How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins: PAN de YUCA

EFA Project Space presents How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins: PAN de YUCA by the artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. Employing a traditional, South American Pan de Yuca bread as raw building materials, Skvirsky’s live participatory performance doubles as a community action, with the audience assisting in the building of an ephemeral Incan border wall within EFA Project Space.

The performance is preceded by a screening that introduces Incan construction techniques. How to Build a Wall... links popular narratives concerning the persistence of pre-Columbian identity with current discussions on borders, immigration, and nation states. A Q&A with the artist and reception will follow the performance. Admission is free and first-come, first-served.

How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins: Pan de Yuca is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement (LMCC), supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Pan de Yuca for this performance is provided by by La Nueva Bakery (Jackson Heights, Queens).

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and early arrival is recommended.

About the Artist

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. Skvirsky became interested in photography at a young age discovering her identity by organizing her parents’ photo album. As an artist, Skvirsky excels at telling stories through images, static or moving, often using performance to ground them. Her video, The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios and series of images, The Railroad Workers, draw parallels between a teenage girl’s journey through the mountains of Ecuador, and the indigenous and Jamaican workers who constructed one of the most dangerous stretches of railway in the world. The project premiered at the 2016 Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) curated by Dan Cameron.  

In 2010 she participated in There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), where she exhibited work from her project, Memories of Development. 

Skvirsky's work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows including: Centro de la imagen, DF, MX (2018), Centro de arte contemporaneo Quito, EC (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, NY (2018), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2017), Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid, SP (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016), Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, NY, NY (2014), DPM Gallery, Guayaquil, Ecuador (2014), Instituto Cervantes, Rome, Italy (2013), The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2013), Stephan Stoyanov Gallery,  NY, NY (2013), La Ex-Culpable, Lima, Peru (2010), Scaramouche Art, NY, NY (2010), Galeria Proceso, Cuenca, Ecuador (2009), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT (2007), El museo del barrio, NY, NY (2006), Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY, NY (2006), Jessica Murray Projects, NY, NY (2006), Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY (2006) and others.   

She has received grants from: Creative Capital (2019), The National Association of Latino Arts & Culture (NALAC), San Antonio, TX (2018), Fulbright Scholar Program (2015), The Jerome Foundation (2015), The New Jersey State Council in the Arts in photography (2015), The New York State Council on the Arts, Film and Electronic Arts, NY (2010), Urban Artist Initiative, NY, NY (2006), Puffin Foundation, Teaneck, NJ (2006) and others.  

She has participated in the following artist in residence programs including: Office Hours, El museo del barrio, NY, NY (2015), The Laundromat Project, NY, NY (2011), MacDowell Artist in Residence Program, Peterborough, NH (2005 & 2010), Cuts and Burns Residency, Outpost, Artist in Residence Program, Brooklyn, NY (2008), Harvestworks New Work Residency, NY, NY (2006), Swing Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY, NY (2005), Institute of Electronic Arts Residency, Alfred University, Alfred, NY (2005), Center for Book Arts, Artist in Residence, NY, NY (2005), Smack Mellon Artist in Residence, Brooklyn, NY (2004), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Workspace, Woolworth Building, NY, NY (2003), Cyberart Residency, Longwood Arts Project, Bronx, NY (2003) and others.

Skvirsky is represented by Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid and is a member of the EFA Studio Program.

Soft and Wet Publication Launch & Conversation
featuring Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, Judy Blum Reddy, and Sadia Shirazi

Please join us at EFA for the closing event and launch of Soft and Wet, a publication reflecting on the exhibition of the same title curated by Sadia Shirazi. The evening will feature readings of excerpts from the Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States (1980) catalog by Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, and Judy Blum Reddy. The curator will read excerpts from the newly commissioned texts for the publication it accompanies, followed by a conversation with the speakers about “Third World Women Artists” in the 1970s and 80s and the linkages with Soft and Wet.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and early arrival is recommended

RSVP here.

