Join us via Zoom Thursday, September 24 at 8pm EST for Art for Non-Humans, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at "Owning Earth," opening Spring 2021 in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.

Our panel will feature artists Eleanor King, Lucy Pullen, Michael Asbill, Derek Stroup, and Sarah Max Beck. They will discuss the ways their pieces for Owning Earth seek to expand aesthetic practices and notions of kinship by engaging non-human audiences with human-made artworks. The panel will be introduced and moderated by Tal Beery.

About Owning Earth

Owning Earth is an ambitious, two-year outdoor exhibition in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts. It will help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination, and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.

More info:https://www.unisonarts.org/owning-earth

About the Panelists

Eleanor King

Eleanor King is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation art that responds to our physical, social, and economic landscape. Her works have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Nuit Blanche, Franklin Street Works, Spring/Break Art Show, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Diaz Contemporary, among others. She attended residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, the Banff Centre, and A.I.R. Gallery. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Art in America. Eleanor is a Fulbright fellow, and received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia. Eleanor holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA form Purchase College, SUNY, where she works in the School of Art+Design.

Lucy Pullen

Lucy Pullen is a Canadian artist based in New York. Her work was the subject of exhibitions at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; Art Metropole in Toronto; and survey exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Tate Modern in London England among others. Current site- specific installations include The University of Victoria, North in Kitchener and The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. In 2019 she formed Level Foundation, a platform for public art in Brooklyn, with a large-scale work by Eleanor King.

Michael Asbill

Michael Asbill weaves arts advocacy, community engagement, environmentalism, and curatorial endeavor into his installation and public art practice. His work has been experienced in venues such as Sporobole and Galerie Zybaldone (Sherbrooke, QC), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), The Oregon City Elevator, and the Poughkeepsie Train Station. As a core collaborator with Habitat for Artists, Michael contributed to eco and social engagement projects for Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Arts Brookfield (New York, NY), Washington DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Michael is the founder and director of CHRCH Project Space (Rosendale, NY), a residency for the development of pioneering, community-based, participatory artworks. Michael is a visiting lecturer, and currently head of the sculpture program, at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

Derek Stroup

Derek Stroup is an artist based in New York. He studied with Helen Harrison and Eleanor Antin, and was an assistant to Robert Irwin. In addition to sculptural and photographic projects, he is the author of six artist books and was co editor of Field magazine, a print-only magazine of contemporary art. Publications include photographs in Kalle Lasn’s  Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, and Various Small Books (Referencing the Work Of Ed Ruscha) by the MIT press.

Sarah Max Beck

Sarah Max Beck’s body of work builds on symbiotic, closed-loop human nutrient systems; redefining waste as resource; and comments, often wryly and self-consciously, on the parallels of current elective human influence on the planet and a parasitic infection of a host. A background in agriculture became tangled up with a sculpture degree until a creative practice with compost, resource recovery, fermentation, permaculture, and post-consumer plastics all amalgamated into bioart. Beck is co-founder of studioHydrostatic, a collaborative bioart lab in NYC.

On Precarity: Owning Earth Panel Discussion

Our panel will feature artists Eileen Wold and Sam Spillman. We will discuss the ways art practice can help us embrace experiences of uncertainty and vulnerability. The panel will be facilitated by Tal Beery.

About Owning Earth

Owning Earth is an ambitious, two-year outdoor exhibition in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts. It will help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination, and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.

Speaker Bios

Eileen Wold

Eileen Wold received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently teaches a critical studies course in the Studio Art MFA program there.  Wold is the co-founder of the online artist publication Black Bucket Essays and has been organizing group exhibitions through a pop-up gallery space she created in her studio building outside of Seattle.   Her research and art practice examines the issues of power production, environmental conservation, and ecological vulnerability.

Sam Spillman

Sam Spillman is an artist who creates architectural environments that embody anxiety and suspense through an exploration of psychological states in physical space. Spillman’s site-specific installations use existing architecture as a point of departure for interactions that make the familiar unfamiliar. He has an MFA from the School of Art + Design at Purchase College SUNY, where he is currently a Lecturer in the Sculpture Department. His work has been included in exhibitions in New York City, Westchester, Pine Plains and Ithaca NY. 

Join us for On Visibility and Restoration, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at Owning Earth, opening this fall in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.

Our panel will feature artists jackie sumell, Maureen Connor, Eugenia Manwelyan, Landon Newton, and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. They will discuss the ways their land-based proposals for Owning Earth aim to expose, and perhaps heal, deep-seated injustices.

