Nato Thompson

Worked as partner, artistic director and founder at this ditigal art commissioning, presenting and selling organization. Worked heavily to produce to produce artworks secured through blockchain, often referred to as NFTs, and curated and worked with artists such as Jill Magid, Paul Pfeiffer, Walid, Raad, Ahmet Ogut, Marco Brambilla, The Mccoys, and Shirin Neshat.

Back and Song was a meditative four-channel film and art installation by filmmakers Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young, produced by Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University. This kaleidoscopic installation reflected on the manner in which health and wellness are part and parcel of the American black experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considered the labor and care provided by generations of black healers—doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides—and their histories of contribution to, and resistance of, the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine.

Working with archivists from around the world, Moorhead and Young synthesized photographs of quotidian black family life into a time-based archive of expression. Paired with new footage, these archival compilations emphasized forms of movement, rest, and ecstatic experience from across the African diaspora as crucial modes of healing and attunement to the body. Across four film channels, music, movement, sound therapy, ritual dance, rest, and meditation were brought together, presented as a spectrum of individual and communal pursuits of well-being. Cumulatively, these archival compilations demonstrated the complexity and interconnectedness of different modes of healing, and how the pursuit of health is at the root of how life, breath, joy and pain manifest in the black experience.

Back and Song was presented at Girard College, originally chartered in 1833 as a school for “white, male orphans” and later a pivotal site in the movement to legally desegregate all Philadelphia schools. Filling its central auditorium with sound and moving image, Back and Song transformed the Chapel at Girard College into a space of rejuvenation.

Spread across Race Street Pier and the newly opened Cherry Street Pier, Festival for the People featured three weekends of dynamic participatory programs and events, sculptures, installations, videos, and banners from October 13 – 28. The festival celebrated the rich subcultural forms across Philadelphia, from comics to tattoos to internet culture, while also offering a fun and critical perspective on populism.

Festival for the People aimed to expand the public conception of what contemporary art is and can be with installations and programming across a range of mediums and subjects. Visitors played with interactive sculpture installations brought to Philadelphia in collaboration with the Montreal-based group Creos: Impulse, an installation of seesaws designed by CS Design and Lateral Office, and Prismatica, a group of colorful spinning prisms by Raw Design. The Festival also featured a collaboration with Philly Typewriter, specially commissioned banners celebrating Philadelphia’s neighborhoods by Erlin Geffrard, short films by artists including Andrea Bowers, Yoshua Okón, Hiwa K, Jennifer Levonian, and Maider López, an installation of selections from Pledges of Allegiance, an artist-designed flag series originally commissioned by the public art nonprofit Creative Time, and talks by artistic luminaries such as Hito Steyerl and Emory Douglas.
Festival for the People - Day of Movement. A shot of 3 people singing and playing instruments.

In addition to a range of works and installations throughout the duration of the festival, each weekend had additional programming tied to a thematic focus, celebrating popular analog, digital, and embodied cultures with fairs, talks, installations, screenings, and other programming, created in collaboration with arts and community groups from across Philadelphia and beyond.

Nato Thompson: Artistic Director

The Seattle Art Fair is a one-of-a-kind destination for the best in modern and contemporary art and a showcase for the vibrant arts community of the Pacific Northwest.

Based in Seattle, a city as renowned for its natural beauty as its cultural landscape, the fair brings together the region’s strong collector base; local, national, and international galleries; area museums and institutions; and an array of innovative public programming. Founded in 2015 by Paul G. Allen, the Seattle Art Fair is produced by Vulcan Arts + Entertainment and Art Market Productions.

Artists for projects: Heather Dewey Hagborg, C. Davida Ingram, Jennifer Levonian, Mark Pauline, Trevor Paglen, Mariah Hupfield and Charlene Vickers, and Wayne White

Talks: Mark Pauline and Bruce Sterling, Beth Rudin DeWoody and Robert Stillin, Mariah Hupfield, Charlene Vickers and Wanda Nanabush, Catharina Manchanda and Tayyib Smith, Trevor Paglen.

Jane Irish: Antipodes

In partnership with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, Fairmount Park Conservancy, and the Friends of Lemon Hill

In the installation for Philadelphia Contemporary, artist Jane Irish expanded on her years of painted explorations of colonialism, opulence, the violence and futility of American conflicts overseas, and the anti-war activists who resist them. Working in partnership with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, Fairmount Park Conservancy, and the Friends of Lemon Hill, Irish transformed the historic Lemon Hill mansion, filling it with a floor-to-ceiling installation of paintings and ceramics. Irish envisions that the two floors of Lemon Hill serve as antipodes—hemispheric opposites, each filled with her dialectical imagery of past and present, east and west, and war and peace. Its interiors coated with Irish’s swirls of painted vignettes, Lemon Hill became a site where visitors considered how activists might serve as an antidote for past sins, and art’s ability to foresee the wildest scientific futures.