About the Participants

Kazuko Miyamoto is a preeminent feminist figure of minimalism, and a pioneer of a new and radically warm brand of rigorous abstraction, introducing handmade, irregular, and intimate elements that both modulated the movement’s unforgiving visual language and advanced it, by critique. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Miyamoto moved to New York in 1964, studied at the Arts Student League, and assisted Sol LeWitt, she helped produce and execute his open cube sculptures and early wall drawings. Miyamoto’s work has shown in numerous institutions and galleries, both domestically and internationally, including Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria; Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, New York; A.I.R. Gallery, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary, New York; among many others, and is represented by Exile Gallery, Berlin.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979). In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she is now a full professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York), Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2014), and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2015).

Pindell often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. She cuts canvases in strips and sews them back together, building up surfaces in elaborate stages. She paints or draws on sheets of paper, punches out dots from the paper using a paper hole punch, drops the dots onto her canvas, and finally squeegees paint through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had punched the dots. Almost invariably, her paintings are installed unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few finishing nails. The artist’s fascination with gridded, serialized imagery, along with surface texture appears throughout her oeuvre. Even in her later, more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses in order to address social issues of homelessness, AIDs, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.

Judy Blum Reddy lives and works in New York. Blum received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. Most recently she has exhibited at CCS Bard, 2019; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2015; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2016; Villa Vassilief, Paris, 2016; Dak'Art Biennale of African Contemporary Art, Senegal, 2016; Station Independent Project, New York, 2015; 33 Orchard, New York, 2016; FIAC, Paris, 2016; Clark House Initiative, Bombay, 2014-16; Asian Cultural Centre, Gwangju Biennale, 2016; and Art Dubai, 2015. Reddy's work is included in public collections at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Fond National d'Art Contemporain and Centre National d'Art de Grenoble, France.

Sadia Shirazi is a writer, art historian, curator and sometimes architect based in New York. Her reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, MoMA post, C Magazine, The Funambulist, Jadaliyya and ArteEast and she has written monographic essays on Zarina and Jessica Vaughn. Shirazi has curated exhibitions internationally including Three days in the desert at the Lower East Side Printshop (2018), welcome to what we took from is the state at the Queens Museum (2016), and 230 MB/Exhibition Without Objects at Khoj Artists’s Association in Delhi (2013). Her work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Performance Space New York and the Devi Art Foundation. Shirazi holds a MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from the University of Chicago. She is the Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP), teaches at The New School and Cooper Union, and is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

This event is presented with support from ICI and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, with special thanks to A.I.R. Gallery.

Independent Curators International (ICI) produces exhibitions, events, publications, research and training opportunities for curators and diverse audiences around the world. Established in 1975 and headquartered in New York, ICI is a hub that connects emerging and established curators, artists, and art spaces, forging international networks and generating new forms of collaboration.

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University was established in 1996 in response to student interest combined with the University’s commitment to global excellence. It provides a space in which research and public programs, with a focus on community and intercultural studies, are made accessible to faculty, students, and the New York community within a broad, rigorous international and comparative framework.

The A/P/A Institute at NYU produces programming, publications, exhibitions, new research, and a long-running artist-in-residence program, attracting leading academics and practitioners. The Institute's multiple archival collection initiatives have also continued to build a foundation of, and preservation and access to, important historical documents and previously overlooked materials for present and future researchers and students.

Located in Greenwich Village, the Institute serves the community highlighting research, cultural production, and scholarship on contemporary issues facing Asian/Pacific American communities, and provides a nexus for scholars, community leaders, and artists who are working on advancing scholarship in the field and bringing theory into practice.

During the event, an A/P/A representative will be present with copies of DIRECTIONS TO MY HOUSE by Zarina Hashmi with Sarah Burney for purchase. “Memory is the only lasting possession we have,” begins Zarina Hashmi, the A/P/A Institute at NYU’s 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence. In the pages that follow, the artist writes about her life for the first time—her family’s experience during the 1947 Partition of India, her long career as an artist, and the many cities that she has called home. The book includes never-published material, and chronicles the artist’s travels and life around the world through a collection of essays, poems, artworks, and personal photographs. More information on the publication can be found here.

