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.”
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/lettersfromhome03-720x480.jpeg480720Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2016-12-23 18:49:032016-12-23 18:49:03Queens Residents Remind Trump Where He Comes From
SPQ alumni Sol Aramendi invites you to the launch event of the Jornaler@ App this coming Monday. This long term project was possible by the collaboration of many people, organizations and agencies. Will be great to have you there.
Now, with the new administration fast approaching, workers across the country are wondering how they can defend themselves against the regressive labor policies to come. For jornaleros, attempts to devalue their labor have been constant. Every day they face the threat of going without pay, being paid less than the minimum wage, or being subjected to workplace dangers outside of their control. Fighting back has never been optional.
That’s why over two years ago day labor centers in New York started creating a new tool in the struggle to end worker exploitation.
We are launching Jornaler@ App with a press conference on Monday, November 21, from 11:00 am -12:00 PM.
Launch of Jornaler@ App
Press Conference
11:00am – 12:00am
69th Street and 37th Ave in Queens, NY
(3 blocks from the 69 street stop of the 7 train and 4 blocks from 74 Roosevelt E, R, M, F, 7)
Hosted by New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), there will be a light breakfast, a brief walkthrough of Jornaler@ given by day laborers from NICE with artist Sol Aramendi that were closely involved with the design process, remarks by the Executive Director of NICE Manuel Castro, by Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) Pablo Alvarado, President Kenneth Rigmaiden of the Painters Union, President Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO and other invited guests.
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/jornalero-letterhead-1.jpg13012967Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2016-11-18 20:39:362016-11-18 20:39:36Launch event of the Jornaler@ App
Rivers as “Quiet Dialogues” and Other Environmental Perspectives of Ala Plástica
Open A.I.R. Artist Services Talk and Workshop
Oct 16 2016
2:00pm–5:00pm
—En Español abajo—
Ala Plástica is an art and environmental organization based in Río de la Plata, Argentina that works on the rhizomatic linking of ecological, social, and artistic methodology, combining direct interventions and precisely defined concepts to a parallel universe without giving up the symbolic potential of art. They are concerned with relating the artist’s way of thinking and working with the development of projects in the social and environmental realm. Since 1991 Ala Plástica has developed a range of non-conventional artworks, focused on local and regional problems, and in close contact and collaboration with other artists, scientists and environmental groups. Ala Plástica works bio-regionally, within Argentina, as well as internationally in relationship to other transformative arts practitioners.
The lecture by Alejandro Meitin, co-founder of the collective, explores a number of critical transdisciplinary initiatives carried out by Ala Plástica that in their very constitution and process of development integrate an artistic way of thinking and working related to art and the environment in the Rio de la Plata Basin and internationally. These initiatives comprise communicative strategies and actions connected to social contexts that sharply contrast with modernist ideologies of art’s neutrality. The initiatives not only operate amidst the art world’s discursive assumptions, institutional contexts, and publics but also engage with the discourses of both art and activism, opening up possibilities for aesthetics to transcend its disciplinary confines and operative orbits.
These references would help participants understand how artists can constructively engage with community-based economies involving craft work, subsistence farming, forestry and many other activities which today can benefit from specialized knowledge and innovative techniques. The lecture would seek to transmit a holistic approach to the challenges and struggles of a constantly changing world, in such a way that participants can recognize their own opportunities and responsibilities.
The lecture will conclude with a short field methods workshop in which participants will walk to the Flushing River and collect visual and sonic data on their phones which will be collaged together as a group project.
Free, RSVP required to preddy@queensmuseum.org
Please note this event will have simultaneous interpretation for Spanish and English speakers.
About Alejandro Meitin:
Artist, lawyer and founding member of the art collective Ala Plastica (1991 – Current) based in the city of La Plata, Argentina. Additionally, Alejandro Meitin has participated in the research, development and implementation of many collaborative art practices, working with residents, youth, farmers, artists, activists, architects, landscape architects, local authorities and pollution control experts. He has collaborated with regional, national and making proposals on international rivers and water resources systems and conducted exhibitions, teaching, residencies, publications, given lectures and conferences in Latin America, North America and Europe.
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Ala Plástica, es una organización artístico-ambiental que desarrolla su actividad principalmente en el área del Estuario del Río de la Plata (Argentina). Desde 1991, Ala Plástica ha llevado a cabo una serie de iniciativas artísticas no convencionales a escala bioregional. Sus miembros y colaboradores provienen de saberes diversos, cambiando la conformación del colectivo según los proyectos desarrollados. Éstos reúnen una trama compleja de intervenciones que articulan al mismo tiempo ecología, sostenibilidad, trabajos en red, producción de conocimiento, recuperación de economías locales y entramados sociales, partiendo de modelos de expansión rizomática e investigación participativa.
