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.
March 31, 2017 /// 4:00 – 5:30 PM
Laurel Ptak on “The Art Institution as Medium”
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. She is a faculty member in the graduate program of Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts and teaches in the department of Art, Media & Technology at The New School.
Against Monoculture is supported by The School of Art+Design at Purchase College, State University of New York and CUE Art Foundation