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 7, 2017 /// 4:00 – 5:30 PM
Sreshta Rit Premnath on “The Artist as Editor”
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. He completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA at Bard College, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan and Smack Mellon. He has received grants from Art Matters and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and was awarded the Arthur Levitt Fellowship from Williams College. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath is Assistant Professor at Parsons, New York.
Against Monoculture is supported by The School of Art+Design at Purchase College, State University of New York and CUE Art Foundation