En su presentación Alejandro Meitin, co-fundador del colectivo, explorará una serie de iniciativas transdisciplinarias de urbanismo crítico llevadas adelante por Ala Plástica las que en su propia constitución y proceso de desarrollo integran la manera artística de pensamiento y acción a partir de la relacion entre arte y medio ambiente en el área de la cuenca del Río de la Plata e internacionalmente. Estas iniciativas comprenden estrategias dialógicas y acciones relacionadas con los contextos sociales que contrastan con las ideologías modernistas de neutralidad del arte ya que no sólo operan entre los contextos institucionales y públicos propios del mundo del arte, sino que vinculan críticamente arte y activismo, abriendo la posibilidad para que la estética trascienda sus límites disciplinarios y ámbitos operativos.
Estas referencias ayudaran a los participantes a entender cómo los artistas pueden comprometerse críticamente en los ámbitos de la producción económicay también cómo pueden participar de manera constructiva en economías basadas en la comunidad que implican trabajo artesanal, agricultura urbana, silvicultura y muchas otras actividades que hoy en día pueden beneficiarse de los conocimientos especializados y técnicas innovadoras. La presentación tratará de transmitir un enfoque holístico de los desafíos y las luchas de un mundo en constante cambio, de tal manera que los participantes puedan reconocer sus propias oportunidades y responsabilidades.
Sobre Alejandro Meitin:
Artista, abogado, y miembro fundador del colectivo artístico ambiental Ala Plástica (1991 – hasta el presente) con base en la ciudad de La Plata, Argentina. Ha participado en la investigación, elaboración y ejecución de prácticas artísticas colaborativas, trabajando en conjunto con pobladores, productores rurales, artistas, activistas, arquitectos, paisajistas, autoridades locales y expertos en control de contaminación, colaborando con entidades regionales, nacionales e internacionales a partir de propuestas bioregionales sobre ríos, sistemas y recursos acuáticos y ha realizado exhibiciones, residencias, publicaciones, dictado cursos y conferencias, en América Latina, Norte América y Europa.
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cienega.jpg6881238Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2016-10-16 19:38:562016-10-16 19:39:16Workshop & Artist Talk: Ala Plastica — ‘Rivers As Quiet Dialogues’
We are incredible excited for the Opening Reception of Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Artat Queens Museum. Over the Winter and Spring several SPQ MFA students worked with museum Community Engagement and Curatorial staff on Ukeles’ upcoming programming around questions of the role of artists in city agencies and sustainability, to name a few. Check out the upcoming events here.
Since the late 1960s, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ performances, sculptural installations, and writing have explored issues profoundly important today: the role of women in society, cultures of work and labor, and the environment. Her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! laid out the hidden, yet essential role of maintenance in Western society—and the radical implications of actively valuing rather than dismissing or hiding it.Join us for the opening reception for the first survey of Ukeles’ work. The show spans five decades, from Ukeles’ work as a pioneer of feminist performance to a practitioner of public art through which she invites us to reconsider indispensable urban systems and the workers who maintain them. Ukeles is undoubtedly best-known for her 38+ year role as the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Department of Sanitation. Unprecedented when it began in 1978, this residency has now become a model for municipalities engaging with artists as creative agents.
All current and former Department of Sanitation NY employees and their families admitted free throughout the run of the exhibition.
Schedule of Events
3:30pm: The day kicks off as The Social Mirror, a mirror-clad Sanitation truck, encircles the Unisphere with a procession of sanitation workers.
4pm:Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980, is seen and heard anew in the Panorama of the City of New York. Join curator Larissa Harris and Ukeles as they introduce Ten Sweeps Light Path, 2016 and Trax for Trux and Barges II, 1984/2016.
5pm: Remarks by Executive Director Laura Raicovich, NYC Department of Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in the Main Atrium.
5:30pm: Join Queens Museum staff at Peace Table, 1997, to learn how to participate in upcoming dialogues on key aspects of Ukeles’ work, including artists embedded in city agencies, the future of garbage in NYC, diverse explorations on the subject of peace, human agency in changing the world, and how care and service work scales from family to city to planet.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art is organized by the Queens Museum and curated by Queens Museum Curator Larissa Harris with guest curator Patricia C. Phillips, who initiated the project in 2012.
Free shuttle service will run in a continuous loop from under the CitiField/Mets-Willets Point 7 Train Station and the Museum from 2:30-6:30pm.
Queens Museum and Social Practice Queens (SPQ) is hosting a free hands-on Nonfiction Performance Workshop with L.M Bogad on Sat., September 24, 2016 from 2:00pm—4:00pm
All students, artists, and friends are welcome! Please let me know if you plan on attending by Thursday, September 22nd. Free but RSVP requested to preddy@queensmuseum.org
L. M. Bogad is an author, performer, and the founding Director of the Center for Tactical Performance, based in Berkeley, California. Bogad writes, performs, and strategizes with mischievous artists such as the Yes Men, Agit-Pop, and La Pocha Nostra. He is a veteran of the Lincoln Center Theatre Director’s Laboratory, and a co-founder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.