With over 40 contributors from around the world, this issue of the On Curating journal wrestles with “forgetting”, “seeing”, “collecting” and “making” AIDS related culture in the 21st century, and the growing impulse to historize aspects of early responses to the crisis. Through academic essays, conversations, visual projects, reprints and personal reflections, a reader will be exposed to ideas, theories, images, and advice from artists, academics, activists, curators, writers and others around the ethics and practices of curating AIDS-related culture within the ongoing epidemic.

Edited by writer, organizer and educator Theodore (ted) Kerr, WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT AIDS COULD FILL A MUSEUM is an important contribution to the vital conversation about HIV/AIDS-related culture that both centers the role of museums as sites for community, knowledge sharing, inspiration and healing, while also exploring their limits and future possibilities.

At this event, NYC based contributors will share their work, and engage in conversation with each other and guests. Free. All are welcome. Please RSVP here .

Note: This event will be held in the EFA Center Conference Room on the 3rd floor.

Image Credit: On Curating Issue #42 cover
Untitled (Politicians), Chloe Dzubilo, 2010
Letter coloring by Volker Schartner
Thank you T DeLong and Visual AIDS

Join us for a curatorial walkthrough and opening reception for our exhibition Soft and Wet, curated by Sadia Shirazi. The walkthrough will start promptly at 5pm with the reception to follow. Light refreshments will be served.

Image Credit: Ana Mendieta, Corazón de Roca con Sangre, 1975, Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent, Running time: 3:14 minutes © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

EFA Project Space welcomes you to join us for the Opening Reception for Museum Without Building, a project by Yona Friedman. This exhibition is a production of EFA Project Space in collaboration with CNEAI= and Le Petit Versailles. The organizers and some artists will be present with drinks and light refreshments served.

Join EFA Project Space and our 2018/2019 SHIFT Residents as we celebrate the end of their exhibition Temporary Island and the release of the concurrent publication. Artists will be present to talk about their work and the publication will be available for a small donation. Light refreshments will be served.

DOWNLOAD THE PUBLICATION HERE

FAMILIES & ACCESSIBILITY
EFA Project Space is committed to nurturing an intergenerational environment and we encourage 'kid noise' at our events. Please notify us of any accessibility needs by Facebook Messenger, email projectspace@efanyc.org, or give us a call at (212) 563-5855 x 229.

Cover Image: No Man Is An Island, But This Queen Is, Matthew de Leon (SHIFT Resident), 2018-19.

Alicia Ehni, Game of Balance #3, 2017

SHIFT Residency addresses the unique work-life challenges facing a niche of artists who work over 35 hours per week in support of other artists (as arts administrators, curators, educators, and advocates), many of whom are caregivers. How can initiatives of the cultural sector (residencies, art education, exhibition and programming spaces) be re-tooled to better support and advocate for artists who are caregivers?

Join EFA Project Space's SHIFT Residents for a roundtable discussion on caregiver advocacy in the arts. Visitors are encouraged to actively participate during the roundtable and share thoughts or questions alongside guest respondents Juliana Driever, Alicia Ehni, Natalia Nakazawa, and Maya Valladares, who will co-moderate the discussion.

GUEST RESPONDENTS

Juliana Driever
Curator & Writer
Co-Curator of The Let Down Reflex (2016) at EFA Project Space, an exhibition that attempts to recognize the complexities of parenting in the art world, and asks if a better alternative for families can exist.

Alicia Ehni
SHIFT Resident
Program Officer, NYFA
www.aliciaehni.com

Natalia Nakazawa
Artist
Assistant Director, EFA Studios Program
www.natalianakazawa.com

Maya Valladares
SHIFT Resident
Associate Director, Sewing, Textiles & Soft Construction at Parsons Making Center
www.mayavalladares.com


FAMILIES & ACCESSIBILITY
EFA Project Space is committed to nurturing an intergenerational environment and we encourage 'kid noise' at our events. An audio recording of the talk will be available for those who will not attend an early evening event upon request. Please notify us of any accessibility needs by Facebook Messenger, email projectspace@efanyc.org, or give us a call at (212) 563-5855 x 229.

