Participants

Works Progress, Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota

Hand-in-Glove will feature panels curated with guest respondents from artist-run culture around the nation, and artist-designed events, parties, food experiences and tours around the city of Chicago.

Keynote

Nato Thompson is chief curator at Creative Time, as well as a writer and activist. Amongst his projects for Creative Time are “The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice” (2009), “Democracy in America: The National Campaign” (2008), “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans,” a project by Paul Chan in collaboration with The Classical Theatre of Harlem (2007), and “Mike Nelson: A Psychic Vacuum” (2007). Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, where his exhibitions included “The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere” and “Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History.” His newest publication, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Age of Cultural Production, published by Autonomedia, is slated for release in summer 2011.

Panelists and moderators include:

Mark Allen is an artist, educator and curator. He is the founder and executive director of Machine Project, a non-profit performance and installation space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food in a disheveled storefront in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Beyond their storefront space, Machine Project operates as a loose confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from beaches to museums to parking lots.

Juan William Chávez  lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. Chávez is an artist and cultural activist whose studio practice focuses on the potential of space by developing creative initiatives that address community and culture issues. He has exhibited at venues such as Art in General (New York), Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis), and Van Abbenmuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands). His projects include founder and director of Boots Contemporary Art Space (2006-2010), curator for Urban Expression: Theaster Gates for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and  the PRUITT-IGOE BEE SANCTUARY.  In 2011, Chavez successful staged an intervention that helped save a historic North St. Louis brick building that was in danger of being destroyed by brick thieves.  A renovation of that building into a public art project/ community center will begin in Fall 2011.  In 2011, Chavez was also awarded the Missouri Arts Award for Individual Artist and was a recipient of the Art Matters Grant. Chavez has a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Chodos is interested in creative and enterprising arts administration projects and practices, and moonlights as a creative writer and independent curator. Chodos received a Dual Masters degree from the departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Arts Administration in 2008 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing, from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004. She is currently the Associate Director at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, and was formerly Executive Director at threewalls, where she now serves on the board of directors.

Kate Daughdrill is an artist living and working in Detroit. She is interested in the building of intimate spaces and long-term pleasure-based ways of working in the city. She is the co-founder of Detroit SOUP, a public dinner that funds micro-grants for creative projects in Detroit. She received a BA in Printmaking and Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Joseph del Pesco is an independent curator, art journalist, and perennial collaborator. While he’s organized projects and exhibitions for museums internationally, he has also disbursed artist grants, presented video programs in private homes, distributed posters and other ephemera through informal channels, and produced content for the internet.

Recent projects include an historical survey of San Francisco art magazines called the Circulation Desk, a traveling bitter bar brought to the homes of artists who’ve received rejection letters, and a $1000 Travel Grant. This Fall the Pickpocket Almanack, a program developed with SFMOMA, will travel to Paris (Bétonsalon) and Turin (Artissima), and The Feral Share will launch at the Headlands Center for the Arts—a collaboration with Chez Panisse chef Jerome Waag.

Research and journalism work includes the ongoing web-based Anecdote Archive, registering word-of-mouth as a vital distribution network of art related ideas, contributions to Open Space, the SFMOMA Blog and Specters of San Francisco Magazines for Independent Curators International. He also edited a conversation between artist Pedro Reyes and former Mayor of Bogotá, Antanas Mockus, and contributed an interview with A Constructed World forByproduct, a forthcoming anthology on artists embedded in government or business, to be published by YYZ Books.

Courtney Fink is the Executive Director of Southern Exposure in San Francisco. Since 2003, she has guided SoEx’s vision and commitment to support artists and youth in an environment in which they are encouraged to develop and present new work and ideas. She has led SoEx through three relocations as well as the development and opening of its new permanent 20th Street building. She developed major program initiatives including SoEx Off-Site, a public art program; and Alternative Exposure, SoEx’s grant program developed in partnership with the Warhol Foundation. She has held positions at California College of the Arts and Capp Street Project in San Francisco, as well as Franklin Furnace in New York.

