12.29.2012

#36 Art In General, Manhattan 9.18.12




Pablo Helguerafocus includes history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, working in formats including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project,The School of Panamerican Unrest”a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record. He is the director of the Adult and Academic Programs at MOMA and formerly the head of public programs at the education dept. of the Guggenheim. He wrote The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005), Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), and at least 10 other books.

Stefani Bardin, media maker working between video, film, installation and immersion. She is currently engaged with a body of work entitled The Pharmacology of Taste that looks at the role of technology on our food systems. Her projects include the repurposing of gastroenterology devices that record images and information from the GI tract.  She teaches at Parsons and the New School and is the Director of Education at 3rd Ward.

Tamar Adler, writer, chef, food activist, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

Doug Ashford, teacher, artist and writer. He is Associate Professor at The Cooper Union where he has taught 3D design, sculpture, public art and theory seminars since 1989. Ashford’s principle visual practice from 1982 to 1996 was the artists’ collaborative Group Material that produced over 40 exhibitions and public projects internationally. Group Material developed the exhibition form into an artistic medium using display design and curatorial juxtaposition as a critical location where audiences were invited to imagine democratic forms. 

Tracy Candido, New York based artist, producer, and designer, presenting innovative ideas for public consumption. Projects include exploratory food environments, interpretive meals, food workshops, and public culinary interventions. Candido delves deep into spaces of imagination, exploring what is possible in the landscape of multi-sensory information. With food as a medium and eating as a social practice, she investigates spaces of vulnerability, exchange, and power.

Elaine Tin Nyo uses food as a medium in tandem with gestures that examine American community life. Tin Nyo has created food-based rituals and actions such as The Bake Sale (1997) at Deitch Projects, which confronted the politics of the Soho gallery community and replaced the sale of artworks with that of baked goods. Tin Nyo's Tete de Moine Cake (FOOD/FAKE FOOD) (2009), part of the CAFÉ series at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, used replicas of a cheese wheel and a cake that the artist had prepared to remind viewers about what cannot be consumed. Tin Nyo conveys in Icebox Plums (CAFÉ, POET Night) (2009), which encouraged visitors to steal juicy, ice-cold plums from atop a dripping block of ice and eat them, that there are still ways to indulge, even if what you desire seems to be unavailable for consumption. By exploring the social and community practice of eating as an avenue for participation and consideration, Tin Nyo combines the alluring seduction and subsequent sensual release of experiencing the smells, sights, tastes and textures of food with that of the exquisite oddities of American culture.

Marisa Jahn, artist, designer, curator, writer, and community organizer who believes that bridging culture and grassroots politics brings about innovative forms of social change. Marisa co-directed “Pond: art, activism, & ideas,” a gallery-based non-profit dedicated to experimental art, co-founded REV-, a non-profit dedicated to furthering socially engaged art, design, and pedagogy, is creative and executive director of People’s Production House, and has worked with Center for Urban Pedagogy, I-Witness Video, and Reverend Billy & The Church of Life After Shopping. She has co-edited 3 books on art and politics.

Steve Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The NYT “Special Edition,” a replica of the “paper of record” announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with the Yes Men, Graffiti Research Lab, and Greenpeace and is founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art), works have won awards from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, and the California Arts Council

Jill Magid is attracted to situations from which she is excluded, whether they are spaces, systems or ideas; she looks for a point of entry and invents a means and a methodology for access, participation, revelation, or exchange, has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney, the Tate, Gagosian, and all over Europe.

Mary Walling Blackburn’s work ranges from installation and network-based media to video, performance, sculpture, social practice and critical theory. She has exhibited at the Whitney, Bard, and LAX Art. She has taught at Cooper and Art Institute of Chicago and published in Cabinet, Afterall, and Art Forum. Blackburn received a ArtMatters grant, given to artists who display a decisive engagement with social justice. A specific aspect of her art practice involves an experimental educational project, The Anhoek School, a graduate program in which student-teacher monetary exchange is replaced with a barter system. The nomadic school has been invited to Aarhus, Denmark, Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Soex in SF, and Harvard.

