Vogue-ology contains elements which may seem incompatible: aesthetic experience and political activism; community events and forensic activities; public manifestations and private workshops. It is an exhibition presented at Parsons The New School for Design November 17 through 29, 2010, and highlights one of the least understood creative expressions – the dance form of Vogue – practiced usually by one of the most disenfranchised segments of American society, transgender and gay African-American and Latino men and women. Assertive and thriving, vogueing epitomizes the intersection of the personal and the political.

Inspired by poses in Vogue magazine, vogueing emerged in the early sixties and is now a performance genre most commonly associated with the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” directed by Jennie Livingston or Madonna’s song and video “Vogue” of the same year. Still largely performed by the artistic and social LGBT house/ballroom community in tightly scripted competitions, vogueing enacts class, gender and racial identities. Stylistic shifts register the community’s ongoing social analysis and history of struggle.

Reflective of the curatorial triumvirate at its helm – a member of the house/ballroom scene, a curator and an artist – the exhibition is an aesthetic experience as well as a study of methodologies, in particular participatory, sound-based strategies. Through analysis and codification of vogueing, the show will guide the development of a house/ballroom archive and an advocacy and community service organization.

Curators:

Arbert Santana Evisu, member of House of Evisu
Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Robert Sember, member of Ultra-red sound art collective, Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellow

Posted on June 8, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA). The company performs an excerpt from their new play, THE GOLDEN VEIL, followed by a discussion about their practice.

Written by company member Normandy Sherwood and created collaboratively by the ensemble, THE GOLDEN VEIL is what NTUSA refers to as “cautionary entertainment.” A distillation of the company’s design aesthetic and their re-writing of the history of American entertainment, it is a three-person play performed on an entirely hand-crafted, collapsible set. The play explores the picaresque narrative in the tradition of Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. At the same time, it illuminates how teller and circumstances of telling shape the stories and myths we share as Americans.

Recently awarded the 2007 Spalding Gray Award honoring innovative theatrical vision, NTUSA is an ensemble theater company that democratically creates new works for traditional and non-traditional spaces. In the past seven years, their focus on theatrical environment has been matched by a devotion to the exploration of American history and the history of American entertainment. NTUSA’s theatrical creations are intensely visual and densely layered spectacles which are laced with the questions and arguments they bring to the exploration of each subject. This multiplicity of image and argument invites a complicit audience to engage with each piece as an active participant.

Posted on March 22, 2010

“The idea of monument and death
is the ultimate raw material of art.”

– Huma Bhabha

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The second speaker in the series is Huma Bhabha. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Bhabha  (b. 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, lives in Poughkeepsie) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1985), and her MFA from Columbia University, New York (1989). In 2008, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.  She has had solo exhibitions at Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France, 2009; and Salon 94, New York, NY, 2007.  Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY, 2009; and After-Nature, The New Museum, New York, NY, 2008. Bhabha is represented by Salon 94, New York.

Posted on March 11, 2010

“Our generation sees modernist
art through the lens of pop culture,
not the other way around.”

– Thomas Houseago

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The last speaker in the series is Thomas Houseago. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Houseago (b. 1972 in Leeds, England, lives in Los Angeles) studied at Jacob Kramer Foundation College, Leeds (1991) and got his BA from St. Martin’s School of Art, London (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Thomas Houseago, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2009; Thomas Houseago: Ode, Galleria Zero, Milan, 2009; Herald St, London, 2008. He has also participated in group shows including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Beg Borrow and Steal, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, 2009; and Construct and Dissolve, Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, 2009. Houseago is represented by Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

Posted on March 11, 2010

“It’s interesting to see how
inanimate the figure can be, how
figurative art dies, how it scars,
how it shatters into mere things,
how it turns to dust…”

– Matthew Monahan

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The first speaker of the series is Matthew Monahan. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Monahan (b. 1972 in Eureka, California, lives in Los Angeles) received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Modern Art, London, 2009; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2008; Focus: Matthew Monahan, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. He has participated in group exhibitions including: Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 2008; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York, 2007; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006. Monahan is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Posted on March 9, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Aleksandra Wagner. Grounded in her memory of a purchase of A Thousand and One Nights in the Serbian translation by Stanislav Vinaver, Wagner chooses the shortest month of a year, February, to tell stories about the acts of storytelling in education and in psychoanalysis. One story a night, one page each, shared on the night of March 3.

Aleksandra Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bachelor’s Program, The New School for General Studies, and a Member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Wagner is the editor of our recent publication Considering Forgiveness.

Posted on January 27, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Pablo Helguera. Providing an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Helguera digs out little-known stories around the remarkable curators and other colorful figures of its past, while at the same time reflecting on the social role of individuals in museums and the way in which they influence the reading of objects and the larger narratives of collections.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.

Posted on January 27, 2010

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, the Vera List Center is pleased to announce a colloquium exploring artists’ participation in–and reconstruction of–documentary processes to illuminate new perspectives on historical events. The colloquium, organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), will be held Saturday, January 30 and includes artists Steve Mumford and Liisa Roberts as well as curators Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell with moderator Kate Fowle, Executive Director of ICI.

Please note: this event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. Please RSVP to Chelsea Haines, Public Programs Manager at 212-254-8200.

The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics will also present a number of public programs, including discussions with Pablo Helguera and Aleksandra Wagner on the role of storytelling in their practice, and a series of screenings of featured works. The events are sponsored by the Vera List Center and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design in collaboration with ICI, the organizer of the exhibition.

Posted on December 10, 2009

In this re-visitation of John Cage’s 1961 sound work WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING?, sounds of The New School, sampled from recordings collected across campus, are re-configured through processes involving various methods of chance and randomization. Cage was first asked to respond to the questions in the title when he addressed art students at the evening school of Pratt Institute. He has also described the resulting piece as emerging from conversations with friends about the mutually influential relationship between art, science and nature.

Echoing the structural elements of Cage’s original piece, this response to the questions “where are we going and what are we doing? ” draws on site recordings made during sound walks through The New School. These recordings are superimposed on each other using chance procedures and amplified as a two-channel composition onto the street around The New School’s main building.  The live ambient sounds function as the performer does in Cage’s work. While drawing attention to ongoing shifts in time they also encourage attention to and reflection on the conditions that produce those shifts–conditions that may themselves, be shifted.

When no events are taking place in the gallery and Parts & Labor lies inactive and mute, these recordings will emanate  from the vicinity of the truck, evocative of the institution and the activities around it.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on October 7, 2009

On September 15, in conjunction with the North American debut of the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive, Art in General and the Vera List Center co-hosted a conversation between Galit Eilat, founder of the archive and director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, and Ramallah-based curator and art historian Reem Fadda.

In the context of a discussion of issues ranging from art and civil disobedience to the politics of popular contemporary exhibition formats like the archive or the tour, Eilat and Fadda discussed Liminal Spaces, a long-term project examining the possibility of joint action in light of the ever-growing existential hardship of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Video works that were produced during this project will be on view at Art in General from September 24 to October 17, 2009, as part of the Mobile Archive, a cross-national library of video art. For more information:

Posted on September 20, 2009