On the last day of In the Presence of Absence, we will mark its passing with a series of readings on the themes of grief and loss.

Writers and artists Raha Behnam, Erica Cardwell, TR Ericsson, Michelle García, Diane Mehta, and curator Jillian Steinhauer will share original work on grief and loss.

The event will also celebrate the release of the exhibition’s accompanying publication, designed by Partner & Partners, with essays by Michelle García, Jessica Lynne, and Jillian Steinhauer.

As at a wake or a shiva call, there will be refreshments and a chance to mingle and reflect.  Please join us.

About the Readers:

Raha Behnam is an Iranian-born, Canadian-raised, US-based artist; a first-generation immigrant to occupied Indigenous land. She is the daughter of Iranian artists, Darab Behnam Shabahang and Mahvash Vatankhahi. Her current work investigates the breakages and absences in knowing in regards to culture, belonging, and connection, particularly around her Iranian lineage. Raha is concerned with systems and practices for collective healing, and engaged in liberation work through community-based counseling. Last year, Raha and collaborator Mollie Moorhead launched Heirloom, a zine containing reflections on cultural loss and healing by twelve contributors.

Her performance work has been presented at venues including Danspace Project, The Knockdown Center, and Performance Studies international 2017 conference. She is a member of the Future Historical Society, lead by Yazmany Arboleda - a collective that honors the legacy of Ft. Greene, Brooklyn residents; and also a member of the Undoing & Doing Collective, instigated by Lorene Bouboushian.

Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, culture critic, and radical educator based in New York. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is a 2015 LAMBDA Fellow in Nonfiction. Erica teaches in the English Department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) and a Social Justice capstone for the Gural Scholars Program at The New School. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Rewire, Contact Sheet 187: Light Work Annual, Green Mountains Review and elsewhere. Erica is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher Journal. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife Zhaleh and their turtle, Smiley Mousa. www.erica-cardwell.com

TR Ericsson’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad including those with Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Switzerland; Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery, NY, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels. Ericsson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Yale University Library (Special Collections) and the Progressive Art Collection as well numerous private collections.

“Crackle & Drag,” a ruthlessly honest, yet tender portrayal of his mother has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art and an award-winning monograph published by Yale University Press (2015), as well as a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art (2017).

Michelle García is a journalist and essayist. She is a current Soros Equality fellow and Dobie Paisano writer-in-residence. She is working on a book about borders. She is a frequent contributor to the Oxford American and Guernica. Her work has appeared in, Guardian, The New York Times, The Baffler and numerous other publications. She reported from the New York bureau of The Washington Post and she is a former Texas correspondent for Columbia Journalism Review. Member of Pen America. She is based in Texas and New York City and you can find her at www.michellegarciainc.com and on twitter at @pistoleraprod.

Diane Mehta’s debut poetry collection, Forest with Castanets, came out this March. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, and raised in Bombay and New Jersey, Mehta studied with Derek Walcott and Robert Pinsky in the nineties and has been an editor at PEN America’s Glossolalia, Guernica and A Public Space. Her book about writing poetry was published by Barnes & Noble books in 2005. She is finishing a historical novel set in 1946 India and a collection of essays. She lives in Brooklyn.

Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has appeared recently in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications. She won the 2014 Best Art Reporting Award from the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for her work at Hyperallergic, where she was formerly a senior editor. She writes mainly about art and politics, or the intersection of art and the world, but has been known to go on at length about cats, as in an essay commissioned for the 2015 book Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong (Coffee House Press). She received her master's in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU.

A panel discussion co-presented by Reimagine End of Life.

RSVP at our Eventbrite event.