Jeff Hnilicka is a culture producer currently residing in Minneapolis, MN. Jeff is the Director of Kulture Klub Collaborative, an organization that connects youth experiencing homelessness and artists. Jeff is also an active and founding member of Madame, a Queer feminist art space. Jeff was a founding member of FEAST (NY) and Revolting Queers (MN).

Steffani Jemison received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In between, she served as a writer, an independent curator, and as Associate Director of Programs at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where she administered the Swing Space Program and curated time-based programs. As an artist, she has completed residencies at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Project Row Houses, The Wassaic Project, and Studio Lab at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2011 she launched Future Plan and Program—a small press featuring literary works by visual artists—with a catalogue of six works. In October 2011, her first museum exhibition, a collaboration with Jamal Cyrus entitled “Museum as Hub: Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet,” will open at The New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Colin Kloecker & Shanai Matteson are artists and co-founders/collaborative directors of Works Progress. Works Progress is a multi-disciplinary creative collective that produces exhibitions, artworks and public programs at the intersection of art, design and community engagement. Based in Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota, Works Progress is led by Colin Kloecker, Shanai Matteson, Ben Shardlow & Troy Gallas. Works Progress’ ongoing projects include a twice-yearly event series Solutions Twin Cities, the roving neighborhood public program Give & Take, and the live-action arts magazine Salon Saloon. Works Progress also collaborates on a regular basis with other artists and with cultural institutions, large and small, on a range of creative projects, all with a focus on catalyzing creative community connections for cultural sustainability. Their website is worksprogress.org and you can follow them on twitter @works_progress.

Renny Pritikin is the director of the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis. Prior to that he was the chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and director of New Langton Arts, both in San Francisco. He was a founder of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations. Career highlights include museum lecture tours throughout Japan (through the State Department) in 1995 and New Zealand (as a Fulbright scholar) in 2003. A curator and writer, he has written recent catalogue essays about the work of California artists Cornelia Schulz, Julia Couzens, John Bankston, and Tony May, as well as Trimpin, the Seattle sculptor/composer. He is a senior adjunct professor in the graduate program in curatorial practice at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Lane Relyea is Associate Professor and Chair of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Beginning in 2012, he will also take over as Editor in Chief of Art Journal, a quarterly publication of the College Art Association. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, Frieze and Flash Art. He has written monographs on Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Artschwager, Jeremy Blake, Vija Celmins, Toba Khedoori, Monique Prieto and Wolfgang Tillmans among others, and contributed to such exhibition catalogs as Helter Skelter and Public Offerings. He has delivered lectures at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Harvard University among other venues. After teaching for a decade at the CalArts, where he joined the faculty in 1991, in the summer of 2001 he was appointed director of the Core Program and Art History at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. His book D.I.Y. Culture Industry: Signifying Practices, Social Networks and Other Instrumentalizations of Everyday Art is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2012.

Over the past four years, Theresa Rose has worked for the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture & the Creative Economy’s Public Art Program where she administers the Percent for Art program and has lead the City’s first temporary public art commission, Soil Kitchen, by the artist team Futurefarmers. Independently, Rose is the founder and a lead organizer of Philly Stake, a micro-granting program for relevant & creative community engaging projects. Rose is an active member of the Philadelphia arts community serving on the advisory board of both the Tyler School of Art Gallery and the Mural Arts Program, and is a member of the Philadelphia Public Art Forum. Before her employment in City government; Rose worked on several projects as an independent curator and artist. Rose received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she was chair of the Visiting Artist Lecture Series program. Rose is a practicing yogi and completed classical vinyasa teacher training in 2008.

Stephanie Sherman is a curator who designs extraordinary public experiences that activate everyday culture. She is founder and co-director of Elsewhere, a living museum and international residency program set within a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro, NC modeling process-based exchanges between artists and communities. She has led interactive projects for the NC Museum of Art, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Flux Projects Atlanta. Currently, she is curating an artist-designed ride in an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin and an art car wash for Art Basel Miami. She studied philosophy at Duke (MA Critical Theory) and English at UPenn (BA 20th Century Literature). She interweaves roles as artist, curator, anthropologist, ambassador, community organizer, writer, hostess, and magician to build collaborative worlds. She draws intensively from fiction and storytelling to guide, illuminate, and transform her daily practice.

