Designed by artists Melanie Crean and Claire Picher, the Building Better Speech workshops investigate how issues of identity and power can be communicated as a form of text, either through the body’s gestures, or through network-based collective action. Building Better Speech workshops make use of performance, games, and open education models to collaboratively facilitate dialogue around issues defined by groups affected by political transformation and upheaval.

In the pilot iteration of Building Better Speech, a workshop has been designed with a group of female high school students from Turning Point for Women and Families, a Queens-based organization that supports Muslim American families dealing with issues of domestic violence. Over the course of the workshop, the young women first identify and then explore issues of faith and stereotypes through automatic writing assignments, serigraphy, theatrical games, reflection, and discussion. These various methods are a means of improving communication within groups and building ties to allies, as well as promoting mutual understanding. Physical and visual approaches to communication augment the spoken word to help overcome the greatest obstacle to communicating: the challenge of being heard.

On the occasion of Performa 11, and hosted by the Performa Institute, Crean, Picher and the young women of Turning Point for Women and Families will conduct an open workshop, inviting the public to explore issues of stereotyping and identity in a shared session of collective performance games.

The project is developed in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, and presented as part of the Performa Institute, a research and educational initiative of Performa 11.

Posted on November 7, 2011

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks at The New School series examines the transformative potential of sculpture and its ability to reach beyond the material presence of an object’s physical form. Inspired by the influence of conceptual art on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

The second speaker of the series is Alaska-based, Italian artist Paola Pivi. Her installations, sculpture, performances, and photographs create astonishing and enigmatic associations and visual relationships that expand our understanding of the experience of contemporary art. Bringing together surprising references from our everyday world, Pivi has orchestrated such unexpected scenarios as a gallery petting zoo, a transport truck flipped on the side of a road, 100 Chinese people gathered in a gallery, and a leopard traversing a gallery filled with cups of cappuccino. Likened to an “experiential playground”, her work ultimately subverts expectation with the unanticipated. Pivi’s artistic practice challenges our mode of engagement by presenting the inconceivable as real.

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Born in Milan, Paola Pivi has exhibited widely across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United States. She was the recipient of the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennial. Her work has been presented at Manifesta, and the Berlin Biennial. Pivi has also exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MACRO, Rome; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Portikus, Frankfurt; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Tate Modern, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Massachusset College of Art, Boston; Brown University, Providence; Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; P.S.1 MoMA, and White Columns, New York. She is represented by Massimo De Carlo, Milan and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on September 28, 2011

Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Sheila C. Johnson Center for Design at Parsons celebrate the 99th Annual Conference of the College Art Association, with a reception and workshop featuring the artistic entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture is both a book launch for Gregory Sholette’s new work of the same title, and a concrete application of the principles laid out in the book. The book argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate and thrive in the non-commercial sector. It examines the political economy of art and business by highlighting interventionist and collective art as the ‘dark matter’ of the art world. This dark matter is indispensable to the survival of mainstream culture which it frequently opposes.

Two projects are lifted from the book’s pages and installed installed in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center lobby for passerby to participate.

Boston-based artist Cat Mazza offers a craftivism workshop, based on the work of her organization MicroRevolt. MicroRevolt projects investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor.

New York-based artist Jim Costanzo calls for the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion: A Distillation of American Spirit. The original Whiskey Rebellion was a tax protest in Pennsylvania in the 1790s, during the presidency of George Washington. The conflict was rooted in western dissatisfaction with a 1791 excise tax on whiskey. The tax was a part of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program to centralize and fund the national debt. Costanzo is acting on behalf of the Aaron Burr Society which has begun to distill whiskey without a license, in an act of flagrant civil disobedience.

Posted on January 26, 2011

From South Africa, via London, comes Warhorse, the hugely successful theater and puppetry collaboration between Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company and the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. Warhorse is based on the celebrated novel by British writer Michael Morpurgo. Set in World War I, the novel speaks of the immense slaughter of soldiers on all sides told from the perspective of an English farm horse. It will open at Lincoln Center on April 14, 2011.

On the eve of the opening, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, founders of Handspring Puppet Company and winners of Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for this piece, converse with South African-born poet, author and scholar Yvette Christiansë and puppeteer Dan Hurlin. They focus on puppetry as a contemporary medium of communication and advocacy, and look at The Object as Verb, Movement as Thought and The Authorial Audience.

Come hear writer, curator and scholar Jane Taylor speak on Tuesday April 12, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at Cabinet. Taylor has worked with Handspring in developing two major works: the script for Ubu and the Truth Commission and the libretto for The Confessions of Zeno.

