presented both at Serpentine North and inside the online video game. This was the first time a real-world art gallery was recreated in Fortnite, which has more than 400 million player accounts. [21]
A multi-year partnership between Serpentine Arts Technologies and Tezos Foundation supported projects exploring blockchain applications in art. This includes Third World: The Bottom Dimension, a video game and exhibition by Brazilian artist Gabriel Massan, presented at Serpentine North in 2023.
In 2025, Serpentine and the LEGO Group commissioned British architect Sir Peter Gook to design the Play Pavilion, a public art installation aimed at younger audiences that debuted on World Play Day (June 11). [22] [23]
In 2022, Serpentine’s long-running fundraiser The Summer Party began inviting established and emerging UK designers to attend the event with “squads” made up of their muses, friends and collaborators in order to put “great British fashion at its heart.” [24] [25] Its 2025 edition hosted designers Dilara Findikoglu, Harris Reed, David Koma, Conner Ives, Han Chong, Charles Jeffrey, Patrick McDowell, Daniel Lee, Chet Lo, Peter Dundas and more. [26] [27]
In 2025, during Korek’s tenure, Serpentine marked the 25th anniversary of its annual summer Architecture Pavilion with a commission by Marina Tabassum. Architects commissioned in previous years under her leadership have included Minsuk Cho (2024), Lina Ghotmeh (2023), Theaster Gates (2022), and Sumayya Vally (2021).
In December of 2025, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York and Serpentine in London have established a 1 million British pound award to be awarded to 5 artists every 2 years. [28]