Events & Discussions

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by artists Imani Brown and Bob Snead. Imani Jacqueline Brown is a New Orleans native, activist, cultural organizer, and director of programs at Antenna, New Orleans. In 2014, Imani co-founded Blights Out, a collective of citizens, artists, architects, and activists imagining a new model for development that generates art and action to impact issues of blight, gentrification and housing affordability. She is a member of Occupy Museums, an international artist/activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge and deconstruct the commodification of art and culture. Occupy Museums' project, Debtfair, will be featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. In 2014, Imani worked as curatorial associate and manager of publications for Prospect.3, New Orleans, under the artistic direction of Franklin Sirmans. That same year, her paper "Performing Bare Life: Occupying the Liminality between Civilizations" was named "best in stream" at the 5th Annual Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies in Havana, Cuba. She received her BA in visual arts and anthropology from Columbia University in 2010. Bob Snead is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, where he founded Redux Contemporary Art Center in 2002 and remained founding director of the organization until 2005, when he left to pursue graduate studies at Yale University School of Art. After receiving his MFA in 2007, he helped form the traveling artist collective Transit Antenna and spent the next two years developing community based art projects across North America. Since 2010, he has lived and worked in New Orleans, continuing a rigorous studio practice, exhibiting across the US, while also assisting other artists in his role as Executive Director of Antenna (antenna.works). He is a founding organizer of the Platforms Fund as well Common Field, a national service organization for artist-centric organization. He was selected for the 2014 Artfields jury prize, and his work has been featured on the PBS series Art Assignment.

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Jason Middlebrook. Middlebrook was born in 1966 in Michigan and now lives and works in Hudson, New York. His work uses natural materials and the language of abstraction to create a tension between something organic and something man-made. Middlebrook has mounted solo exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the New Museum (New York), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut) and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. He has participated in group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Last year he unveiled a major outdoor sculpture commission at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo). Middlebrook’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Princeton University Art Museum, among others.

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by faculty member, curator and art educator Stephanie Cunningham. Cunningham is the curator of education at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Her teaching career spans almost 10 years and has afforded her the opportunity to teach in a variety of environments. She has practiced inquiry-based learning methodologies at cultural institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, where she helped create the internal wiki database and pedagogical approach for engaging visitors through the museum's award-winning ASK app. At New-York Historical Society she prepared lesson plans that focus on K-12 schools' interest in American history as well as more didactic approaches in tertiary level classes as a lecturer at City University of New York and New Jersey City University. She has led training workshops for the Guggenheim Museum's educators on ways to better engage visitors. At Weeksville Heritage Center she assisted in creating educational programs and increasing their online presence. Cunningham also co-curated Walcott House in Saint Lucia, the childhood home of Derek and Roderick Walcott, influential Caribbean visual artists, poets and playwrights, and wrote the script for the historic house’s tour guides. Cunningham is the co-founder and creative director of Museum Hue, an organization that works to increase diversity in patrons, professionals, and cultural producers in the creative economy; Museum Hue produces and presents arts and cultural experiences throughout the U.S. and abroad, serving artists, arts organizations and neighborhoods worldwide. She holds a BA in art and art history from Brooklyn College and an MA in cultural heritage and preservation studies from Rutgers University.

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by faculty member Jasmine Wahi, a co-director and co-owner of Gateway Project Spaces and founder and director of Project for Empty Space. In addition to these organizations, she also curates exhibitions globally that predominantly deal with issues of cultural identity, intersectionality and female empowerment. Wahi began her art world endeavors in the South Asian art department at Christie's Auction House, which was followed by positions in several Contemporary Asian art galleries around New York City. In 2008, she opened up her own consultancy, which produced exhibitions and cultivated emerging artists from around the globe. Since she first started, Wahi has expanded her curatorial ventures to include a multitude of nonprofit endeavors and socially engaging exhibitions. In 2010, she co-founded Project For Empty Space, an organization that creates socially engaging, multidisciplinary art exhibitions and programming that encourage social dialogue, education and systemic change for cultural tolerance. In 2013, Wahi and PES began a long-term partnership with Rebecca Jampol of Solo(s) Project House, to create a series of pop-up exhibitions under the moniker "Gateway Project Spaces," which then became Gateway Projects.

MFA Fine Arts and ARTNOIR present an intimate conversation with world-renowned artist and pioneer in video and performance Joan Jonas and jazz pianist, musician and composer Jason Moran. This tête-à-tête​ will examine the potency of the collaborative process. The symbiotic journey of these two artists, whose 10-year working relationship has generated a series of acclaimed collaborations, provides a critical discourse that exemplifies the power of creative intersectionality.​ Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) is an artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text and sculpture. Jonas' experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early '70s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures. Jonas has exhibited, screened and performed her work at museums, galleries and large-scale group exhibitions throughout the world, such as the Taipei Biennal; Documentas 5, 6, 7, 8, 11 and 13; the 2008 Sydney Biennial; the 2008 Yokohama Triennial; and the 28th Sao Paolo Biennial. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at Jeu de Paume, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; HangarBicocca, Milan; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; and the U.S. Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennial. Jazz pianist, composer and performance artist Jason Moran was born in Houston in 1975 and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Jaki Byard. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the artistic director for jazz at The Kennedy Center. Moran currently teaches at the New England Conservatory. Moran's rich and varied body of work is actively shaping the current and future landscape of jazz. He is deeply invested in reassessing and complicating the relationship between music and language, and his extensive efforts in composition, improvisation and performance are all geared toward challenging the status quo while respecting the accomplishments of his predecessors. His activity stretches beyond the many recordings and performances with masters of the form, including Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell and the late Sam Rivers, and his work with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records. The scope of Moran’s partnerships and music-making with venerated and iconic visual artists is extensive. He has collaborated with such major figures as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson (BFA 1982 Photography) and Kara Walker; commissioning institutions of Moran's work include the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harlem Stage and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Moran has a longstanding collaborative practice with his wife, singer and Broadway actor Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of live music. BLEED explored the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, and was widely hailed as groundbreaking in the music and performance realm. Moran will have his first solo museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in spring 2018.