Speaker Bios:

jackie sumell

jackie sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a Source Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration.

Landon Newton

Landon Newton (she/her) is a Brooklyn based artist and gardener. She is interested in the relationships between plants and people. Her current research-driven practice explores the history of herbal medicine, specifically the use of plants and herbs for birth control and abortion. She has participated in the EcoFutures, Deep Trash and Queer-feminist Ecocriticism conference, London, UK, Open Engagement, SUSTAINABILITY, Featured Project: The Abortion Herb Garden, Queens Museum, Queens, NY, and is a member of the collaborative how to perform an abortion. In 2018 she was a visiting artist fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has held residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA and Elsewhere Studios, Paonia, CO. She has a BA from Smith College, an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and studied horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden.

Maureen Connor

Working in NY as artist and educator since 1970, Maureen Connor’s collaborative projects have focused on human relationships and social change for more than 20 years. Internationally recognized for her feminist work from the eighties and nineties, she received grants from the Guggenheim, the NEA, NYFA and Anonymous Was a Woman, among others. Co-founder (2016) of reproductive justice collaborative how to perform an abortion, they recently created Reproductive Justice Garden and Waiting Room, ongoing on SUNY Purchase campus. Her podcast Shouldn’t We Talk, launching in Summer, 2020, features interviews and discussions about the beginning of the end of patriarchy.

Eugenia Manwelyan

Eugenia Manwelyan (she/her) is a director, choreographer, and planning practitioner who arrived in the US from Russia at the age of six. She is the founder of Eco Practicum desk-free school for arts and ecology, founding faculty of School of Apocalypse, and a member of collectives and working groups including Bodies Intersect Buildings, Choreographies for Survival, and how to perform an abortion. As a visiting faculty at Columbia University, Eugenia has worked on environmental planning and arts projects in the New York bioregion as well as India, Vietnam, and Jordan. She was a recent SU CASA fellow and her work has been supported by NYSCA, LMCC, Pioneer Works, Columbia University and shared at venues including the Martha Graham Dance Studio, New Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and AIR Gallery.

Jean-Marc Superville Sovak

Jean-Marc is a multidisciplinary artist whose work deeply involves the community around him. Among an array of public art projects, Jean-Marc has built and toured a Tiny House of Steel, staged a neighborhood portrait drawing-as-oral-history storefront, constructed a brick wall with a built-in hole, produced videos of his doppelgangers and given guided tours of NYC housing projects. His work has been exhibited at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Manifesta 8 European Biennial. He is the illustrator of several award-winning novels by Julie Chibbaro. He lives and works with Julie in Beacon, NY.

Don’t Call it a Pivot: Performing Arts in the Pandemic is an online panel discussion bringing together the leaders of respected performing arts organizations in the Hudson Valley and Catskills of various sizes to discuss how they are responding to the pandemic and how they think this moment will (or will not) have a lasting impact on the performing arts sector in the region.

Panelists Include:

• Eric Frances, CEO, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts

• Liza Parker, Executive Director, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

• Adrienne Willis, Executive and Artistic Director, Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts

• Alex Baer, Executive Director, Unison Arts

• Sherma Williams, Owner/Operator, Main Street Dance

Introduction by:

Erin Dudley, Executive Director, The Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre

Discussion Moderated by:

Tal Beery, Chief Development Officer, The Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre

A Conversation with Coco Fusco at Momenta Art
Organized by Occupy Museums
Friday, December 5, 2014, 6-8pm

​In recent years, we have witnessed many art school graduates snared into unpayable debt traps through the skyrocketing tuitions paired with low earning potential. Debtfair by Occupy Museums, currently on view in the exhibition Work It Out, is a proposal for an alternative art fair that aims to alleviate the debt crisis in the Art World. While proposing a solution based on solidarity, Debtfair also examines the interconnections that exist between student debt, exploitative labor conditions in the art industry, and alliances between the art market and multinational banks and corporations.
 
How does the “Art World,” whether willingly or unwittingly, take part in an inter-connected web of globalizing neo-liberal economy? While the Art World frolics amid the markets of the Miami Basel Art Fairs, Occupy Museums invites artist and educator, Coco Fusco to introduce a less glamorous section of the Art World: an art education complex paralleled with global practices of labor exploitation, predatory lending, and the privatization of culture. We will discuss broader ranges of oppressive practices, including tuition hikes, predatory lending to students, and the increasing precariousness of faculty positions that parallels other service-labor.