Participants must bring nonfictional texts they want to work with in performance–ideally archival government texts, but others would do. Bring more than one document on the same topic, perhaps from different perspectives.
This is a practical performance workshop class, emphasizing the creation of original performances based on non-fictional texts. These can range from government documents, newspaper articles, historical primary sources, eyewitness accounts, lists of chemical ingredients, instructional manuals, etc. Students should choose a subject matter that ignites their passion/anger/sense of humor.
Check out the new web archive of Queens College public art collection, past and present—including figures like Vito Acconci as well as students and alumni of the university.
https://qcpublicart.wordpress.com/
Designed by Jocy Meneses, Queens College Graphic Design Student
as part of Sculpture Professor Tyronne Mitchell’s course in Public Art
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Queens College MFA in Studio Art, City University of New York (CUNY), is pleased to announce Dining with Vultures, an ecologically-minded exhibition that contemplates art school as an ecosystem of scavenged thinking, gregarious collaboration, intergenerational slaughter and material transformation. The show features recent work of 21 emerging artists from nine countries, currently enrolled in the MFA and Social Practice Queens programs.
This exhibition is fascinated with the eating habits of urban vultures who remove death and decay from city spaces as they feast. The show highlights five behaviors characteristic of the vulture that the exhibiting artists share, including an ever-present resourcefulness, an ability to transform death into new forms, an openness to working collaboratively, a propensity to look long and work slow, and an attraction to consuming marginalized material.
In addition to works created during their time at Queens College, the artists will present new works produced specifically for the show that scavenge material from the cutting blocks, trash bins, laptops, and floors of each other’s studios. This assignment was conceived by Curator Sarah Fritchey, who will present the results as a Food Web that charts lines of production, consumption, and material concern.
Featured artists: Ghazaleh Abbasnazari, Tabitha St Cyr, Scott Braun, Nancy Bruno, Alejandro Salgado Cendales, Alix Camacho, Amy Cheng, Arber Dabaj, Eliesha Grant, Floor Grootenhuis & Setare S. Arashloo, Effisleeps, Zaid Islam, Jeff Kasper, Maria K. Karlberg-Levin, Alan Lien, Jenna Makuh, Raina Marie Panagiotopoulos, Gina Minielli, Nicole Mouriño, Uno Nam, and Erin Turner
*Image above: Alan Lien (MFA Sculpture ’16), older than Caligula but not quite there, 2016. Found hardware, cement, aluminum pipe, aluminum chain, artificial grapes, dimensions variable. Photo: Gina Minielli. Courtesy of the artist.
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The Queens College Department of Art welcomed Tomie Arai for a guest lecture at the Godwin Ternbach MuseumThursday, April 21st, 12 to 2pm.
Arai is public artist who lives and works in NYC. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially-Engaged Art. About her process Arai says “Through the use of family stories, shared memories, and archival photographs, I construct pages of ‘living history’ that reflect the layered and complex narratives that give meaning to the places we live in.” Learn more about the artist here: http://tomiearai.com
Event sponsored by Professor Mitchell.
Stay-tuned for a recording of the lecture.
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image1.jpeg612792Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2016-04-23 06:12:202016-04-23 06:14:39Tomie Arai visits Queens College
The Queens Museum’s Open A.I.R. Artist Services Program and the Social Practice Queens MFA Concentration at Queens College invite you to join artist Dread Scott for a presentation and discussion of their work.
Location: Queens College, Klapper Hall, Fine Arts Department Room 672 on the 6th floor.
About Dread Scott Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is exhibited across the US and internationally. For three decades he has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering norms of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed one of his artworks and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, Pori Art Museum (Finland), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and galleries and street corners across the country. He is a recipient of grants form Creative Capital Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation and his work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.
About Social Practice Queens
Social Practice Queens (SPQ) is a unique MFA concentration bringing together the resources of an academic research institution, Queens College (City University of New York: CUNY), with the long-standing community-based activism of the Queens Museum. The new MFA concentration in social practice integrates studio work with social, tactical, interventionist and cooperative forms. SPQ’s goal is to initiate interdisciplinary projects with real world outcomes rooted in CUNY’s rigorous departmental offerings (e.g.: urban studies, environmental science, public policy, experimental pedagogy, social theory) in tandem with the Queens Museum’s ongoing community-based activities.
About Open A.I.R. Artist Services Program
Open A.I.R. draws on the Queens Museum’s resources, staff expertise, and networks to provide workshops and lectures that help artists grow their practice, advance their career, and develop sustainable lives as artists. Given the Museum’s commitment to socially-engaged art that crosses sectors, as well as attention to its role in neighboring communities, Open A.I.R. works to expand the notion of who is an artist and, moreover, utilizes a holistic view of how to support their potential to thrive and contribute to the cultural landscape of Queens and New York City more broadly. Tailored to artists in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx, Open A.I.R. prioritizes the needs of artists of color, queer artists, and immigrant artists, facilitating conversations where art meets activism, and organizing experiences that bring together artists and non-artists.
