CHLOË BASS
Co-director, Social Practice Queens (SPQ)
Assistant Professor, Social Practice and Performance
Queens College, Department of Art
http://chloebass.com/
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies; 2018’s include a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her forthcoming monograph will be published by the Operating System in Fall 2018; she also has a chapbook, #sky #nofilter, forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published on Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader.
Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer and activist. He is a founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution, REPOhistory collective, and Gulf Labor Coalition, an artists’ group advocating for migrant workers’ rights constructing Western branded art museums in Abu Dhabi. His individual art explores issues of artistic labor, historical representation and political resistance, and his critical writing documents and reflects upon several decades of activist art, most recently by guest editing a special double issue of FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art with over thirty global reports focusing on “Art, Anti-Globalism, and the Neo-Authoritarian Turn” [ http://field-journal.com/
GREGORY SHOLETTE
Co-director and Co-founder, Social Practice Queens (SPQ)
Professor, Sculpture, Critical Theory and Social Practice.
Queens College, Department of Art
Heng-gil Han
Adjunct Professor, Social Practice Queens (SPQ)
Heng-Gil Han was born and grew up in South Korea. He holds an MFA degree in 2-dimensional art from Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). A Korean edition of his critical writings on art, Network & Fluid, was published by the Stone and Water Art Project in Anyang, South Korea, in 2009. Han has extensive experience in curating temporary public art projects, including participatory art events engaging with the public. A former Visual Arts Director and Curator for Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Han conceptualized Jamaica Flux: Workspaces & Windows in 2002 and has implemented it four times in 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2016. Through the project, Han supported many critical artists in creating site-specific public art, revitalizing discussions on the power of art for social transformation within the New York art community. Building upon his curatorial experience of socially engaged art, Han founded the Korea Art Forum, a 501(c)3 art organization run by artists with the mission of bridging the world through art. Han currently develops The Korean War, An Elusive Presence, to further KAF’s mission by advancing art that is diverse, inclusive, open, and equal to all images and persons regardless of beliefs, gender, and race.
Alicia Grullón is from and based in New York City. Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University, Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa 11, and Art in Odd Places. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts, the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, and Franklin Furnace Archives. She has participated in residencies with Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance at New York University, Center for Book Arts, Bronx Museum of Arts on 80 White Street AIM Alum, and Shandanken Project on Governors island. She has presented for Creative Time Summit 2015, The Royal College of Art, and United States Association for Art Educators. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, ArtNet News, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory from Taylor and Francis. Grullon is the recipient of the inaugural Colene Brown Art Prize for 2019. Her art activist work led her to be one of the initial and current organizers for The People’s Cultural Plan (The PCP), a collection of artists and cultural workers addressing inadequacies with the city’s first proposed cultural plan. She is a contributing author in “Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?” a collection of essays by artists and historians on social practice work and “Bringing Communities Through Socially Engaged Art” from Routledge 2019. Grullon’s curatorial projects include “What is Here is Open: Selections from Treasures of the Trash Collection” which she co-curated with Nelson Molina, a retired sanitation worker who collected objects creating the collection. The exhibition opened to great reviews at Hunter Gallery East Harlem made possible with HiArts in East Harlem. Grullon is an adjunct at The School of Visual Arts and the City University of New York.
Alicia Grullon
TARRY HUM
Department Chair, Professor
Queens College, Department of Urban Studies
Tarry Hum is Professor and Acting Chair of Queens College’s Department of Urban Studies. She also serves on the Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center’s Environmental Psychology program. Hum’s research areas include immigrant urbanism, transnational capital and real estate financialization, urban planning and community economic development. Her first book, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, received a 2015 Honorable Mention for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Paul Davidoff Book Award. Her most recent book talk was at the 2017 Brooklyn Book Festival and aired on CSPAN. Hum continues to conduct research on urban manufacturing and industrial gentrification, and recent articles were published in Metropolitics and Progressive City. Hum contributes regularly to the online Gotham Gazette: The Place for New York Policy and Politics on real estate development and the affordable housing crisis in immigrant neighborhoods. In April 2017, Hum was invited to present at a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies conference and her paper, “Minority Banks, Homeownership, and Prospects for New York City’s Multi-Racial Immigrant Neighborhoods,” was reviewed and revised as a chapter in a forthcoming volume, A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality, which will be published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Hum is the lead editor of a volume, Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, NY, forthcoming from Temple University Press. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, “The Asian Century”: Chinese Transnational Capital and City Building in Immigrant New York.
Rafael De Balanzo Joue is an Architect, Urban Planner and Designer, with a Ph.D. in Sustainability Science, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter & Queens College at City University of New York (CUNY) and Director of the international non-profit Action Without Borders of the International Union of Architects. His expertise is conducting urban design participatory processes. In 2019, he was a recipient of the 2019 Colombia/Fullbright Chair for Resilience, and he recently won the Urban Design Competition for the Three Hills Park in Barcelona with the multi-disciplinary EMF Studio and Raon Publiques.