While grief is a personal feeling, memorials are a key way in which our society collectively mourns. This panel discussion will consider the different forms that such public tributes can take and the politics of who gets to be commemorated. What new memorials are being created to fill out the landscape of a death-denying country dotted with Confederate statues? What future ones do we need? The four panelists, Anthony Goicolea, Melinda Hunt, Karla Rothstein, and Elizabeth Velazquez, have all experimented with what a memorial can be, bringing their creative energies to bear on an old practice. They will speak about their work and then engage in a conversation about who, what, and how we collectively remember. Moderated by Jillian Steinhauer.

Event Image:
DeathLAB: Democratizing Death, Perpetual Constellation sakura viewing, Tokyo.

Image courtesy of Columbia University GSAPP DeathLAB and LATENT Productions

Panelist Bios:

Anthony Goicolea is a New York based multi-disciplinary artist who established his career in the late 1990s with a series of provocative self-portraits. His work ranges from photography, sculpture, and video, to multi-layered paintings on Mylar and large-scale installations. His work is held in many public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Hirshorn Museum in D.C., the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; 21C Museum in Louisville KY, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in NY. He recently unveiled the LGBT Memorial in the located in the Hudson River Park at West 12th Street in NYC. 

Melinda Hunt is an interdisciplinary artist and founding director of the Hart Island Project. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (1985), film (200), and electronic art (2011). She received Canada Council Interarts Awards (2008, 2009, 2017, 2018) and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in 2017. She directed the development of Traveling Cloud Museum produce in collaboration with Studio AIRPORT and Inspire Innovation in the Netherlands. She has recently launched a creative initiative to recover the identities of AIDS victims buried on Hart Island.

Karla Rothstein is the founder and director of Columbia University’s DeathLAB, a cross-disciplinary research and design initiative housed at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation where she has taught design studios for twenty years. An 8-month solo exhibition in 2018-19 at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa Japan, DeathLAB: Democratizing Death, featured the lab’s research, design proposals, and interviews. Rothstein’s work at DeathLAB has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, Columbia’s Earth Institute, The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, The Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Art Omi, Kanazawa 21C, and Columbia GSAPP. Rothstein is a practicing architect, co-founder and design director at LATENT Productions. Current building projects include 25 units of affordable housing in Brooklyn NY, remediation of brownfield conditions and the revivification of a 9-acre, 240,000 SF former cotton-spinning campus in the Berkshires, and a meandering vertical urban oasis for a private client.

Elizabeth Velazquez creates mixed-media sculptural works, installations and rituals. Elizabeth currently lives in Queens, NY. She is one of the founding members of SEQAA (Southeast Queens Artist Alliance), whose current project, a mobile zine cart/mobile workshop space, received funding from a QCA grant. Ms. Velazquez was awarded a 6-month residency at Cigar Factory in LIC, culminating in a two-person show in that very unique space. Ms. Velazquez was a participating artist in Reimagine End of Life for which she created a ritual in memory of Rose Butler and those who remain buried below Washington Square Park. Elizabeth will be traveling to Jerusalem for the month of July as part of the apexart International Fellowship.

Join EFA Project Space for special evening hours for the current exhibition, In the Presence of Absence. Stop by to see the show and enjoy drinks, snacks, and casual conversation with the curator and some of the artists.

Todd Shalom will facilitate a participatory music event, "Good Grief." The evening will begin with participants listening to and playing pre-recorded songs that relate to grief as a way of sharing their stories with the group. The conversation will focus on the feelings that different songs evoke and flow from there, likely moving toward other themes. There's no pressure to participate nor is there any prep work to do beforehand. "Good Grief" presents an opportunity to practice intimate listening with people you've likely never met.

This event holds 8 people. To RSVP, please email: info@toddshalom.com

Todd Shalom is the founder and director of Elastic City, a nonprofit organization that produced over 200 participatory walks and events between 2010 and 2016. In collaboration with performance artist/director Niegel Smith, Todd conceives and stages interactive performances in public and private environments. Todd has been a faculty member at Pratt Institute and is currently teaching at the School of Visual Arts. His work has been presented by Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University GSAPP, Des Moines Art Center, The Invisible Dog, ISSUE Project Room, MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, P.S. 122, and Stanford University. Todd has been an artist-in-residence at Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Japan), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and SHIFT (EFA Project Space).

