Against Monoculture: A lecture series on artists, institutions, and practicing exits to business as usual
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.
April 28, 2017 /// 4:00 – 5:30 PM
Sarah Ross on “Working Through A Wall,” 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. In other collaborative projects, she has developed a series of research-based projects about land use and global agriculture. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Copenhagen, and Rio De Janeiro, among other places. She is the recipient of grants from the Propeller Fund, Graham Foundation, and the Illinois Art Council. Sarah Ross is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Against Monoculture is supported by The School of Art + Design at Purchase College, State University of New York and CUE Art Foundation.