Prior to working at CUNY, Rafael was Lecturer at ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona. He has also been Visiting Professor at different institutions in Europe, the US and Latin America including EINA, Barcelona Autonomous University, Alicante University, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in Spain; Montpellier and Bordeaux School of Architecture, Marseille University in France, MICA in Baltimore, US; and Science Museum of Medellin, CUJAE, Colegio de Mejico, and Del Tolima University in Latin America. He also received awards from the Spanish Architects Institute and works as a consultant for the UN/Habitat III and the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Urban Agenda in Spain. Among his publication, his most recent one is a Journal of Ecology and Society article entitled “Crisis and Reorganization in Urban Planning: The Barcelona Case Study.”
RAFAEL DE BALANZO JOUE
Adjunct Professor
Queens College, Department of Urban Studies
SCOTT LARSON
Lecturer and Co-Director of the Office of Community Studies
Queens College, Department of Urban Studies
Scott Larson (PhD CUNY Graduate Center, 2010) is a faculty member and Co-Director of the Office of Community Studies and the Service Learning program in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College. His research focuses on urban space and social justice, including the issues of redevelopment, gentrification and community-led urbanism. His book, Building Like Moses in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City (Temple University Press, 2013), uses ongoing debates about the legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses as a lens for examining the redevelopment strategies of the administration of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Recent publications include the paper “Imagining Social Justice and the False Promise of Urban Park Design” (Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2018) and the chapter, “A High Line for Queens: Celebrating Diversity or Displacing It?”, in Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park (Rutgers University Press, 2017).
His current work focuses on Community Land Trusts (CLTs) as a mechanism for reorienting political and economic agency at the community level.
Zoe Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1980 she moved to New York to study at Columbia University where she received an MFA in Film. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art,Site Santa Fe, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Zoe works with a wide range of media including film, projection performance, installation and drawing. She considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Each project aims to connect the present to past so that it might illuminate the future in new ways. Her most recent completed project is the installation Emotions Go To Work. She is currently at work finishing the film Exile in which Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht find themselves in New York today. Unfixed, oscillating between their time and ours, they reveal what has been buried in our own history, making connections between fascism in New York in the 1930’s and its manifestation in the Trump era. She has been awarded fellowships from. The Graham Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a Professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens College CUNY.
ZOE BELOFF
Professor
Queens College, Department of Media Studies
PAUL RAMIREZ JONAS
Assistant Professor, Studio Art, Hunter College, City University of New York
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/studio-art/faculty-and-staff/paul-ramirez-jonas
Paul Ramirez Jonas: Over the past 25 years Ramirez Jonas has sought to challenge the definitions of art and the public and to engineer active audience participation and exchange. He has been made public in galleries, institutions and urban spaces around the world. He has been an Associate Professor at Hunter College since 2007; and is represented by Galeria Nara Roesler in Sao Paulo and New York.
Paul Ramírez Jonas selected solo exhibitions include Museo Jumex, Mexico City, The New Museum, NYC, Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo; The Aldrich Contemporary Museum, Connecticut; The Blanton Museum, Texas; a survey at Ikon Gallery (UK) and Cornerhouse (UK) in 2004, and a 25 year survey at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2017. Selected group exhibitions at P.S.1; the Brooklyn Museum; The Whitechapel (UK); Irish Museum of Modern Art (Ireland); and Kunsthaus Zurich. He participated in the 1st Johannesburg Biennale; 1st Seoul Biennial; 6th Shanghai Biennial; 28th Sao Paulo Biennial; 53rd Venice Biennial and 7th and 10th Bienal do Mercosul. He is an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY.
Claire Bishop is an art historian, critic, and professor in the art history department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York since September 2008. Bishop is the author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship(2012) and is a contributor to art journals including Artforum and October. She is known as one of the central theorists of participation in visual art and performance.
CLAIRE BISHOP
Professor, Art History, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Visiting artists, critics, curators and mentors include: Doug Ashford, Paul D’Agostino, Angela Dufresne, Dana Schutz, Xenobia Bailey, Larry Bogad, Deanna Bowen, Robert Boyd, Tania Bruguera, Gretchen Coombs, Amy Cutler, John Currin, Lois Dodd, Torkwase Dyson, Alicia Grullon, Spencer Finch, Yevgeniy Fiks, Tom Finkelpearl, Sarah Fritchey, Stamatina Gregory, Fran Ilich, inCUBATE, Alfredo Jaar, Jim Lee, Omar Mismar, Pepon Osorio, Saul Ostrow, Liz Park, Elizabeth Peyton, Ted Purves, Sal Randolph, David Reed, Mika Rottenberg, Gregory Sale, Dread Scott, Elsie Siegel, Eve Sussman, Nato Thompson, Caroline Woolard, T. J. Wilcox, The Yes Men, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rick Lowe, Frida Kahlo (Guerrilla Girls co-founder), Josh MacPhee.
