Saturday, January 28th. 1-6pm
CUE Art Foundation, 137 W25th Street, ground floor, between 6th and 7th Ave.
Cost: FREE please RSVP via Eventbrite
This day-long symposium with three panels examines models for artists to participate in institutions outside of what’s traditionally understood as art. The models on the table draw on traditions as diverse as institutional critique, political organizing, social practice and management strategy. What if we treated art not as a good, but as a service?
We will pay special attention to the way that artists are increasingly finding positions for themselves inside institutions outside of art, and to the question of scalable impact for the imagination. In general, these panels propose that art can play a pivotal role in creating stronger institutions. What is the relationship between artistic practice and institution-building, and what are the traditions and case studies of artists as creators of durable social contexts that we can look to?
Opening Remarks
1:00-1:20PM
The Artist-Run Institution
1:20PM-2:40PM
Robert Ransick
Karolina Sobecka
Christopher Udemezue
How are artists redefining the way that institutions are run through experimenting with different formats (parties, focus groups, and libraries), communities (such as scientists, businesspeople, and readers), and standards (alternative metrics and professionalisms)?
The Embedded Artist
3:00PM-4:20PM
Taeyoon Choi
Marisa Jahn
Maureen Connor
Jordan Seaberry
"Embedding" is a practice by which an artist joins a community while retaining their role as an artist; what can an artist bring to a collective practice that draws on their skills as an artist, and what are traditions related to or antagonistic to this "embedded" practice?
Self-Institutionalizing
4:30PM-5:50PM
Devin Kenny
DIVERSITY FELLOWS!
Lauren Van Haaften Schick
Leah Schrager
This panel focuses on the question of how an artist may turn themselves into an institution, through brand-building, contract-writing, and related practices of public administration. In addition, we will discuss how this institutional cover allows for access and exercises that aren’t otherwise possible.
This event is presented in conjunction with the group exhibition, The Visible Hand, curated by David Borgonjon. On view at CUE Art Foundation January 7 - February 15, 2017.
SPEAKERS
Robert Ransick is an artist, designer and educator. He draws inspiration from the social and political world we live in, history, and the potential for a future that is better. After the economic collapse of 2008 and Occupy Wall Street, he enrolled as an MBA in Sustainability student to research the systems that fueled the catastrophic events. His interest in social justice, public engagement, local economies, and the power of the art to effect change made this a natural place for him to acquire new knowledge and skills. He believes that systemic shifts in methodology and ethos have the potential to redefine the roles of producer and consumer and their shared responsibilities to each other and the environment. http://robertransick.com/
Karolina Sobecka is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. Her recent projects focus on climate engineering as a way of investigating the values that drive technological innovation, and shape the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature. http://www.gravitytrap.com/
Christopher Udemezue was born in Long Island, NY as a first generation Jamaican American has shown at a variety of galleries and museums including the Queens Museum of Art, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, AC Institute Art Gallery, and Envoy Enterprises. Christopher has been featured on Style.com, Interview Magazine, Afro Punk, Paper Magazine, ID magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, DIS magazine, Fader and was a part of the OUT Magazine’s OUT 100 2013. Christopher (Neon Christina Ladosha), as organizing leader of the House of Ladosha, utilizes his Jamaican heritage and the politics of queerness as a primary touch point for his performative and visual work. In Chris’s 2015 solo show “Top-A-Toppa” at Stream Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) Chris explored Jamaican culture, the complexities of gender identity, desire, tragedy, and public lynching bringing to light recent murdered queer persons in Jamaican headlines. In summer of 2016 Chris launched RAGGA NYC, a platform that highlights the queer Caribbean community through profile interviews and events.
