Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker
Public Art
Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker
Focused around Union Square, a cross-roads for many from diverse walks of life in the city, this project features video activations of the ubiquitous LinkNYC screens that will focus on the critical situation of recently arrived migrants in New York City.
When
October 4-31, 2024
Where
Video activations will take place on LinkNYC kiosks around Union Square.
Coco Fusco portrait, photographer: Geandy Pavón
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About the artist
Two men who immigrated to New York City decades apart.
In 2024, as part of More Art’s 20th Anniversary Year, Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco will create a video for LinkNYC screens that will focus on public perception of newly arrived migrants in New York City. Broadly known for her interdisciplinary art practice that over the last several decades has been concerned with the themes of colonialism, power, race, gender, and history, Fusco will address the ways that immigration to New York – which has been constant since the city’s founding – is currently being recast as a crisis that threatens city life to serve conservative political purposes.
New York City was built by immigrants and its vibrant culture is composed of contributions from the many cultures that coexist and mingle here. Forty percent of the city’s population is foreign-born. Immigrants bolster the city’s workforce, making crucial contributions to the city’s economy, gastronomy, linguistic diversity, and street life. Our city’s guarantee of universal housing and universal education is under threat by those who seek to demonize and problematize the presence of immigrants, overlooking the reality that New York regularly receives tens of thousands of immigrants annually and succeeds in integrating them. By interspersing historic images of immigrants with contemporary photographs of new New Yorkers, Fusco’s work draws attention to the continuities between past and present immigration to call into question the negative characterization of migrants as a destabilizing force.
On October 5th, 2o24, Coco Fusco will unveil a video activation of the ubiquitous LinkNYC screens around Union Square Park, a cross-roads for many from diverse walks of life in the city. The project will launch with a day-long festival featuring performances by Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, Xenoduo, and food provided by La Morada, a mutual aid project and restaurant in the Bronx that works to support Dreamers and refugees, along with a new publication by Noah Fischer as part of his New York 2044 series commissioned by More Art.
Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.
Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.
Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).
Fusco is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.