EventsThe New Social Environment#796
Mandy El-Sayegh: The Amateur
Featuring El-Sayegh and Chloe Stagaman, with Emily Martin
Tuesday, April 25, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist Mandy El-Sayegh joins Rail Director of Programs Chloe Stagaman for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Emily Martin.
Mandy El-Sayegh

Mandy El-Sayegh’s highly process-driven practice is rooted in an exploration of material and language. Executed in a wide range of media, including densely layered paintings, sculpture, installation, diagrams, and sound and video, El-Sayegh’s work investigates the formation and break-down of systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic, or political. Through simple, repetitive patterns such as a hand-painted grid or geometric molds, formal and narrative synthesis occurs that is not consciously intended or anticipated. Solo and two-person exhibitions of El-Sayegh’s work have been organized at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, South Korea (2022), UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA (2022), and elsewhere, and is held in many private and public collections.
Chloe Stagaman
Chloe Stagaman is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. Since 2022, she has been the Director of Programs at the Brooklyn Rail, where she organizes the journal’s weekday conversation series The New Social Environment.
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.
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 🌈✨