AGAINST MONOCULTURE is a multi-part lecture series organized by CUE Art Foundation and Purchase College’s MFA Visual Arts Program. Conceived as a lecture series in residence, Against Monoculture connects multiple partners, artists, and art organizations in an effort to rethink how institutions should thrive in era of debt and crisis.
The monocrop industry is an apt metaphor for the contemporary art market. Both scenarios create bad conditions for labor, bad ecosystems for local landscapes, bad environments for cultivating diversity and difference. Against Monoculture troubles the mythology of what is a working artist and considers various types of organizing, institution making, and alternative support structuring that art communities can enable and dream.
SCHEDULE
NICHOLAS WEIST on "Doing Business in Shorts"
Friday, March 24, 4:00–5:30PM
Weist is the founding director of The Shandaken Project, which has offered free residencies to important but under-served cultural practitioners since 2012. A veteran arts administrator, he has held senior positions at Creative Time and powerHouse Books, and has organized exhibitions internationally. MORE>>
LAUREL PTAK on “The Art Institution as Medium” Friday, March 31, 4:00–5:30PM
Ptak is a curator of contemporary art based in New York City. She is currently Executive Director of Art in General and previously was Director & Curator of Triangle from 2014–17 and has held diverse roles at non-profit art institutions in the US and internationally, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and Tensta konsthall, Stockholm, among others. MORE>>
SARAH ROSS on “Working Through A Wall” Friday, April 28, 4:00–5:30PM
"Working Through a Wall" is a talk about organizing a cultural project between free and incarcerated artists at Stateville prison.
Ross is an educator and artist whose work uses narrative and the body to address spatial concerns as they relate to access, class, anxiety, and activism. She co-founded the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project (PNAP), a cultural project that brings together artists, writers, and scholars in and outside Stateville prison to create public projects concerning segregation, criminalization, and incarceration. MORE>>
SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH on “The Artist as Editor” Friday, April 7, 4:00–5:30PM
Premnath is an artist, founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter and has had solo exhibitions at KANSAS, New York; GALLERYSKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Statements, Art Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong; and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. MORE>>
MEG ONLI on “Poetics and Politics” Friday, May 5, 4:00–5:30PM
Onli is a curator and writer whose work attends to the intricacies of race and the production of space. Prior to joining Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, she was the Program Coordinator at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. While at the Graham Foundation she worked on the exhibitions Architecture of Independence: African Modernism and Barbara Kasten: Stages. In 2010 she created the website Black Visual Archive for which she was awarded a 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. MORE>>
Against Monoculture is supported by The School of Art+Design at Purchase College, State University of New York and CUE Art Foundation