Hilary Baum, Director of Baum Forum, President of Public Market Partners. For 15 years, as a producer of educational seminars, multi-day conferences and special events focusing on food, farming and markets, she has advanced the dialogue on critical issues among industry professionals, culinary students, market managers, farmers, officials, citizens. She recently completed her term as founding Coordinating Director of Food Systems Network NYC. She has been involved in the development of farmers’ and public markets, agricultural marketing programs, and CSAs. Beginning with her tenure as founding director of The Public Market Collaborative at Project for Public Spaces in 1987, she consulted nationally with market sponsors and municipalities on strategies for creating and improving markets for downtown revitalization and to stem the tide of local agricultural decline. She is recognized as an industry leader, challenging assumptions about our food sources, food quality and food safety. 


Adam Katz, founder and president of Imprint Project, a cultural consultant and curator, behind a variety of innovative marketing initiatives that bridge commerce and culture to develop new models for arts patronage, education, and community engagement.

Cerise Mayo, founder and director of Nutshell Projects, a consultancy committed to building sustainable, regional food economies. Cerise was formerly director of special projects at Slow Food USA and also ran the New Amsterdam Market.


Julia Sherman mines folk traditions, canonical art history, feminist theory and a range of personal anxieties to create tableaus of fantasy, philosophy and interrogation. She is the founder of workspace in LA and has apprenticed with a weaver, a wig-maker and a cobbler. She is a contributing artist/writer to Triple Canopy, White Zinfandel, Cabinet Magazine and The Highlights art journal. In her most recent work she examines the 1968 Miss America Pageant and the Women’s Liberation intervention of the event, in an effort to consider the legacy and contemporary state of the American feminist movement.

Courtenay Finn, curator at Art In General

Alexander Provan is a writer living in Brooklyn and a founding editor of Triple Canopy. He is also a contributing editor of Bidoun. His work has appeared in the Nation, the Believer, GQ, and Bookforum.

Melena Ryzik, lead writer of the Carpetbagger blog, general assignment culture reporter, covering film, music, theater, television, visual art, dance, has chronicled cultural life in New York for the UrbanEye video series, joined The Times in 2001 writing for metro and investigative news, enjoys riding her bicycle to black tie events

Olga Kopenkina, writer and curator, her curatorial work focuses both on modernism’s heritage and cultural legacy of artistic expression after the fall of communism, teaches on topics related to political understanding of art such as future of utopia, political history of exhibitions, and art and political ecology at NYU, published in Modern Painters, Afterimage, Documenta Journal, and Manifesta Journal.

Gregory Sholette, artist, writer, a founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000), and author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture, 2011. His most recent exhibitions include 15 Islands for Robert Moses at the Queens Museum of Art Panorama, and the Imaginary Archive: Galway, Ireland. He is the co-curator with Olvier Ressler of the exhibition It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. An Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College, member of Gulf Labor Coalition; The Institute for Wishful Thinking; and an academic adviser for the new, Home Workspace Program in Beirut, Lebanon.

Varun Mehra, assistant to Alice Waters

Victoria Estok has a dual background in sound art and environmental work. Her work highlights listening as a practice often exposing emotional undercurrents. Alternating between taking a playful look at what we consider to be reality and then sometimes a more poetic approach, Estok lingers on sounds and words capturing listeners and having them reexamine what they are paying attention to.

Audrey Snyder explores notions of site-specificity, storytelling, and changing urban and rural landscapes through an interdisciplinary practice. As one such exploration she collected over fifty water samples from various sites in California to create a map of water-use in the state. The appearance of the samples, which ranged from clear spring water in the Sierra Nevada to the silty sludge from reservoirs in Southern California, was a material investigation that produced an alternative map. Her projects involve performance, sculpture, and printmaking to tease out the psychic and economic issues that are inherent to an urban versus rural binary.

Monica LoCascio, Executive Producer of SCOPE art fair