Open A.I.R. is made possible by a generous grant from The Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund. Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
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Maureen Connor, Professor Emeritus and co-founder of the social practice program at Queens College, was featured in The New York Times, introducing SPQ and the rise of social practice and collaborative art in academic programs: “We try to teach collaboration,” … “Most artists haven’t had the opportunity to work collaboratively, and many of them find it difficult at first to work that way. For so many years, they have been encouraged to work on their own and in competition with others.”
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They recieved a grant the Van Arsdale Center and presentated on WAC projects to date proposing collaboration workers public art project in concert with the International Labor Organizations centennial in 2019. Plumbers built a preliminary pvc structure which Jaime Lopez customized and lit up for the purposes of framing a street theatre project that Namrata Bali of the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, collaboratively created with conference participants from all over the world. Stay tuned for updates on future collaborations.
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Sol Aramendi, 2015 A Blade of Grass Fellow, and SPQ alumni, is developing a “Wage Theft app” as a result of a joint effort between artists, day laborers, community organizers and lawyers.
The Spanish-language platform for Android and iPhones came to be after five sessions in which day laborers gave ideas for a digital resource that would accommodate their needs. The app, which will cost $10,000 to design, will be developed by Cornell University and should be out in September.
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José Serrano-McClain (SPQ ’15) is now an Adjunct Professor at the New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in the Department of Art and Art Professions teaching a course titled ‘Contemporary Art and Community Partnerships’, one of 3 core courses for the new MA in Art, Education, and Community Practice. In addition Serrano-McClain is teaching in the new MFA in Community Practice at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.
Learn more about the artist and community organizer here.
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SPQ is excited to have Dr. Tello visit SPQ this fall! She is the Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow National Institute for Experimental Arts, at UNSW AUSTRALIA.
Veronica Tello completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2013. Her research broadly focuses on the intersections of contemporary art and politics. Her forthcoming book Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Contemporary Art and Refugee Histories (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury) analyses how contemporary artists have adopted experimental methods for memorialising recent refugee flows spanning Cuba–America, Middle-East–Australia and Africa–Europe.
Her current research examines contemporary art at the intersection of social practice, public art and institutional critique in the work of artists such as Tania Bruguera, Ahmet Ögüt, Renzo Martens and Jonas Staal. It traces the development of experimenal social institutions led by these artists in diverse regions including the Congo, Syria, Germany and the US amidst global crises including conflict, refugee flows and the uneven distribution of capital.
Veronica’s work has been widely published in national and international journals, most recently in Third Text, Afterall and Contemporaneity. Other publications include essays in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2 and Vitamin P2 monographs, as well as catalogue essays for numerous Australian artists in the areas of performance art, video art, photography and installation
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This November, SPQ welcomes visiting student Tanex López! López is a visual artist and founding member of “La Agencia”: a civil association interested in the connection between contemporary art, education and social practice. He is currently studying a Master Program at Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, Mexico. His ongoing research examines art educators’ belief system in order to understand the pedagogical practices of art teaching both local and globally.
Tanex’s work with “La Agencia” includes pedagogical interventions such as workshops of contemporary art or deschooling courses for high school students. In 2012, he received a State award for a project called Historia reciente del Arte en Aguascalientes. The work consisted in the creation of an archive containing information about the recent history of the visual arts in the city.
The Queens Museum’s Open A.I.R. Artist Services Program and the Social Practice Queens MFA Concentration at Queens College invite you to join artist Caroline Woolard for a presentation and discussion of their work.
Location: Queens College, Klapper Hall, Fine Arts Department Room 672 on the 6th floor.
Caroline Woolard is an artist and organizer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, architecture, and political economy. After co-founding and co-directing resource sharing networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop from 2008-2014, Woolard is now focused on her work with BFAMFAPhD.com to raise awareness about the impact of rent, debt, and precarity on culture and on the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative to create and support truly affordable commercial space for cultural resilience and economic justice in New York City.
Caroline Woolard’s work has been supported by MoMA, the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, Eyebeam, the MacDowell Colony, unemployment benefits, the curiosity of strangers, and many collaborators. Recent group exhibitions include: Crossing Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Maker Biennial, The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and Artist as Social Agent, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Woolard’s work will be featured in Art21’s New York Close Up documentary series over the next three years. Woolard is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts and the New School, is an Artist in Residence at the Queens Museum of Art, and was just named the 2015 Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Judson Church.
About Social Practice Queens
Social Practice Queens (SPQ) is a unique MFA concentration bringing together the resources of an academic research institution, Queens College (City University of New York: CUNY), with the long-standing community-based activism of the Queens Museum. The new MFA concentration in social practice integrates studio work with social, tactical, interventionist and cooperative forms. SPQ’s goal is to initiate interdisciplinary projects with real world outcomes rooted in CUNY’s rigorous departmental offerings (e.g.: urban studies, environmental science, public policy, experimental pedagogy, social theory) in tandem with the Queens Museum’s ongoing community-based activities.