Marisa Jahn: Of Chinese and Ecuadorian descent, Marisa Morán Jahn is an artist and founder of the art, social justice, and media non-profit Studio REV-. Jahn’s work has been presented at The White House in DC, the Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, worker centers, and public spaces; received awards from Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance, Creative Capital, Rockefeller Foundation; and reviewed in media ranging from The New York Times, Art Forum, BBC, Univision, CNN, and more. Jahn has created 3 books about art and politics and teaches at The New School and MIT. http://marisajahn.com/
Jordan Seaberry: Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Jordan became deeply involved in the Providence social justice community, while studying painting at Rhode Island School of Design. He began as a prisoners’ rights organizer, helping to pass multiple criminal justice reform milestones including the "Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners” Bill, Probation Violation Reform, and the recent “Comprehensive Community-Police Relations Act.” In 2014, he began The Violences Project, a continuous suite of paintings that memorializes each of Rhode Island’s homicide victims. He currently works as the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, and maintains a painting studio in Providence. http://www.jordanseaberry.com/
Taeyoon Choi is an artist and educator based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and storytelling that often leads to intervention in public spaces. Choi collaborates with fellow artists, activists, and professionals from other fields to realize socially engaged projects and alternative pedagogy. He was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has published books about urbanism and is currently working on a book of drawings about computation. Choi cofounded the School for Poetic Computation in 2013, where he continues to organize and teach. Recently, he's been focusing on unlearning the wall of disability and normalcy, and enhancing accessibility and diversity within art and technology. http://taeyoonchoi.com/
Maureen Connor’s work combines installation, video, interior design, ethnography, human resources, feminism, and radical pedagogy. Since 1999 she has been developing Personnel, a series of interventions that focus on bringing more democracy to the workplace of art institutions. Other projects include Dis-con-tent, a video and installation that considers medical experimentation, created together with the Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT), the collective she co-founded in 2008. In 2012 she co-organized the Pedagogy Group, a cooperative of art educators who meet to share syllabi and readings and to consider how to embody anti-capitalist politics in the ways we teach and learn. She is Emerita Professor of Art, Queens College, CUNY where she co-founded Social Practice Queens in 2010 with the Queens Museum. http://www.maureenconnor.net/
DIVERSITY FELLOWS! (Reya Sehgal and Marc Boucai) is an American collaborative interested in interrogating aspects of (their) Americanness. Aimed at blurring the lines between performance, politics, and the presentation of self in every-day life, the FELLOWS use race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and more as both lenses and performed identities to produce genre-blurring pieces that refer to pop-cultural tropes, critical theory, and queer performance tactics, creating chaotic environments out of seemingly simplistic interactive structures: Green card interviews, diversity workshops, make-up appointments, karaoke. https://diversityfellows.wordpress.com/
Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and independent curator. Hailing from the south side of Chicago, he relocated to New York to begin his studies at Cooper Union. He has since continued his practice through the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SOMA Mexico, and collaborations with DADDY, pooool, Studio Workout, Temporary Agency and various art and music venues in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere including: Recess, Het Roode Bioscoop, REDCAT, MoMa PS1, Freak City, and Santos Party House. He received his MFA in 2013 from the New Genres department at UCLA and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program. http://www.devinkenny.info/About
Lauren van Haaften-Schick is a curator, writer, and artist from New York City. She is a currently working on a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, and is the Associate Director of the Art & Law Program in New York. Her current interests concern the artistic appropriation of legal technologies such as contracts; artists’ labor, property, and moral rights; judicial and legislative art histories; and critical forms of circulation, with a focus on artistic networks, early conceptual art and institutional critique. http://www.laurenvhs.com/
Leah Schrager is an artist who works between the web and NYC. In her work she photographs, appears in, augments, and markets her own image. She’s interested in the line, movement, biography, and digital life of the female body. In 2010 she founded a new form of therapy as Sarah White, The Naked Therapist. She co-curated the female-positive BodyAnxiety.com exhibition, which is featured in the April 2015 issue of Art Forum. She graduated in 2015 with an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School. She is currently engaged in a celebrity-as-art-practice project, ONA (2015-2020), as part of which she has an Instagram with over 400k followers, released her EP “Sex Rock,” had a first year retrospective in February at Superchief Gallery (NYC), held an investors presentation at Johannes Vogt Gallery, and recently published an analysis of “Self-Made Supermodels” in Rhizome.