Time: March 26 6:00pm EDT
Location: Art Department, City College of New York, Compton Goethals, Room 249, West 140th Street and Amsterdam Avenue (A,C,B,or D train to 145th St., or 1 train to 137th St.)
Held in conjunction with The Left Front, this symposium will bring together contemporary artists, curators, and writers to discuss socially engaged artistic interventions in the urban sphere and ask panelists to respond to the question posed by the exhibition, “what could a revolutionary art be today?” Organized by Anna Indych-Lopez, with speakers Dread Scott, artist, on Wanted, his art project on the streets of Harlem; Johanna Fateman, musician (Le Tigre), cultural critic, and writer, on her collaboration with the feminist guerrilla performance collective Pussy Riot; and Carlos Motta, multi-disciplinary artist, on Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice a series of performative interventions in public squares held during the 2010 presidential elections in Bogotá, Colombia. Moderated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Organized by the Art Department, with the support of the Division of Humanities & Arts and the Simon H. Rifkind Center, City College of New York; and co-sponsored by NYU’s Grey Art Gallery.
This program is generously supported by the David Berg Foundation.
Offered in conjunction with “The Left Front: Radical Art in the Red Decade, 1929-1940” exhibition on view at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, January 13-April 4, 2015. Information:www.nyu.edu/greyart (http://www.nyu.edu/greyart)
The Left Front highlights the work of American artists who took to their brushes amid the economic and social devastation brought on by the Great Depression. Joining forces in the John Reed Club and its successor, the American Artists’ Congress, a group of intellectuals and artists—among them Isabel Bishop, Louis Lozowick, John Sloan, and Raphael Soyer—tackled themes ranging from class struggle, labor organizing, unemployment, civil and workers’ rights, immigration, socialist mysticism, and utopian communities to the Spanish Civil War. Presenting prints, posters, paintings, and books—including selections from the rich holdings at NYU’s Tamiment Library—the exhibition queries what revolutionary art was then, and what it could be today. Organized by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, the exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication.