About Open A.I.R. Artist Services Program
Open A.I.R. draws on the Queens Museum’s resources, staff expertise, and networks to provide workshops and lectures that help artists grow their practice, advance their career, and develop sustainable lives as artists. Given the Museum’s commitment to socially-engaged art that crosses sectors, as well as attention to its role in neighboring communities, Open A.I.R. works to expand the notion of who is an artist and, moreover, utilizes a holistic view of how to support their potential to thrive and contribute to the cultural landscape of Queens and New York City more broadly. Tailored to artists in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx, Open A.I.R. prioritizes the needs of artists of color, queer artists, and immigrant artists, facilitating conversations where art meets activism, and organizing experiences that bring together artists and non-artists. These goals are addressed through the following vehicles:
Open A.I.R. is made possible by a generous grant from The Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund. Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Boys and Girls High School
1700 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY 11213
After two years, the Creative Time Summit—the world’s largest international conference on art and social change—is headed home to New York City! Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC” will take place at the Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on November 14 and 15, 2015.
Building on the Summit held at the Venice Biennale in August, the New York Summit is dedicated to education and other ways knowledge is disseminated and obtained. “The Curriculum NYC” will focus on the effects of specific education policies in the United States. From within Boys and Girls High School, which has come to symbolize both the democratic ambitions and the pervasive inequalities of public education today, we will explore the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, pedagogical art practices, omissions in contemporary curricula, and political issues such as the re-segregation of public schools and student debt.
In addition to hosting presentations by a distinguished roster of over 50 participants, theCreative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC” invites attendees to join in our afternoon sessions, which will comprise break-out sessions held in the school’s classrooms. Taking the form of roundtables, open dialogs, or workshops, they will provide opportunities for more intimate exchanges among attendees, special guests, Summit presenters, and students or teachers from Boys and Girls High School. While diving deeper into urgent pedagogical issues, sessions will also address topics specific to the field of socially engaged art.
Keynoteaddresses will be given by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and artist/community activist Boots Riley. Participants include Bill Ayers, Luis Camnitzer, Hope Ginsburg, Gugulective (Athi Mongezeleli Joja), Hans Haacke, Tia Powell Harris, Kemi Ilesanmi, Rolling Jubilee (Laura Hanna and Astra Taylor), Stanley Kinard, Pedro Lasch, Simone Leigh, MFA NO MFA (ex-USC students), Naeem Mohaiemen, Pepón Osorio, Jolene Rickard, Andrew Ross, and Jennifer Scott.
Workshops, roundtables and panels to be led by the Center for Artistic Activism, Flux Factory, Deborah Fisher, Noah Fischer, Not an Alternative, Silvia Juliana Mantilla Ortiz, Douglas Paulson, Laundromat Project, Marinella Senatore, Visible Project, Gregory Sholette, Daniel Tucker, Caroline Woolard and Sue Bell Yank. In addition, there will be a featured special project by Chto Delat.
Get your tickets for “The Curriculum NYC” today! Pay-what-you-wish tickets available here. Special opening event by The Visible Project
On the High Line at West 16th Street
Friday, November 13, 6pm
Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum NYC kicks off with an opening event co-presented with High Line Art. Curated by Matteo Lucchetti and Judith Wielander of the Visible Project, the event will include site-specific performances by Marinella Senatore, Nástio Mosquito, and others to be announced. Performances are free and open to the public.
Call for proposals
Are you an artist, activist or cultural producer living and/or working in the neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights? Interested in organizing and leading a roundtable discussion focused on important issues in your community? Click here for more information on how to get involved.
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/e0f14_7a0c00c6151c6ba8369c9bfe8d6b811a_images.jpg430587Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2015-10-06 02:47:222015-11-04 21:59:11SPQ’s Greg Sholette at 2015 Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC”
Gulf Labor, Precarious Workers Rights, and SPQ at The CUNY Graduate Center
Join SPQ and QCMFA’s own Gregory Sholette, Setare Arashloo, and Barrie Cline (’14) for a conversation on Nov 19, 2015, 6:30 pm at the Skylight Room 9100, CUNY Graduate Center,365 Fifth Avenue, New York.
Precarious Workers Pageant, Venice Italy 8/7/2015
What does Bertolt Brecht have to do with workers’ rights in Abu Dhabi? Although politically engaged art and theater takes many forms, the recent Precarious Workers Pageant at the Venice Biennale took a Brechtian approach as it pointed out the solidification of global capital in architecture in Abu Dhabi and the precarious state of migrant workers who are building these future cultural sites. The pageant’s street performance offered a new public commons fabricated out of the deconstructed architecture of the avant-garde museum. Join artists, scholars, and activists in conversation for an evening of discussion, debate, and for an evening of discussion, debate, and propositions as part of the Social Choreography seminar at the Center for the Humanities and in tandem with the exhibition by Zoe Beloff at the James Gallery, “A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.” Following the Precarious Workers Pageant video premier will be another New York premier: a presentation of TheGulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, edited by A. Ross and published by OR Books, with contributions by Sholette and other members of Gulf Labor.