Artists are in tents! Signal Fire was formed in 2008 in response to the urban demand on working artists. We bring artists to the farthest stretches of our remaining wild and open places. Utilizing public lands, we advocate for the importance of access to and protection of these places in order to enrich and sustain society. We maintain a commitment to keep our programming low-cost or free and accessible to artists working in all media. We have hosted filmmakers, writers, visual artists, musicians, photographers and creative agitators. Signal Fire was co-founded by activist Amy Harwood and artist Ryan Pierce. We currently offer a residency program, backpacking retreats, and workshops. More at www.signalfirearts.org.

Daniel Tucker has worked as an artist and organizer in Chicago for the last ten years, initiating a number of large-scale local projects, exhibitions, and events. In 2005, he founded the organization AREA Chicago and edited Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago from 2000–2005 with Emily Forman. In 2008, he coorganized Town Hall Meetings with Nato Thompson, for which one-hundred socially-engaged artists in five cities were interviewed. He has lectured widely about art and politics throughout the United States and Europe. His collaborative projects have been exhibited internationally and his interviews and writings have appeared in numerous journals and books and his first book, Farm Together Now (coauthored with Amy Franceschini) was released in Fall 2010. He is currently an MFA student at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is developing a long-term interview project with Rebecca Zorach entitled Never The Same: Conversations About Art Transforming Politics & Community in Chicago & Beyond. miscprojects.com

Performance artist Martha Wilson is Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., a museum she established in her TriBeCa storefront loft in lower Manhattan which, since its inception in 1976, has presented and preserved temporal art: artists’ books and other multiples produced internationally after 1960; temporary installations; and performance art. Franklin Furnace “went virtual” on its 20th anniversary, taking the Internet as its art medium and public venue to give artists the freedom of expression they had enjoyed in the loft in the 70s. Ms. Wilson lectures widely on the book as an art form, on performance art, and on “variable media art.”

Trained in English Literature, Ms. Wilson was teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design when she became fascinated by artworks created at the intersection of text and image. In New York, she founded DISBAND, the all-girl punk band of artists who couldn’t play any instruments. Since DISBAND disbanded in 1982, she has performed in the guises of Alexander Haig, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore. In the spring of 2008, she had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, “Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971-1974.”

Oliver Wise and Eleanor Hanson Wise create hybrid systems that blur the line between art production, commerce, advocacy and philanthropy. The Present Group, an organization they founded in 2006, is dedicated to finding new ways to fund and distribute artist projects. Their subscription art project enables a community of subscribers to fund artist projects and receive limited editions in return. They recently launched a web hosting service that funds artists grants and in the fall of 2011 they will debut Art Micro Patronage, an experimental platform for showcasing and supporting web-based artwork.

Sarah Workneh is the Executive Director of Programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she oversees all aspects of Skowhegan’s summer residency program for emerging artists. She was formerly the Associate Director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. She has served on numerous panels addressing issues relating to artists’ communities for the College Art Association, the Alliance of Artists Communities, and other organizations. She earned her BA in Linguistics and Russian Language and Literature from the University of Maryland-College Park and is working on a Masters of Art in Interdisciplinary studies from DePaul University.

Nancy Zastudil is an itinerant curator with a focus on collective art practices that operate in the service of revolution and social progress. She is co-founder of PLAND (Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation), an off-the-grid residency program that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects in the context of the Taos mesa; Taos Coordinator for ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness; managing editor of 127 Prince; and co-founder of Slab. She was Associate Director of the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts (2007 – 2010); co-edited On the Banks of Bayou City: The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Houston (March 2009); and her writing has been published in Artlies, Proximity Magazine, spot, and …might be good. Nancy holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University and an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts.

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