Charles Krause

Charles Krause is a former Washington Post, CBS News, MacNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour foreign correspondent turned art dealer and theorist who believes the power of fine art to influence social and political attitudes on behalf of positive social and political change should be recognized as a legitimate measure of its importance and value.

In 2011, he opened CHARLES KRAUSE/REPORTING FINE ART in Washington, DC to show the work of contemporary artists whose political art has been largely ignored or discounted by curators and collectors in the United States. The Gallery’s first exhibit, reviewed and named a Critics’ Pik by ARTForum magazine and one of the 10 Best Gallery Exhibits of 2012 by The Washington Post, presented the graphic and fine art of Jerzy Janiszewski, a Polish artist whose name was virtually unknown in the art world and whose work had no established value because it had never before been shown by a gallery or museum outside Poland.

Mr Krause’s efforts to gain recognition for the art of social and political change have evolved since he first discovered the power of fine art to influence social and political change while reporting from Central America, Eastern Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East from 1978 to 2000. He received a number of awards for his foreign reporting, among them an Emmy Award in 1997 for his NewsHour coverage of Israel and the West Bank; the Latin America Studies Association’s Media Award in 1987 for his coverage of the Sandinista revolution and its aftermath in Central America; and the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, in 1979 for his coverage of Jonestown, where he was shot and wounded while on assignment for The Washington Post.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Mr Krause first became interested in contemporary art as a teenager, when his parents began collecting work by Ferdinand Leger, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson and other 20th Century masters. His own extensive art collection began when his parents gave him a Calder lithograph for his high school graduation present.

Among his other activities, Mr. Krause is currently president of the American Friends of the Gdansk Theatre Foundation and serves as a member of the Inter American Foundation’s international advisory board. He is also a former Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and former board member of USA for UNHCR, the US support committee for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.