The event is co-sponsored by the Social Choreography Mellon Seminar in Public Engagement and Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and Committee on Globalization and Social Change.
– See more at: http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/program/gulf-labor-and-precarious-workers-rights#sthash.IkYj7MPT.dpuf
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tumblr_inline_nrjra0pVBr1tx6ps0_500.jpg249500Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2015-10-04 17:44:252015-11-04 21:59:42Gulf Labor, Precarious Workers Rights, and SPQ at The CUNY Graduate Center
Gregory Sholette, artist, writer, activist, and professor of Sculpture and social practice at Queens College, discusses the varied tactics associated with Gulf Labor Coalition as they seek to call attention to the plight of precarious migrant workers in Abu Dhabi where a new Guggenheim Museum is in the works, followed by an examination of Marina Naprushkina’s sustainable art project in the Moabit section of Berlin where she is developing an “artificial institution” whose mission is to service the needs of her “new neighbors”: political refugees fleeing military and economic conflict in Syria, Iraq and Northern Africa. The broader issue that both of these politically engaged, artistic endeavors confronts is how we might redirect resources, as well as invent new models, for rethinking the notion of a shared commons operating in opposition to the predacious appetite of neoliberal enterprise culture. This larger agenda seems especially urgent today as we witness an ever-tightening intersection between contemporary art, global capital, and the growing multitude of migratory, precarious, and paperless laborers who are simultaneously tasked with building the fabulous architectural fantasies serving the world’s .01% ultra-rich, while also demonized as a dangerous social surplus dragging down limited economic resources. People at risk, including refugees, low-income workers, indebted students, marginalized people of color and women, as well as most artists, and even perhaps an entire nation in the case of Greece, increasingly wield a dark transformative agency with nothing to lose except their precariousness.
Presented by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Critical Inquiry, Art History, DOVA, and Art and Public Life.
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Event_Page_pic.jpg233370Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2015-10-04 17:42:292015-11-04 22:00:45Gregory Sholette at UChicago | October 9th
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tumblr_nvfvt934rJ1uz532ho1_500.jpg534413Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2015-10-04 17:41:532015-11-04 22:00:39An Evening with Gulf Labor at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics 10/2
Imagine yourself uncovering a cache of materials and documents that record a past whose future never arrived? Imaginary Archive is just such a repository: pamphlets, books, photo-albums, records, blueprints, small objects, whose assorted narratives imagine alternative histories and speculative tomorrows that nevertheless frequently shed a precise light on concrete realities. SPQ’s own Gregory Sholette has invited participants from Germany, Philadelphia, Ukraine, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria as well as others from around the globe to produce this Imaginary Archive, which is a collection of unknown, under-represented, dreaded and/or hoped-for “historical” materials that point to multiple interpretations of the past, the present, and the future. Working with Sholette, architect Marcel Kalberer designed and constructed a bamboo labyrinth within Zeppelin University’s White Box exhibition space to house this most current edition of Imaginary Archive while simultaneously inaugurating this new cultural venue for students and the public.
Participating Imaginary Archivists (as of September, 2015) include: Aaron Burr Society: (Jim Costanzo), Agata Craftlove, Alan Hughes, Alexander Wolodarskij, Alien Abduction Collective: (Todd Ayoung, Heather Davis, Kim Asbury, Ulla Hvejsel, and Phoebe Bachman), Andrea Aversa, Anna Zvyagintseva, Austin Ivers, Azra Aksamija, Babis Venetopoulos & John Voyatzopoulos, Basekamp and Friends (Philadelphia), Ben Geoghegan, Brian Hand, Bryce Galloway & Students, Charlotte Schatz, Chris Esposito, Christina Lederhaas, Closed Engagement, Daniel Tucker, Dave Callen, Denis Pankratov, Doris Jauk-Hinz, Edda Strobl, Ellen Rothenberg, Eva Taxacher & Karin Ondas, Eva Ursprung, fabian dankl/johannes schrettle/christina lederhaas, Glen Goldberg, Grant Corbishley, Gerald Raunig, Gregory Sholette, Hanns Hoffmann Lederer, Helmut Kaplan, Jeffrey Skoller, Jenny Polak, Jeremy Booth, Liga für Kunst und Kultur: (Johannes Schrettle), City Life/Vida Urbana: (John Hulsey), Josef Fürpaß, Karl Lorac, Leah Oats, Lee Harrop, Lada Nakonechna, Lesya Khomenko, Malcolm Doidge, Matthew Friday, Matthew F. Greco, Maureen Connor, Markus Wetzel, Maryam Mohammadi , Miroslav Kulchitsky, Murray Hewitt, Mykola Ridnyi, Naeem Mohaiemen, Nannette Yannuzzi, Nayari Castillo, Niall Moore, Nikita Kadan, Oleksandr Burlaka & Oleksiy Radynskyi, Oliver Ressler, Eidia House: (Paul Lamarre & Melisa Wolf), Paul Maye, Patrik Aarnivaara, Pedro Lasch, REPOhistory, R.E.P. group, Reinhard Knall, Roger O’Shea, Salem Collo-Julin, Sarah Farahat, Sasha Dedos, Simon Fleming, Suchness, Tender & Endangered Cow/Horse of Dimness, TanzLaboratorium, Tiarnán McDonough, “TJ”, Theresa Rose, Thom Donovan, Trust Art, White Fungus Zine, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Yevgeniya Belorusets, Yevgeniy Fiks, Zoe Beloff, and The Think Tank That Has Yet To Be Named: (Jeremy Beaudry, Katie Hargrave & Meredith Warner).
