EventsThe New Social Environment#154

Celebrating Art in General

Monday, October 19, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Join us for a celebration of Art in General’s incredible work over the past 40 years. Panelists will include Dean Daderko, Eleanor Heartney, Chris Larson, Paul Pfeiffer, Jacob Proctor, Aliza Shvarts, Robin Tewes and founders Teresa Liszka and Martin Weinstein. The conversation will be led by Charlotte Kent and Art in General Executive Director Irene Mei Zhi Shum. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Caits Meissner.

In this Talk

THANK YOU

CLOSING THOUGHTS & SIGNS OF CHANGE

From Art in General

After careful deliberation and long discussions over the past six months, the Board of Directors and the Executive Director have arrived at the difficult decision to close Art in General, upon reaching the milestone of our 40th anniversary. Although we have taken critical measures to adjust to the new normal, the financial constriction due to the COVID-19 pandemic has proved formidable, severely affecting our ability to fulfill our mission of presenting new work by emerging and mid-career artists to the New York area.

Since 1981, Art in General has proudly shown over 2,000 artists who have gone onto greater success, including Dorothea Rockburne, Joan Jonas, Kay WalkingStick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Glenn Ligon, Byron Kim, Elizabeth Peyton, Marina Abramovic, Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, William Pope.L, Pipilotti Rist, Francis Alys, Walid Raad, Sharon Hayes, Patty Chang, Allora & Calzadilla, Pierre Huyghe, among many others. Our roster of artists reflects our deep and long-standing commitment to diversity and equity in the arts. To secure this legacy, we have donated our archives to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, where students and scholars may find materials about our past programs, as well as founding documents and the entirety of Holly Block’s papers during her 18-year tenure as Art in General’s pioneering first director. To complement the papers at the Smithsonian, we also donated a complete set of publications by Art in General to New York University Special Collections — Fales Library, Downtown Collection. Our remaining inventory of books and printed materials were gifted to Art Resources Transfer, a nonprofit organization committed to the egalitarian access to the arts and literacy. Through their Distribution to Underserved Communities Library Program, A.R.T. will disperse Art in General’s publications free-of-charge to rural and inner-city public libraries, schools, prisons, and alternative education centers nationwide.

We are proud to present our last New Commission, Project 270: Signs of Change and online exhibition Dropped By and Found You: #DroppedByAiG.

Learn more: http://www.artingeneral.org

Join us for a celebration of the incredible 40 year history, accomplishments, and people part of Art in General.

Dean Daderko

Dean Daderko is a curator based in New York. He has curated exhibitions and created programs for Art in General, Artists’ Space, The Kitchen, Larissa Goldston Gallery, and Visual AIDS in New York, and for the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. His writing has appeared in publications by the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts. He is the recipient of a Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2008-09 from the French American Cultural Exchange, and has been a Curator of The Americas In Residence at the Fonderie Darling in Montreal, Quebec. He was appointed critic in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2010.

Eleanor Heartney

Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project

Eleanor Heartney has been writing about art since 1981. She is a longtime contributor to Art in America, Contributing Editor to Artpress, Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for Artnews, Artnet, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and was honored in 2008 by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her most recent book is the co-authored Mothers of Invention: the Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art.

Charlotte Kent

Associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University Charlotte Kent, PhD, is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and a contributor to assorted books on art and technology, including as co-editor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect Books, 2024), co-author of Midnight Moment: A Decade of Artists in Times Square (Monacelli Press, 2024), and editor of Generation to Generation (Vetro, 2026). She is the recipient of grants from NEH and Google Art + Machine Intelligence, with a forthcoming book on contemporary art and technoabsurdity. She is a member of the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property.

Chris Larson

Portrait by Phong H. Bui

Chris Larson is an artist.

Teresa Liszka and Martin Weinstein

Photo by Katie Degroot

Founder of Art in General

Irene Mei Zhi Shum

Curator Irene Mei Zhi Shum is a highly regarded arts leader and strategist, known for building the operational & programming capacity of arts organizations, organizing ambitious exhibition projects, and championing the artists and designers with whom she works. She is skilled at creating and aligning programming with new initiatives and long-term objectives. Her curatorial practice explores the intersection of art and architecture and specializes in new commissions.

https://www.ireneshum.com/

Paul Pfeiffer

Photo credit: Joey Trisolini

Paul Pfeiffer is a visual artist living and working in NYC. He was born in 1966 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to explore how images shape the perception of ourselves and the world. Pfeiffer earned a B.F.A. in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, an M.F.A. from Hunter College, and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is the recipient of a number of awards, most notably an Alpert Award for Visual Arts from CalArts in 2009, a United States Artist Fellowship in 2015, and the inaugural Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum in 2000. Pfeiffer’s work has been seen in numerous national and international group exhibitions.

https://www.dennistonhill.org/

Jacob Proctor

Jacob Proctor is the Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector at the Archives of American Art. He was previously Curator at the Museum Brandhorst, where he organized a major Alex Katz exhibition in 2018, co-edited and contributed to a new guide to the collection and is currently curating a mid-career survey of Lucy McKenzie, scheduled to open in September 2020. Proctor served as founding curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, a position he held from 2013 through 2017. He has also served as curator at the Aspen Art Museum, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Ruth V. S. Lauer Curatorial Assistant in the department of prints at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.

Aliza Shvarts

Dr. Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist.

Robin Tewes

Robin Tewes is a New York painter and educator. Born and raised in Queens, New York, Tewes graduated from the High School of Art and Design in 1968 and received her BFA from Hunter College in 1978. Tewes was an original member of P.S. 122 Painting Association and founded the Fifth Street Gallery which operated on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s. Tewes has taught at several colleges and universities around New York City including Bard College, Hunter College, Pace University, Parsons the New School for Design, and the School of Visual Arts. She has been included in numerous exhibitions, both domestically and internationally.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