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho) will speak about his set of prints in the exhibition, "Dead Indian Stories," which are a response to the conditions of life for Indigenous peoples in the United States. The artist will discuss some of the many issues that Native people face today—including poverty, deficient educational opportunities, high rates of suicide, and lack of political representation—and how his artwork pays homage to the ongoing perseverance of Native nations.

RSVP Here via EventBrite.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap Of Birds is an artist and an advocate for Indigenous communities worldwide. His work includes multidisciplinary forms of public art messages, large-scale drawings, Neuf Series acrylic paintings, prints, works in glass, and monumental porcelain enamel on steel outdoor sculpture. While representing Indigenous communities, his art focuses first on social justice and on the personal freedom to live within the tribal circle as an expressive individual. Heap of Birds’ work was shown in the 2007 Venice Biennale and has been exhibited at some of the most renowned institutions in the world. In 2012, he was named a USA Ford Fellow and in 2014 was honored as a Distinguished Alumni from the University of Kansas. Now retired from teaching at the University of Oklahoma after 30 years of service, he continues to serve there as professor emeritus.

Opening Reception for In the Presence of Absence with a performance by ​Jaamil Olawale Kosoko - ​Chameleon (The EFA Installments).

Chameleon is a performance project created by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people. Using live feed and augmented reality media with complexity theory (the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments) as a choreographic device, this work explores how minoritarian communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests that archive personal freedom narratives as a way to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.

RSVP Here.

Curatorial walk-through for the exhibition In The Presence of Absence with curator Jillian Steinhauer.

RSVP Here.

A collective rehearsal, glowing capsules of intimacy. Our corrugated hunger will jump from the screen to the stage. Choreographed emojis and memes. Sad songs performed live to send later via text message. Do we live inside a miracle? 

Presented in partnership with Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.

About the presenter:

Amelia Bande is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer from Chile. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Storm King Arts Center, Tang Museum, MoMA Library, MIX NYC, Abrons Arts Center, Participant Inc., BOFFO Performance Festival, and more. She has been an artist in residence at WORM Filmwerkplaats, The Shandaken Project and Yaddo. She is co-editor of Critical Correspondence, an online publication of Movement Research. Her chapbook The Clothes We Wear was published by Belladonna in 2017.

Documentation video by Jason Hirata.

Collective Strategies for Reparative Care: A panel discussion with  OlaRonke Akinmowo (creator, The Free Black Women’s Library), Kevin Gotkin (artist, activist, and professor), Ted Kerr (writer and organizer, What Would an HIV Doula Do?), Lana Lin (filmmaker, scholar, author of Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer, 2017). A reception will follow the event. Presented in partnership with NYU Center for Disability Studies.

About the presenters:

OlaRonke Akinmowo is a Black feminist scholar, librarian and interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in collage, paper printmaking, and installation. She is also a set decorator, yoga teacher, and mom. Her work is informed by ritual, research, and identity. She aims to provide alternative contexts around race, gender and class, as well as examine the sacred aspects of history and culture. She sees life, nature and archives as necessary and sacred. In 2014 she birthed The Free Black Women’s Library, a public art project that centers and celebrates Black women writers, artists and activists. This biblio installation currently holds a collection of over one thousand books written by Black women, and features workshops, readings, performance, film screenings and critical conversation. It has been installed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCADA Museum, Weeksville Heritage Center, Concord Baptist Church, National Black Theater and Nurture Art Gallery. Ola is a recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from varying organizations including the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Awesome Foundation, Culture Push, The Laundromat Project and The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio. 

