INVITATION TO BYO
(Bring Your Own: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center)
BYO fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening conversations.
"WATCHING MY STORIES": A DISCUSS OF BLACKNESS,
QUEERNESS AND VIDEO ART
March 18, 2009
7pm
Sert Space
Carpenter Center, 3rd Floor
An informal discussion on representing blackness
in a post "Shirley Q. Liquor" world
with Kalup Linzy and Tavia Nyong'o
A key figure in a new generation of "queer video artists," Kalup Linzy satirizes almost every cultural scene, high to low, in video pastiches written, directed, performed, edited and overdubbed by himself (perhaps most famously All My Churen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Mlehmn8cI.) The work deconstructs identity markers and brings Southern, queer and transgendered subcultures into the frame. Tavia Nyong'o, an assistant professor of performance studies at New York University, poses a challenge to prevailing narratives regarding the historical formation of blackness and queerness by newly reading early nineteenth-century cultural performances of gender and sexuality as preparation for the highly politicized "postracial" nation to come. In this conversation for BYO, each will present recent projects - Linzy's Melody Set me Free (2007) and Keys To Our Heart (2008) and Nyong'o's reading of masochism, music, and queer performance in Linzy's work - while assessing the medium of recorded performance, particularly its potential to expose the connections between, race, class, sex, and popular culture.
Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. Born in Stuckey, Florida, he received his MFA from the University of South Florida in 2003. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007 and in 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum and is collected by major museums including MOMA. Most recently he showed in Prospect 1 in New Orleans, at Art Basel Miami, and received a grant from Art Matters to support a European tour of a new album/project with original music, spoken word and performance.
http://www.kaluplinzy.net/
Tavia Nyong'o is assistant professor of performance studies at New York University, where he teaches courses in black and queer art, cultural history, and performance. He is a frequent invited speaker locally and internationally in both academic and museum settings. He has published essays and reviews in Social Text, The Nation, Yale Journal of Criticism, Women and Performance, TDR, and Radical History Review. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz, will be released by the University of Minnesota Press in 2009.
http://performance.tisch.nyu.edu/object/NyongoT.html
This event is co-sponsored with Harvard University's Department of African and African American Studies and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
HOW TO WIN:
With Steven Duncombe and Steven Lambert
December 10, 2008
7:00 p.m.
Sert Space
Carpenter Center, 3rd Floor
Q: As a political artist, how can you know when you have been successful?
--Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert
A: I've been asked that question many times, and that question requires one to go around it before one really avoids it.
--Hans Haacke
BYO: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center is pleased to host a discussion with artist Steve Lambert and theorist/critic Stephen Duncombe about their work-in-progress, "How to Win," which is part of their ongoing interrogation of the terms and conditions of activism, efficacy, and social and political change in contemporary art. Consisting of interviews with approximately 40 mid-career artists in both the visual and performing arts, this project is currently assembled into a dynamic website, and will result in a book that will explore how contemporary artists conceptualize their work's success-its efficacy in bringing about real-world change through artistic practices. Is art effective in bringing about change? How is it most effective? What constitutes efficacy? And how does one know if the art has or has not been effective?
Project Blog: http://howtowin.visitsteve.com/
PARTICIPANTS
Stephen Duncombe is an associate professor at New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media and culture. He is the author of "Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy" and "Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture," as well the editor of the "Cultural Resistance Reader." Duncombe also writes widely on culture and politics for a number of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral Nation to the more prurient Playboy. He is a lifelong political activist, a co-founder of the community activist group The Lower East Side Collective, and a key organizer for the New York City chapter of the international direct-action group Reclaim the Streets. He is currently working on three projects: 1) a book on propaganda and persuasion during the New Deal, 2) an anthology on punk rock and the politics of race and 3) an ongoing exploration of the efficacy of political art (with Steve Lambert). He lives in New York City.