With special thanks to Professor Dr. Karen van den Berg, Curator of Fine Arts Ulrike Shepherd, Bettina Pfuderer and the ZU Facility Management, as well as IA co-collaborators Olga Kopenkina and Matt Greco for their all around support, and to the White Box installation crew including: Caroline Brendel, Jona Kalberer, Laura Niemann, Toby Eckert, Friederike Kötter, Lena Mehner, Mathilde Nadeau, Maria-Luisa Villena, Christina Buck, plus the architects Prof. Eugen Rabold und Markus Müller for researching leads, Ingrid Feustel from the Hoffmann-Lederer archive and Hilde Corbo from the Narrenzunft Seegockel for materials, und Karl Heinz Mommertz for essential research.
Previous IA host curators and institutions include:
• 2015 Liz Park, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
• 2014: Larissa Babij, Les Kurbas Center, Kyiv, Ukraine.*
• 2013: Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art, Graz, Austria.
• 2012: Megs Morely, Tulca Art Festival/Gallery 123, Galway, Ireland.
• 2010: Siv B. Fjaerestad, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand.
* IA Kyiv was made possible with assistance from CEC Artslink and individual supporters.
The Gulf Labor Pageant & Procession: Aug. 7, Venice, Italy @ Sale Docs
Join members of Workers Art Coalition, Aaron Burr Society, Occupy Museums, Social Practice Queens, Sale Docs, G.U.L.F. andGulf Labor Coalition in a collective performative experiment deconstructing Frank Gerhry’s proposed Guggenheim Museum on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Right now we are fabricating portable, modular elements based on Gehry’s design and rehearsing a public procession whose tones will be partially somber and partially celebratory.
The Gulf Labor Pageant and Procession starts off at Sale Docs on the South side of the Dorsaduro August 7th at 6PM after which we will wind our way out and around the nearby Peggy Guggenheim Museum where various stations, enactments, testimonials, and performances will focus on the struggle for social justice amongst migrant workers in the Gulf region, as well as labor conditions and the plight of migrant workers in Europe and the USA.
Following the procession stay for a book launch for The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor edited by Andrew Ross from OR Books. PLUS a party! (More details to follow soon, and note: a second performance is slated for this Fall in New York City, plus a panel at the CUNY Grad Center.) JOIN US! *
* This project is possible thanks to the generous support and labor of its participants, as well as the Mellon Seminar in Collaborative Research and Public Engagement in the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY
The Precarious Workers Pageant- a collaborative project with members of Workers Art Coalition, the Aaron Burr Society, Occupy Museums, G.U.L.F., and Social Practice Queens (CUNY) staged an pageant-intervention at the Venice Biennale this summer.
Zigzagging across the fever-hot streets of Venice a line of men and women advance. As they march a series of “liberated” geometric shapes and hand-made banners are worn or carried aloft overhead. A man in a blue cape blows a baritone trumpet. Everyone shouts, chants and sings about solidarity with migrant laborers in the Gulf State of Abu Dhabi. In fact, solidarity with precarious labor everywhere is called for. (photos by Setare Arashloo)
The group reveals dual influences. First, the Russian Futurist avant-garde of the early 20th Century, and second, the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike and Pageant, in New Jersey. After weeks of rehearsals this band of NYC based construction workers, students and artists traveled to Italy, marched past the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in the Dorsoduro on August 7th, and then come to a stop at the nearby Gallerie dell’Accademia plaza. At which point the deconstructed architectural elements of Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi they carried with them were reassembled into a circular barricade. And there, inside this temporary public “commons,” a series of speeches, songs, poems and “mike checks” captured the attention of surprised tourists and residents.
As it turns out Guggenheim administrators were also caught off guard. The museum’s displeasure with the Pageant was compounded by other critiques made during the Venice Biennial that were similarly focused on the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project. Bitterly their ire was conveyed to members of Gulf Labor Coalition, and among other (now familiar) counter-accusations was the assertion that the museum has not exploited any workers in Abu Dhabi because no contract for building the Guggenheim there has been awarded. No exploited workers, no evil empire.