Kevin Gotkin’s work combines research, artistry, and activism. He studies forms of endurance and the ritualization of ableism in American culture. His current book project considers the histories of the telethon, danceathon, walkathon, and hackathon in the U.S. His previous research has been published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Video Ethnography, and Porn Studies. Kevin’s teaching interests include media studies methodologies, identity politics, disability theory, and media production. In 2015, he won the university-wide Penn Prize in Excellence in Graduate Teaching from the University of Pennsylvania.  In 2016 with Simi Linton, he co-founded the Disability/Arts/NYC (DANT), an activist organization that seeks to advance the aesthetics and artistry of disability in NYC. This work has been funded by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the Cultural Agenda Fund administered by The New York Community Trust. The activism can be seen reflected in the city’s first cultural plan, CreateNYC, and in public programming around the city, including “An Etiology of Omission” at The Whitney Museum in the fall of 2017. 

Canadian born Theodore Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer, organizer and artist whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS, community, and culture. Kerr is a founding member of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective, a community of people committed to better implicating community within the ongoing response to HIV/AIDS. Their work has been featured in The Body,  Art in America and POZ magazine. With Aldrin Valdez, Kerr is a co-founder of Foundational Sharing, a performance and publishing platform. Since 2013, Valdez and Kerr have hosted 5 Foundational Sharing salons, and been invited to produce the event with the Bowery Poetry Club, CUNY, Visual AIDS and Queer Art Mentorship. Creating postcards, posters, stickers, and collages, Kerr's art practice is about bringing together pop culture, photography and text to create fun and meaningful shareable ephemera and images. Collaboration is a big part of Kerr's art practice. He has made work with Zachary Ayotte, L.J. Roberts, Chaplain Christopher Jones, Niknaz Tavakolian, Bridget de Gersigny, Malene Dam and others. He has been in exhibitions curated by Kris Nuzzi, Sur Rodney (Sur), Danny Orendorff and others. Two of his works, in collaboration with Shawn Torres and Jun Bae, are part of DePaul Art Gallery's permanent collection.  

Lana Lin is a filmmaker, artist, and writer whose creative practice concerns embodied vulnerabilities. She has produced a body of experimental films and videos that interrogate the politics of identity and cultural translation through attention to the formal capacities and historical contingencies of moving image media. Since 2001, she has focused on collaborative multi-disciplinary research-based projects (as Lin + Lam) that examine the construction of history and collective memory. Lin’s works have been screened and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, NY, Stedelijk Museum, Gasworks, London, UnionDocs, Brooklyn, Oberhausen Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and China-Taipei Film Archive, among others. She has received awards from the Javits Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Civitella Ranieri, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Lin is the author of Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer,which examines the psychic effects of cancer through studies of three important creative and intellectual figures: Sigmund Freud, Audre Lorde, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She recently completed a feature-length personal documentary that “re-visions” Black feminist poet Audre Lorde’s 1980 memoir, The Cancer Journals. An Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School, Lin is currently a fellow of the New School's India-China Institute.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS HELD AT ICI:
401 Broadway, Suite 1620
New York, NY 10013 

Join ICI for a conversation about the EFA Project Space exhibition CURRICULUM with curators Stamatina Gregory and Jeanne Vacarro, artists Becca Albee and Sarah Zapata and scholar Macarena Gomez-Barris. In a format redolent of consciousness raising groups and spurred on by key questions from each participant we’ll be workshopping ideas central to the exhibition’s inception: the relationship between curatorial practice and pedagogy, with a focus on structural critiques of self-help, fostering group intimacy, and thinking through decolonial thought and aesthetics.

The exhibition CURRICULUM, at EFA through March 16, reimagines collective study outside of cultural institutions and creates pathways for resistance by asking the questions: What would a curriculum for collective study and political action look and feel like? Can simply being present together be a form of learning, a way of transforming one another? What is recuperable from decades past? What can we do that we have not yet done?

The practices and research taken up in CURRICULUM connect with the ideas and questions taken up by several of ICI’s programs internationally, most notably Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. with ICI’s investment in DIY culture, archives, hapticality and a capacity for queering our everyday. This event intends to introduce commonly engaged practitioners in New York through their respective elected affinities to consider and process current global and regional dynamics cultural producers from different fields are grappling with in the context of New York.
This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP here

ICI
401 Broadway, Suite 1620
New York, NY 10013 

This event is accessible to people with mobility disabilities. Please contact ICI for additional accessibility needs.