Dream: http://www.dreampolitik.com/
Village Voice profile: http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-02-20/books/use-your-illusion/
Steve Lambert is currently in the news for his role in the distribution of a hoax edition of the New York Times in cities around the country. A Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, Lambert teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. Despite never graduating from high school, Steve went on to study sociology, film, and music before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a Master of Fine Arts degree at UC Davis in 2006. He founded the Budget Gallery, an outdoor guerilla art gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. Steve has worked as a furniture installer, radio host, record store clerk, ballet dancer, parking lot attendant, Winnie the Pooh at kid's parties, mystery shopper, undercover store investigator, theater house manager, delivery truck driver, national dealer representative, upright bass player in country western band, high school teacher, landscaper, and lecturer among other things. He currently claims artist and professor on his taxes. Steve's projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and others. His work has been shown nationally in cities like Detroit, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as internationally in Havana, Canada, Barcelona, and Rotterdam. He has been banned for life from the El Dorado Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, ArtNews, and Newsweek.
Steve's website: http://visitsteve.com/
New York Times hoax paper: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/pranksters-spoof-the-times/?scp=1-b&sq=new+york+times+hoax&st=nyt
BYO is supported by the Provostial Funds Committee of the Office of the Dean for the Arts and Humanities.
MAKING CRAFT MATTER: FEMINISM AND POLITICS IN HANDMADE ART
October 22, 2008
7PM
Sert Space
Carpenter Center, 3rd Floor
An Informal Discussion on the Politics of the Handmade with Julia Bryan-Wilson, Liz Collins, Sabrina Gschwandtner and Cat Mazza
PARTICIPANTS
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the director of the PhD program in visual studies at the University of California, Irvine and assistant professor of contemporary art history. She has taught previously at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was awarded the John Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Foundation and the O'Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism. Bryan-Wilson was an inaugural winner of the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in the Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art US, Art Journal, Bookforum, Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Frieze, and Modern Painters. Her current project examines the feminist, queer, and activist potential of handmade, craft-based art since 1970."Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond's Floorpieces" is forthcoming in the March issue of the Journal of Modern Craft. Her book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, which focuses on questions of collectivity and artistic labor in the late 1960s and 1970s, will be published in 2009 by the University of California Press. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley.
Liz Collins is an artist and designer, recognized internationally for her use of machine knitting to create ground breaking clothing, textiles, and installations. After five years as an independent designer of ready-to-wear collections in New York, in the fall of 2003 Collins returned to her alma mater, Rhode Island School of Design (BFA’91/ MFA’99), as an assistant professor in the Textile Department. In addition to teaching, Collins currently designs knitwear and collaborates with other designers, producing signature knit pieces and collections for them. In the spring of 2005, a new facet of Collins’ work emerged: a series of performance-based installations called KNITTING NATION, that employ uniformed machine knitters to create a multi-sensory experience that examines the relationship of humans to manufacturing and the process of machine knitting. Collins is a 2006 United States Artists Target Fellow in Crafts and Traditional Arts and a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Her work was included in the celebrated exhibition Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2007, Evolution/Revolution at the RISD Museum of Art in 2008, and can be seen the books Fashioning Fabrics, by Sandy Black and Elyssa da Cruz, Knitknit: Presenting 27 Innovative Knitters and Their Projects, by Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Designing a Knitwear Collection: From Inspiration to Finished Garment, by Lisa Donofrio and Marylin Heffernen.
Sabrina Gschwandtner is a New York City-based artist who works with a range of photographic and textile mediums including: Super 8 film; digital video; 35 mm slides; sewing; crochet; knitting; and embroidery. She received her BA in art/semiotics from Brown University and an MFA from Bard College. Her artwork has been exhibited at various international museums and galleries such as the Fleming Museum, Vermont and the Museum of Arts & Design, New York. She is the founder of KnitKnit, a limited edition art journal published in seven editions to date and included in the permanent collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has curated exhibitions and events around themes explored in the publication, including "The Handmade Goes Digital," a screening at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY and The Workmanship of Risk, an art exhibition at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY. Sabrina's book KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting's New Wave was published by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang in 2007. She has written articles, reviews, and essays for the Journal of Modern Craft, Selvedge, American Craft and Cabinet, among many other publications.
Cat Mazza is the creator of microRevolt, a web-based practice that engages new media audiences, labor activists, and craft hobbyists. A 2008 Creative Capital grantee and a 2007 Rockefeller Re:New Media Arts Fellow, Mazza has exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, Garanti Gallery in Istanbul, Turkey, and Arte & Arte in Como, Italy and received a Digital Communities award in 2005 Ars Electronica. Mazza was a founding member of Eyebeam, an art and technology center in New York City, from 1999 to 2002. She received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Mazza is currently assistant professor of art at UMass, Boston.