Futures, Narratives, and Networks: Work from the More Art Fellowship Sunday, April 10, 2022, 11am-5pm
More Art 2020 and 2021 Engaging Artist Fellows come together at the Queens Museum on April 10 to share their work as socially engaged artists through a series of workshops, performances, and conversations with invited guests. Complementing the work of Stephanie Dinkins and Suzanne Lacy, the EA Fellows draw from their vast experience and research practices to examine: the limits of public art; technology and nature; building networks of communication across generations and languages; the intersection of teaching and artistic practices; and personal embodied experience as a tool for community-building. Mirroring the ideas of Dinkins and Lacy, the EA Fellows explore new opportunities to “subvert cultural narratives” and engage with the potential of our collective and individual future histories. Join More Art for a full day of free programming alongside a diverse group of socially engaged artists working deeply across disciplines and research areas.
Participating fellows include: Bryanna Bradley, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, Andrew Freiband, Cody Ann Herrmann, Hyperlink Press, Mafe Izaguirre, Amy Khoshbin, Althea Rao, Amy Ritter, and Hanae Utamura, with additional contributions by Bel Falleiros and Amy Wetsch and guest artists Adam Zucker, Esther Neff, and Stephanie Dinkins. Participant bios can be found here.
Please send any accessibility needs and requests to info@moreart.org at least one week prior to the event. Find general accessibility information for the Queens Museum here. Please note, masks are required for all Museum guests, regardless of vaccination status and regardless of local or state guidelines.
About the Engaging Artists Fellowship
The Engaging Artists Fellowship is a year-long program that provides an infrastructure and laboratory for eight NYC-based emerging and underrepresented artists (or collectives) to gain a deeper understanding of the history of the field of public art, incubate and develop their early-stage research and project, collaborate with communities in shaping society, and build sustainable careers. Click here to learn more.
Schedule
All day
Location: 2nd floor mezzanine
Ephemera and works on display by Bel Falleiros, Amy Wetsch, Amy Ritter, Hanae Utamura, More Art, and more.
11:00am – 11:30 am (30 mins)
Location: Atrium
Format: Talk/tour
Welcome & Curator-led tour of exhibitions
11:45pm-12:30pm (45 mins)
Location: Theater
Format: Presentation
Vagina Chorus
Althea Rao
How can human-machine collaboration help us build kinship with a less-explored part of our body—the vagina? How can imaginations of alternative futures help our vaginas unload the heavy weight of socially constructed expectations, shame and trauma?
2020 Engaging Artist Fellow Althea Rao will discuss Vagina Chorus—a community-engaged experimental music performance in which performers wear individual vaginal instruments and create a chorus of voices through their vaginal contraction and relaxation in real time. Rao will present Vagina Chorus’s learning and results, address unexpected challenges, and pose new questions around patriarchal values and the distribution of reproductive labor. Following the presentation, Rao invites participants to join a simple speculative exercise to brainstorm: How can people with vaginas and uterus feel empowered to (re)claim ownership over their autonomy and reproductive choices? What does it mean for vaginas to go on a vacation?
The content is family friendly and welcomes visitors with or without a vagina.
11:45pm – 12:15pm (30 mins)
Location: Meet in Atrium. Piece takes place outside (weather permitting)
Format: Participatory exercise
Sun Seekers
Amy Khoshbin
Sun Seekers, created by sisters Amy Khoshbin and Jennifer Khoshbin, is a body of immersive performance, installation, and sculptural work meant to promote healing through disconnecting with technology and reconnecting with the natural world. The Sun Seekers is a sci-fi narrative about an alternate world that maintains a direct correlation to our current experience of constant indoor on-screen life—the Wreck-tangle. The Sun Seekers pursue outdoor spaces filled with light while consuming botanicals to escape the Wreck-tangle, to collectively create a sense of empathy with the environment and to get back in touch with our bodies as a critical act of self-care. Gathering temporary communities together in physical space at the Queens Museum, Amy Khoshbin will induct the audience into the Sun Seekers world through a technology-free somatic experience.
12:00pm – 2:00pm (2 hours)
Location: 2nd floor mezzanine
Format: Participatory artwork
A glimpse of the future (it’s bound to come tumbling down)
Cody Ann Herrmann
Cody Ann Herrmann presents A glimpse of the future (it’s bound to come tumbling down), a participatory artwork that visualizes the distribution of affordable housing, market rate units, and hotel rooms in the recently rezoned Special Flushing Waterfront District (SFWD). The SFWD allows for 13 new towers to be built in 29 acres along the Flushing Creek coastline, in Flushing, Queens, with 1725 new residential units, and 879 new hotel rooms. In this project, the combined 2604 units are represented as 160 12″ x 6″ x 3″ cardboard boxes, sized to match children blocks commonly found in nursery schools. All 1719 units of market rate housing are represented as 102 blue blocks, 61 units of affordable housing are represented by 4 black boxes, and 879 new hotel units are depicted by 54 orange boxes, representing a scale of about 6% of the total SFWD project. People are welcomed to create their own forms with the blocks and browse resources to understand more about the SFWD and development coming to the area around the Queens Museum.