The Free Black Women's Library Book Sessions: a discussion of Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper.

About the presenter:

OlaRonke Akinmowo is a Black feminist scholar, librarian and interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in collage, paper printmaking, and installation. She is also a set decorator, yoga teacher, and mom. Her work is informed by ritual, research, and identity. She aims to provide alternative contexts around race, gender and class, as well as examine the sacred aspects of history and culture. She sees life, nature and archives as necessary and sacred. 

 In 2014 she birthed The Free Black Women’s Library, a public art project that centers and celebrates Black women writers, artists and activists. This biblio installation currently holds a collection of over one thousand books written by Black women, and features workshops, readings, performance, film screenings and critical conversation. It has been installed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCADA Museum, Weeksville Heritage Center, Concord Baptist Church, National Black Theater and Nurture Art Gallery. Ola is a recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from varying organizations including the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Awesome Foundation, Culture Push, The Laundromat Project and The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio. 

Support the growth of the library through the Patreon page, and follow its progress on Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr.

Letting Go describes the experience of being stalked by a student, and offers an extended reflection on the psychic costs of living with harassment.

About the presenter:

Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays on art and sport. She is also writing about paranoia, harassment and the workplace. In 2015, she curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera, for the Vincent Price Art Museum. She is also the curator of “The Tip of Her Tongue,” a feminist performance art series presented by The Broad Museum, in Los Angeles. She is a member of the Board of Directors at Human Resources, Los Angeles, a space dedicated to performance-based and interdisciplinary experimental art.

The Free Black Women's Library Literary Sessions: February - Honoring Alice Walker and Audre Lorde.

The Literary Sessions honor Black women authors born in that month. Guests are welcome to come and listen to readings of these author’s work and possibly be inspired to write, draw and create what they feel based on the reading or the prompts offered.

About the presenter:

OlaRonke Akinmowo is a Black feminist scholar, librarian and interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in collage, paper printmaking, and installation. She is also a set decorator, yoga teacher, and mom. Her work is informed by ritual, research, and identity. She aims to provide alternative contexts around race, gender and class, as well as examine the sacred aspects of history and culture. She sees life, nature and archives as necessary and sacred. 

 In 2014 she birthed The Free Black Women’s Library, a public art project that centers and celebrates Black women writers, artists and activists. This biblio installation currently holds a collection of over one thousand books written by Black women, and features workshops, readings, performance, film screenings and critical conversation. It has been installed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCADA Museum, Weeksville Heritage Center, Concord Baptist Church, National Black Theater and Nurture Art Gallery. Ola is a recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from varying organizations including the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Awesome Foundation, Culture Push, The Laundromat Project and The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio. 

Support the growth of the library through the Patreon page, and follow its progress on Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr.

The Free Black Women's Library Book Sessions: a discussion of TRAINING SCHOOL FOR NEGRO GIRLS by Camille Acker.

About the presenter:

OlaRonke Akinmowo is a Black feminist scholar, librarian and interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in collage, paper printmaking, and installation. She is also a set decorator, yoga teacher, and mom. Her work is informed by ritual, research, and identity. She aims to provide alternative contexts around race, gender and class, as well as examine the sacred aspects of history and culture. She sees life, nature and archives as necessary and sacred. 

 In 2014 she birthed The Free Black Women’s Library, a public art project that centers and celebrates Black women writers, artists and activists. This biblio installation currently holds a collection of over one thousand books written by Black women, and features workshops, readings, performance, film screenings and critical conversation. It has been installed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCADA Museum, Weeksville Heritage Center, Concord Baptist Church, National Black Theater and Nurture Art Gallery. Ola is a recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from varying organizations including the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Awesome Foundation, Culture Push, The Laundromat Project and The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio. 

Support the growth of the library through the Patreon page, and follow its progress on Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr.

Opening Reception, with performance by Julie Tolentino and Pigpen (aka Stosh Fila)

Curatorial Walkthrough with exhibition curators Stamatina Gregory & Jeanne Vaccaro.