The extraordinary success of Warhorse has drawn attention to Handspring’s decades-long experiments and innovations in the art of puppetry and their remarkable contribution to theater in South Africa. Founded in 1981 by Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler, Jill Joubert and Jon Weinberg, the company has produced eleven plays and two operas, often directly addressing pressing political concerns such as the proceedings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They have collaborated with many artists including Mali’s Sogolon Puppet Troupe and South African artist William Kentridge, and have appeared in over two hundred venues in South Africa and abroad.

The event is co-sponsored by the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design.

Posted on December 10, 2010

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks series presents three artists who all transform the conventional lecture into a unique work of art. These hybrid performance-lectures provide a window into each artist’s practice and present viewers with a new way of experiencing their art. Using live video and dialogue, Pawel Althamer creates a live sculpture workshop with the audience, extending the collaborative approach that has defined much of his work. Born in 1967 in Warsaw, Poland, Pawel Althamer graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, where he studied in the Department of Sculpture. In 2004, he received the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His recent solo exhibitions include Pawel Althamer und Andere, Secession, Vienna (2009); One of Many, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2007); Black Market, neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2007); and Au Centre Pompidou, Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006). Recent group exhibitions include 8^th Gwangju Biennale, 10,000 Lives, Gwangju (2010); The Science of Imagination, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2010); Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010); and The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Spaces, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2008). He is represented by the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Pawel Althamer currently lives and works in Warsaw.

Posted on October 21, 2010

Vogue’ology contains seemingly incompatible elements: aesthetic experience and political activism; community events and forensic research; public manifestations and private workshops. The exhibition is a joint project between the Ballroom Archive & Oral History Project and the sound art collective Ultra-red. Central to the collaboration is a shared interest in developing terms that can serve to organize the Ballroom Archive, a community-initiated effort to gather histories of the House|Ballroom scene.

The House|Ballroom scene emerged in New York City in the first half of the last century and is today found in cities across the United States. Members of the scene have organized themselves into houses, such as the House of Ebony, the House of Evisu, and the House of Garçon, which function as intentional communities and artistic collectives. Houses sponsor Balls: large events at which members compete in multiple performance categories. For generations of transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay primarily Latino and African American men and women, the Balls have provoked radical explorations of style, identity and social inequality. Vogue, the community’s signature performance form originally inspired by poses in Vogue magazine, enacts an analysis of normative gender, class and racial identities.

Rather than exhibiting the archive or attempting to represent the House|Ballroom scene itself, Vogue’ology investigates the processes and goals of archiving as they pertain to the specific characteristics and conditions of the House|Ballroom scene. Its structure and aesthetic elements amplify the resonances between the vocabularies of both archive and Balls, particularly their common interest in protocol, category, disassembly, and recombination.

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

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The exhibition is accompanied by a series of free public programs:

EXHIBITION OPENING CELEBRATION
Thursday, November 18, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m

PANEL DISCUSSION
Organized Listening: Sound Art, Collectivity and Politics
Thursday, November 18, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Participants include Edgar Riviera Colon and Rev. Jamaul Roots from Ballroom Ministries; human rights advocate and musician Karen Hakobian; artist Paige Sarlin of 16 Beaver; musician, writer and curator Alex Waterman of Plus Minus Ensemble and Either/Or Ensemble.

Facilitators: Dont Rhine and Robert Sember

LISTENING SESSIONS
Monday, November 29, 2010, 6:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Gallery visitors are encouraged to interact with the exhibition and share their responses in writing, at the gallery or via email (info@ultra-red.org). In addition, the artists are facilitating a public listening session in the gallery, to consider collectively the intersection of object and analysis, and to evaluate and debate the political consequences and possibilities of recording history.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Living the Fight: AIDS Activism
Tuesday, November 30, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
The New School, Michael Klein Room
66 West 12th Street, 5th floor

With Lolisa Gibson, Johnny Guaylupo, Charles Long, and Pedro Julio Serrano

Sponsored by Health Education, Global Studies, Department of Natural Sciences and Math/ Interdisciplinary Science at Lang, Campus Queer Collective, Parsons Diversity Initiative, Lang’s Ethnicity and Race Program, Office of Intercultural Support, VDay@New School, The New You, Association for International Development, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

FILM SCREENING
Sex In An Epidemic
Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Screening of Jean Carlomusto’s award-winning film Sex In An Epidemic (2010), followed by a conversation with Arbert Santana Evisu, Kevin Trimell Jones, Black LGBT Archivists Society of Philadelphia, and Robert Sember

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