12:30pm – 1:10pm (40 mins)
Location: Atrium
Format: Participatory Performance
There is no blood in our flag
Hanae Utamura
Join us for a participatory movement-based performance that exercises various forms of community and collective ritual. In the work, a flag will be treated as a symbolic object of freedom instead of a nation state. Hanae Utamura will facilitate the reenactment of various forms of historical movement and game, and examine different degrees of power at play. Conjuring spaces of liminality, participants will engage with the cloth of the flag—shifting and moving through forms that recall rites of passage, conflict, bullfighting, and nationalism, for example.
The performance juxtaposes the movement of power and the intimate gesture of care as a form of resistance, investigating how social consciousness emerges within private and public spaces, from the perspective of the individual, through to units of partnership, family, and nation state. Through the building of social monuments in a form of performance, the work expresses the interdependency between individual and social bodies, and activates the discussion for alternative community and public space.
Please register through the link below to participate as a performer. Audience observation is welcome and invited
REGISTER HERE
12:45pm- 2:15pm (1 hour, 30mins)
Location: Theater
Format: Panel
Artist as Institution
Andrew Freiband, Amy Ritter, and Esther Neff
The role of the artist has progressively become one of instigator, operating within and outside of institutions to enact tangible changes in the public realm. More and more, we find artists working in the medium of institutions themselves–circumnavigating bureaucracy to address issues head on–or often attempting to create shifts from within the system itself. What is the future of the artist as institution (or artists who institute), and what limits does public art have to implement real world change when the larger systems and structures in place are failing?
2021 Engaging Artist Fellows Amy Ritter and Andrew Freiband join Esther Neff in conversation around the artist as institution, debunking myths of social mobility as it relates to the American Dream, and new systems for artists to engage meaningfully in the world given its current state. Approaching public art and artist as institution from three distinct positions, Neff, Ritter, and Freiband bring together their philosophies, theories of change, and tangible approaches to navigating themselves and their practices within and outside of the Institution.
2:45pm – 4:00pm (1 hr 15mins)
Location: Atrium
Format: Presentation and discussion
New Devices of Dissemination
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza and Hyperlink Press, with Adam Zucker
The rapid spread of information via new technologies and accessible modes of communication provide ripe opportunities for artists to uplift and engage with broader audiences, uplifting ideas and processes often overlooked by larger systems. Where do the practices of teaching and art intersect? How can we open up communication across different generations and languages? What is the role of artist as teacher, and how can solidarity be used to create more accessible and equitable modes of sharing resources and information?
Join 2021 Engaging Artist Fellows Chantal Feitosa-Desouza and Hyperlink Press, as they discuss their intersecting work around pedagogy and care; publications and their ability to showcase underrepresented ideas and modalities; and accessible and equitable new pathways to share information.
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza will present a performative lecture that explores the concept of the time machine as a pop-cultural artifact and narrative storytelling device. We will consider new definitions and reference points for interpreting time travel within the context of diaspora, immigration, and alternative understandings of time-keeping and archives.
Through their publications, zine fairs, and workshops, Hyperlink Press provides equitable and accessible spaces for young artists—especially those working outside of the west—to present and produce their work. Hyperlink will discuss the platforms they’ve built, accessibility in print- and zine-making, and shifting the perception surrounding compensation of labor and support for emerging artists.
The program will conclude with a discussion moderated by Adam Zucker.
3:15pm – 4:30pm (1 hour 15mins)
Location: Theater
Format: Presentation and discussion
Intangible Languages and Spaces
Mafe Izaguirre, Hanae Utamura, Althea Rao, and Stephanie Dinkins
Within the realm of socially engaged art, communication is crucial to building the connections necessary to spark action. The intangible space between bodies, power dynamics, monuments and technologies is often more palpable and impactful than standard language itself. How does the artist create dialogue with this immutable, liminal space, and how is the conversation that is generated used as a tool for community and transformation?
Join Engaging Artist Fellows Mafe Izaguirre (2020), Althea Rao (2020), and Hanae Utamura (2021), with artist Stephanie Dinkins as they discuss the power of dialogue and communication, generating new networks of connection, cybernetics, and the potential for the artist as translator of this intangible language.
4:15pm – 4:45pm (30mins)
Location: Atrium
Format: Performance
Feeling the Distance: the introspective
Bryanna Bradley
Feeling the Distance: the introspective is a movement performance incorporating voice and sound by 2020 EA fellow, Bryanna Bradley. The piece is a meditative performance on different forms of travel (commuting, ancestral travel, death, digestion, this list is not exhaustive). An introspective retrospective of the past 2 years.