Mark Thomas Gibson is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Gibson received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 1998 and his MFA from Yale University School of Art in Painting & Printmaking in 2013. During his time at Yale, Gibson was the recipient of the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Award in 2013. Gibson is an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union and a part-time lecturer at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University, and this summer will be a member of the faculty at The Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art and Music. In early 2016, Gibson curated the exhibition "Black Pulp!" at Yale University's Edgewood Gallery. Gibson is represented by Fredericks and Freiser gallery in New York City, where he will have his second solo exhibition opened March 24, 2016, coinciding with the release of his first book, Some Monsters Loom Large. Upcoming exhibitions include a group show at Able Baker Contemporary in Maine and a to-be-named group exhibition at Salon 94 in New York City this July.

MFA Fine Arts and SVA Galleries present the "SVA x Skowhegan" catalog release, as well as a conversation between the exhibition's curator Lauren Haynes, and featured artists Miryana Todorova and Marvin Touré, about the artists' work and their studies at SVA and Skowhegan.

MFA Fine Arts and SVA Career Development present Paul Amenta (MFA 2000 Fine Arts), co-founder of SiTE:LAB, and installation artist Julie Schenkelberg (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) discussing methods for a sustainable art practice.

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by faculty member and New York City-based artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an artist, writer and former public school social studies teacher. Through immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, sound projects and discursive programming, her work engages with both figurative and literal language to explore how we narrate the connections between the past, present and future. In her interdisciplinary and research ­intensive practice, she considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an EdM (2008) in Secondary Education from Stanford University as well as a BA (2006) in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College. She has exhibited her work at Jack Shainman Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, BRIC Art Gallery, Weeksville Heritage Museum, Project Row Houses, Smack Mellon Gallery, Vox Populi Gallery, MoCADA, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Leroy Neiman Gallery and the Soap Factory, among others. Currently, she is an artist in residence at Smack Mellon and on faculty at SVA.

MFA Fine Arts presents faculty member and video and performance artist Kalup Linzy discussing his work.

MFA Fine Arts faculty member and New York City-based performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow speaks about her work.

MFA Fine Arts presents faculty member Genevieve Hyacinthe discussing Kanye West's Yeezus-era aesthetics, including how West's album design, stage performance and other design elements are informed by Jean-Michel Basquiat's persona and painting constructions.

MFA Computer Art, MFA Fine Arts and BFA Visual & Critical Studies present artist and curator Armin Medosch discussing his book, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978), which was recently published by MIT Press. Armin Medosch, Ph.D., is a Vienna-based artist, curator and scholar working in art and media theory. In 2014, he curated the international exhibition "Fields" for the Riga European Capital of Culture, and is initiator of the Technopolitics working group in Vienna. The event is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York and the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria.

MFA Fine Arts presents faculty member and interdisciplinary artist Dread Scott discussing his work.

MFA Fine Arts presents faculty member Sheila Pepe, who is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures made from domestic and industrial materials, discussing her work. Since the mid-1990s, Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate ideas concerning the production of canonical artwork, as well as the artist’s relationship to art institutions.

MFA Fine Arts presents the Smoke School of Art (SSA), an Atlanta-based non-profit arts group that addresses contemporary issues in art, culture and philosophy, discussing the group's mission. Members of the collective include Christopher Hutchinson, Eric Mason, Carina Maye, Julio Mejia, Michi Meko, Jason Sweet and Jamele Wright Sr.

MFA Fine Arts presents Miami-based artist Nicolas Lobo discussing his work, which has incorporated materials such as grape flavored cough syrup, an aphrodisiac soft drink and Play-Doh. His work has been exhibited at venues across the country, including the American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; Florida Atlantic University, Palm Beach; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

MFA Fine Arts presents New York-based photographer Accra Shepp discussing his work, which is centered on how the natural environment influences human interactions, and international protest movements. Shepp's work is in a variety of collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Victoria and Albert Museum. He is currently at work on a survey of the more than 40 islands that make up New York City. Selections from his series “Occupying Wall Street” were included in the book The Order of Things, published in conjunction with a show at the Walther Collection, Germany.

Panel discussion with curator Rocio Aranda-Avarado and artists Manuel Acevedo, K.C. Tidemand, Denise Treizman and Alejandro Guzman. elmuseo@SVA represents a coming together of two New York institutions: El Museo del Barrio and the School of Visual Arts. Founded by artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz and local activists, parents and teachers in East Harlem, El Museo del Barrio’s original mission was to support the art and culture of Puerto Rico. By the early 1970s that mission expanded to include all of Latin America and Latino communities in the Unites States. The work on view in the exhibition explores the aesthetic and thematic affinities of these different but like-minded communities. In the words of curator Aranda-Alvarado: “At various stages of their careers, the artists in the show act as contemporary anthropologists gathering objects or inspiration from the urban landscape, engaging with issues around migration and the body, exploring space and architecture, tradition and craft.”

MFA Fine Arts presents Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Jamie Isenstein discussing her work. Isenstein is the 2013 Creative Time Sandcastle Competition Champion.