A Curator Talks Social Practice at Queens College

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Located about an hour outside of the usual New York City art hubs, Queens College has long been renowned for its studio-based Social Practice MFA program with current and former professors including artist Chloë Bass, Vito Acconci, Maureen Connor, and Judith Bernstein.

After having been given the opportunity to curate an all-female show in the student gallery, I was stunned by the variety of available media at the facility, including a woodshop and a bronze-casting studio. Material Archive (April 2016) aims to present the viewer with diversity in materiality while also offering an investigation of the notion of the artwork as a vessel of personal, historical and cultural memory.

Read more on ArtReport.

Queens Residents Remind Trump Where He Comes From

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Sunday November 20th, an oversized mailbox was installed in Jackson Heights’ Diversity Plaza, an invitation to Queens residents to send postcards to President-elect Donald Trump. The action, called Letters from Home, was organized by the Center for Artistic Activism as the culmination of its Arts Action Academy at the Queens Museum with SPQ alumni Sol Aramendi and current MFA Alix Camacho.

“We realized something about Queens, that it’s one of the most ethnically diverse places on Earth and it’s the [childhood] home of Donald Trump,” Stephen Duncombe, co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, told Hyperallergic. “Here’s this person who’s talking about making America ‘great again,’ but of course the America that he came from is one of the most diverse places on Earth.”

Watch the video here!

Read the full article on Hyperallergic!