SALLY TALLANT
Executive Director, Queens Museum
Sally Tallant is the President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum, Queens, New York. She was previously the Director of Liverpool Biennial (2011-2019). She has delivered large-scale exhibitions, commissions and music and performance programmes. From 2001 – 11 she was Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, London where she was responsible for the development and delivery of an integrated programme of Exhibitions, Architecture, Education and Public Programmes. She has curated exhibitions in a wide range of contexts including the Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Hospitals, Schools as well as public art commissions. She is a regular contributor to conferences nationally and internationally. She is Vice President of the International Biennial Association; a member of the London Regional Council for the Arts Council of England; a Commissioner for the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice. She was awarded an OBE for services to the Arts in the Queens Birthday Honours in 2018.
Larissa Harris is a curator at the Queens Museum. Exhibitions at QMA include Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, a project on home finance by artist and urban designer Damon Rich; The Curse of Bigness, which featured major works by Survival Research Laboratories, J. Morgan Puett, and Dexter Sinister, among others; and the first U.S. solo presentation of Korean video and performance artist Sung Hwan Kim. In addition, she is helping plan a new long-term artist residency in Corona, Queens, the largely new-immigrant neighborhood on which the museum borders, with partners at Queens College CUNY. The first long-term resident is Tania Bruguera, invited in partnership with Creative Time. From 2004-2008 she was associate director at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT where she and staff commissioned and produced new work by Michael Smith, Damon Rich/ the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), John Malpede, and Xavier Le Roy; instituted a visiting artist series (Vito Acconci/ Acconci Studio, Miranda July, Judith Barry, Seth Price, Dexter Sinister, and Rachel Harrison, among others); a student residency program; and a residency for Boston-area artists.
LARISSA HARRIS
Curator, Queens Museum
MAUREEN CONNOR
Artist, QC Professor Emeritus, co-founder of SPQ
Maureen Connor, Queens College Art Department Professor Emeritus and co-founder Social Practice Queens (SPQ), she serves as an adviser and guest lecturer for SPQ. Her artistic work combines elements of installation, video, interior design, ethnography, human resources, feminism, and social justice. In 2008 she co-founded the collective the Institute for Wishful Thinking and examples of the group’s projects include the SOS Peace Pentagon, which addressed the question ‘how can a building mobilize for peace and justice?’ and Artists in Residence for the US Government (self declared), first shown at Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York and which was also part of the Connor’s survey exhibition Contradictions, at Akbank Sanat in Istanbul, with work from 1978-2012. Since 2000 she has also been developing her project Personnel, a series of interventions concerned with the workplace that explore the attitudes, needs, and desires of staff at various institutions. Connor is also known for her feminist work from the 1980s and ’90s, which has been included in numerous publications and exhibited internationally. Her work has received funding from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Guggenheim, the NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, PSC-CUNY and Harvestworks, among others.
Tom Finkelpearl is an American arts promoter, former Queens Museum museum director, and former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. He is a co-founder of Social Practice Queens 2009.
TOM FINKELPEARL
American arts promoter, former Queens Museum museum director
JEFF KASPER
Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Design at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Jeff Kasper is an interdisciplinary artist and critical designer who employs a trauma-informed approach to design-facilitation, public pedagogy, and participatory experiences. His current research is concerned with nonviolent communication in the design process; LGBTQIA+ health; and cooperative models to design practice that empower people as experts in shaping their own lives. His work is influenced by behavioral sciences, prefigurative politics, and disability justice. Kasper is most known as an organizer and social practice artist working in arts management and social planning. Over the last decade, he has collaborated with numerous cultural, grassroots, and civic organizations in New York City to design over 300 public programs, publications, workshops and exhibitions with hundreds of artists and community members. He was recently awarded residencies, fellowships, and project support from Downtown Art, CUE Art Foundation, Art Beyond Sight, Ontario College of Art & Design, Social Practice Queens, New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. he co-founded Civic Art Lab, the perennial, community platform, with Laura Scherling.
Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and curator. Most recently, she co-curated Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a multi-borough survey of the artist’s work, and served as the director of the Queens Museum. She also launched Creative Time’s Global Initiatives, was Dia Art Foundation’s Deputy Director, and has held posts at the Guggenheim and Public Art Fund. She is currently the Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators at Hyperallergic, is working on a forthcoming book on museums and neutrality, and is co-curating a public seminar series titled Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness at the New School’s Vera List Center for Arts and Politics. Additionally, she is a member of the Art and Social Justice Working Group, lectures internationally on socially engaged and collaborative art, and she is the author of various essays on art and culture, as well as a novel based on Viagra and Cialis spam, “A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties.” Laura received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in both Art and Political Science from Swarthmore College and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
PRERANA REDDY
Director of Programs at A Blade of Grass
Prerana Reddy is the Director of Programs at A Blade of Grass. Prior to joining ABOG, she was the Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art, where in addition to organizing their screenings, performances, discussions, and community-based collaborative programs and exhibits both on- and offsite, she developed an intensive arts and social justice program for immigrant youth as well as a community development initiative for Corona, Queens residents, many of whom are new immigrants with mixed status families and limited English language proficiency. She has also curated “Fatal Love”, an exhibition of South Asian American Contemporary Art, as well commissioned two editions of “Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere,” Queens Museum’s socially-interactive public art projects. She is currently on the board of NOCD-NY, ArtBuilt, Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, and New Immigrant Community Empowerment.