The Selects Gallery Presents Twenty One Summers

The Selects Gallery, New York, hosted a book launch for the book Twenty One Summers, sponsored by IRK Magazine

Marie Audier and The Selects Gallery, New York hosted a book launch for IRK Editor at Large Thomas Werner and co-author Derrick Connell. The private event was held at Par Excellence. It is a Manhattan based luxury space that features the best of French design. The space also features images from The Selects Gallery, creating an elegant afternoon of inspiration, art, and design.

Twenty One Summers

“Twenty One Summers” explores the amount of time we have in life. Also, the goals we hope to achieve, and the Blind Spots that keep us from reaching them. Altogether, it is a guidebook, a pathway or way of living. In the hope that, it offers valuable insights, inspiring readers to take the first step toward bringing positive change to their lives and those of others. These changes, goals, and dreams, are their Twenty One Summers.

Twenty One Summers is brought to life through seventeen stories. They illustrate the challenges faced and successes achieved by people like the reader, and those they aspire to be. This is a diverse group of people, including the authors, from varied international backgrounds who have made the decision to change their lives in big ways and small with a profound impact on their future and their communities. Though following extraordinarily different paths we found that each has applied a similar process as they work toward their goals.

Global Perspective

Subjects are from Japan, Cameroon, Nepal, Australia, United Kingdom, Belarus, Ireland, Russia, Israel. As well as, small rural towns and cities like Salt Lake City, Seattle and New York. Further, they include tech entrepreneurs, home makers, first responders, fashion designers, photographers. Also, artists, activists, students, senior executives, editors, film makers, educators, engineers, women’s rights and LGBTQ advocates, mountaineers, and one National Geographic person of the year. They work in areas ranging from corporate and tech to the arts, adventure travel, and not for profits.

Thomas Werner, author of “The Business of Fine Art Photography”, Routledge, “The Fashion Image”, Bloomsbury Publishing. He is Board Member for the Santa Fe CENTER for Photographic Art, Co-founder of Chasing Beauty Publishing, the former owner of Thomas Werner Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea Art District, and a past Photography Program Director at Parsons School of Design in NY, and has collaborated with the United States Department of State on projects abroad. Galleries in New York and Los Angeles represented Thomas, and his work reviewed in The New Yorker Magazine.

The Authors

Derrick Connell, formerly one of the leading advisors to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Specializing in Search and AI.  He led global product and engineering teams comprised of 4,000 of the world’s best product managers, machine learning scientists, software developers and designers. They delivered global products and services directly to consumers via partners such as Apple, Amazon, Meta, Twitter and Yahoo.

The current issue of IRK Magazine features an article on the visual collaboration between The Selects Gallery artist Robert Farber and Delphine Nobili, founder of the Paris-based Atelier Lebuisson.

By Editor at Large, Thomas Werner                                                                 
@Thomaswernerprojects