The counterargument is of course a dodge. Not only has the Guggenheim dotted its own colossal boardroom office map with the anticipated Abu Dhabi location, but they also prominently herald the coming new museum on their custom shopping bags. However, if you are of the opinion that the conspicuous rolling-out of one’s imminent plan of action does not truly constitute a line that has already been crossed; then consider the future museum site itself. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is literally being constructed on desert sands. Unlike an urban setting where builders can rely on a pre-established support grid for power and water and so forth, everything on Saadiyat Island must be built from the bottom up. That includes roads for trucks to travel on and water lines and power cables for contractors to use. So take a close look at the areal images of the site where the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is to be raised. Not only do we see roads, ramps and concrete supports already in place, but also the entire museum footprint is a man-made peninsula jutting into the water. Needless to say, the infrastructure for the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi did not arise spontaneously. Instead, it required labor by migrant workers whose conditions of exploitation are well documented. (In fact, Gulf Labor has already commented on this all too obvious evasion: CLICK )
Still, one thing especially vexed the museum. A man with a black porkpie hat, blowing a large bass horn, and wearing a hand-lettered cloak that read: Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Evil-Empire of Art. The egregious phrase was hand-lettered onto a rectangle of canvas and hung like a thespian’s cape off the shoulders of performance artist Jim Costanzo, founder of the Aaron Burr Society. The paint-stiffened cloak declaimed its scalding indictment on a breezeless torrid day -although in Abu Dhabi the heat reached 41c, another five to six degrees hotter still than Venice- and it did not go unnoticed.
Along with the Precarious Workers Pageant, Costanzo’s theatrics belong to a long tradition of political satire whose practitioners include Honoré Daumier, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, Hanns Eisler, Lotte Leyna, Dario Fo, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Carnival Knowledge (the 1980s feminist group), Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, Occupy Museums and Pussy Riot. Against the extensive communicational power of mainstream media and established cultural institutions a certain DIY vernacular aesthetic has often been the preferred artistic weapon of the weak, the marginal, and the precarious.
Costanzo’s videos, performances and agitprop projects have often channeled this bottom-up energy, sometimes projecting into the public sphere a state of anger so raw it makes one flinch as in his 2003 piece “The Scream: 21st Century Edition.” Created in the lead-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq and made all the more unfathomable by the unprecedented global demonstrations against such aggression by the United States you can see his video here: CLICK
Years later, he founded the “Aaron Burr Society,” a “mockstitution” whose nom de guerre honors the former US Vice President who railed against the establishment of a centralized banking system. This time Costanzo donned an archaic looking cape and topcoat, trained it down to Wall Street carrying a large, almost obscene sounding baritone trumpet with him (an instrument that he is still struggling to play “properly”) all in an effort to register his personal outrage over the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent welfare bailout for the world’s top bankers. CLICK
And so, through the steamy streets of Venice Costanzo blew his horn, clearing the way for members of Workers Art Coalition including Barrie Cline, Stephanie Lawal, Eliza Gagnon, Marquis Jenkins, Mirana Zuger and fellow participants from Gulf Labor, G.U.L.F., S.a.L.E. Docs and Social Practice Queens, as the Precarious Workers ostentatious and communal act of institutional critique called upon the planners of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to reconsider branding a regime whose abuse of migrant labor is as egregious as it is flagrant. Costanzo’s accusatory cloak was rhetorically embellished, for a reason. Against the extensive reach of mainstream cultural, political and media institutions the surplus army of precarious artists gleefully turns to the carnivalesque, spitting out an often vulgar aesthetics of the street, the circus, or fiesta in order to have their voices heard above the patronizing tones of proper cultural decorousness. Such ribald insurgency has its own dark strengths, even in an age of top-down, empire culture.
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/gulf_labor_0.jpg253450Jeff Kasperhttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJeff Kasper2015-10-04 17:39:092015-11-04 22:02:20Precarious Workers Pageant in Venice!
Here are a few images of the collaborative work of SPQ students and alumns Seth Aylmer, Gina Minielli, and Scott Braun, from the March 21, 2015 opening reception for the Queens Museum’s studio program.
The trio have collaborated to create a non-denominational, communally-occupied sacred space in the “triangle area” of the Queens Museum. With Aylmer a video artist, painter, and sculptor; Braun a sculptural furniture-maker; and Minielli an established photographer, each participant has a separate practice which contributes to the larger work.
The Sacred Spaces design/build crew consists of Jeff Gagnon, Ben Berton, Larry Healy, Alejandro Velazquez, and Claudio Stalling.
Photos: Steven P.Harris 2015
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/unnamed-6.jpg15841584Josehttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJose2015-03-23 17:36:402015-11-04 22:01:06‘Sacred Space – Triangle’ debuts as part of Queens Museum exhibition
https://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10367152_874568322588094_984538940597511475_n1.jpg640960Josehttps://www.socialpracticequeens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/spq-logo2.pngJose2015-01-27 21:02:192015-11-04 22:01:15Mariam Ghani speaking at Queens College
