David Humphrey, MFASO Lecture
Hunter MFA, Second Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
March 14, 7pm
Koren Christofides: Needle and Thread and Paperclay
Thomas Hunter Project Space
Thomas Hunter Building
68th Street and Lexington Avenue
New York, NY
Through March 16
Doll House. There was briefly a maquette for this first sewn soft sculpture. A small puffy cube made from an old nightgown. It grew a tree form and a house on a hill. It looked like a child’s toy – sewn on a plantation in a distant era.
The toy wanted to be bigger. And a silly serpent wiggled along an edge and rose up by a stockinged foot.
This exhibition explores soft sculpture in paperclay, ceramics with textile elements and embroideries that inspired sewing in the round.
Koren Christofides received her BA Art History, BFA Painting and MFA Printmaking from the University of Washington, where she studied with Jacob Lawrence. Her work is informed by world mythologies, fables, proverbs about women and the natural world. She is also the editor of Fables of La Fontaine Illustrated, University of Washington Press, Seattle/ London, 2006.
Visitors will need to get a “guest pass” from the main entrance at Hunter College on the corner of 68th St. and Lexington Ave. You may then use any entrance to reach the Thomas Hunter Project Space, located in the basement of the Thomas Hunter Building (930 Lexington Ave.)
Jules de Balincourt, Kossak Lecture
Hunter MFA, Room 202
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
March 19, 7:30pm
Tania Bruguera, Zabar Artist Lecture
Roosevelt House at Hunter College
47-49 East 65th Street
New York, NY
March 21, 7pm
The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce a public lecture by Tania Bruguera, the Spring 2018 Judith Zabar Visiting Artist. Free and open to the public.
For over 25 years Tania Bruguera has created socially engaged performances and installations that examine the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of their constituencies. Her research focuses on ways in which art can be applied to the everyday political life; on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects are intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education, and politics. Her works often expose the social effects of political forces and present global issues of power, migration, censorship, and repression through participatory works that turn “viewers” into “citizens.”
By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.
Copy, Translate, Repeat: Contemporary Art from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
205 Hudson Gallery
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
Through April 1
Student Curators’ Hours: March 17 and 24, 1-3pm
At a moment of much debate about the status of global contemporary art, this exhibition examines how artworks drawn from the contemporary collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros navigate this complex issue by embracing appropriative strategies for making art. The appropriative act enables the artists in this exhibition to confound conventions of time and space and question narratives of history, art, and progress. By repeating and copying art historical and archival sources, literary texts, and objects made far away and long ago, they collapse distance as near and far or “here” and “there.” In one way or another, all these artists are intervening, inserting themselves, repeating some type of source. If they are all devoted to repeating already extant works and images, they are also dedicated to exploring the cracks, the potential veins of growth and expansion, exploration and discovery, that always existed within the “originals.”
Featuring: Jonathas de Andrade, Armando Andrade Tudela, Juan Carlos Araujo, Waltercio Caldas, Mariana Castillo Deball, Elena Damiani, Josefina Guilisasti, Leandro Katz, Jorge Macchi, Leticia Obeid, Dario Robleto, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Christian Vinck
Curated by Prof. Harper Montgomery with Hunter MA and MFA Students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate.
The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey
Curated by Javier Rivero Ramos and Sarah Watson
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
Hunter West Building
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10013
Through May 6
The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey foregrounds the relationship between Downey’s artistic and pedagogical practices as illustrated in his works from the series Life Cycles and Mi casa en la playa, produced in the early to mid 1970s while Downey was teaching at Hunter College and Pratt Institute. These works address Downey’s concerns and theories around architecture, ecology, cybernetics, and feedback. Downey sought to redefine architecture as the wielding of invisible forces—physical, social, and psychic. In his assignments, he likewise challenged his students to reconsider their potential as producers of social change through the transformation of space.
The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey is made possible by the generous support from the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Carol and Arthur Goldberg, and the Leubsdorf Fund.
Madeline Hollander, Sean Raspet, Sam Lewitt at The Artist’s Institute
132 East 65th Street
New York, NY
Through May 25
Madeline Hollander’s New Max will be performed every Saturday from 2-6pm.
This spring, the Artist’s Institute’s program brings us closer to the surprising, unstable, and powerful capacities of matter. In the physical sciences and economics, we sometimes call this kind of work energetics―the study of the way that energy flows through a system. For the art field, an emphasis on energetics reorients aesthetics to material expression, sometimes a material expression that exceeds that of the artist’s own imagination or will. Through artworks, talks, and other events this spring, the Institute’s fellows are engaging with energy as an animating force. Energy has the capacity to synthesize molecules. Energy heats up a room.
Amy Butowicz: A Room to Hoist
Caroline Wells Chandler, MFASO Lecture