“The artwork by the Russian collective Chto Delat, consists of an array of shipping containers producing a small village; a veritable mass shipped revolution that unpacks into a world. The work takes its cue from El Lissistky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, designed by famed architect Yury Avvakumov.
Roughly half of the containers will take on a different moment in revolutionary history ranging from the Mexican Revolution, Yugoslavia and China to May ’68, Cuba, and to Zapatista. The other half will house local artist activist groups touching on issues that address Indigenous peoples, migrant workers, sex workers rights, queer activism, and to revolutions dedicated to African diaspora, and much more. In doing so, this living, breathing monument brings into the world a social space that informs and complicates the narrative and history of global justice.”

Nato Thompson joined director Harry Philbrick on a journey to create a museum for the 2st century. A design process was established by David Van Der Leer and with the support of Michael Forman, we charted out a journey to create a new model for culture. The architecects chosen for the design were the incredible Johnston Marklee. While the museum never came to fruition, we did develop incredible concepts and intiatied some amazing programs along the way.

Doom•oc•ra•cy (dü-ˈmä-krə-sē), n.

1. A form of government in which the supreme power is vested in a tyrant by a terrified general electorate. 2. The esoteric arithmetic that makes the electoral process malleable. 3. A corporate coup d’état in slow motion. 4. Permanent global war waged in the name of freedom. 5. A house of political horrors at the Brooklyn Army Terminal from October 7 to November 6, 2016.

Exchanging political fights for political frights, Creative Time and Pedro Reyes took over the Brooklyn Army Terminal in the fall of 2016 for an exciting collaboration. Doomocracy, a major new immersive installation by Reyes, marked the confluence of two events haunting the American cultural imagination: Halloween and the presidential election.

How much surveillance are we willing to accept? How much pollution? How much corporate malfeasance? Provoking what Reyes calls “political catharsis,” this immersive artwork distilled the horrors of our political landscape into the form of a haunted house, inviting us to navigate a maze of near apocalyptic torments, from climate change to pandemic gun violence to GMOs. Visitors to Doomocracy worked their way through a labyrinth of rooms, exploring the depth and breadth of American political anxieties.

Opening to the public Oct. 7, running through Halloween, and concluding just days before the 2016 presidential election, Doomocracy occupied a vital moment in US history, offering the perfect platform and location to create real dialogue around the contemporary state of global and US politics. Doomocracy was curated by Nato Thompson and directed by Meghan Finn, and was free and open to the public.

Creative Time is pleased to announce the commission of Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, a 25 year long new public artwork by the internationally renowned French conceptual artist Sophie Calle co-presented with Green-Wood Cemetery. The project debuted with a two daylong inaugural event on April 29th and 30th, 2017.

To inaugurate the project, the public was invited to Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to privately unburden and inter their most intimate confessions.

During the two-day opening, in a setting nestled among the mausoleums and monuments of Green-Wood’s verdant rolling hills, visitors transcribed their secrets onto paper, and deposited them into the earth below, through a slot on a marble obelisk of Calle’s design. The artist was on hand during the two-day event to receive some visitors’ secrets.

The two-day performance was free and open to the public. Guests were invited to spend the day exploring the sculptures and monuments throughout Green-Wood, a tradition that dates back to the early 1800s. Free maps of the cemetery, specially designed to accompany Calle’s installation, were be available. Guided walking tours emphasizing the cemetery’s symbols and iconography were offered at no cost.

Visitors to the Cemetery can now see Calle’s installation during regular cemetery hours and independently deposit secrets into the marble obelisk. Calle has also pledged to return periodically over the next 25 years, each time the grave is filled, to exhume and cremate them in a ceremonial bonfire service and moment of remembrance.

Flux Projects, the Atlanta-based public art organization, is excited to present Flux Night 2015: Dream, a one-night event that will bring site-specific visual and performance art to Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward on Saturday, October 3 from 7pm until midnight.

This year’s Flux Night will be curated by Creative Time Chief Curator Nato Thompson. “There is something fascinating, compelling, and deeply urgent in the landscape of Old Fourth Ward,” says Thompson. “It is not only the historic birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., but this neighborhood speaks volumes about the potentialities and struggles throughout time at the confluence of urban space, race relations and dreams.” 

Thompson has selected a diverse, provocative and accomplished group of local, national and international artists to create a collection of temporary public art projects for this year’s Flux Night audience. The line-up includes: Elissa Blount Moorhead (Baltimore) + Rashida Bumbray (New York) + Arthur Jafa (Tupelo, MS); Sheila Pree Bright (Atlanta); Center for Tactical Magic (San Francisco); Courtesy the Artists (New York); Stephon Ferguson (Atlanta); Chris Johnson (Oakland, CA) + Hank Willis Thomas (Brooklyn, NY) + Bayeté Ross Smith (Harlem, NY) + Kamal Sinclair (Los Angeles); Jennifer Wen Ma (New York & Beijing); Yoko Ono (Nutopia); Otabenga Jones & Associates (Houston, TX); Pedro Reyes (Mexico City); and Jessica Scott-Felder (Atlanta).

Curating with Cara Starke, as the centerpiece of Central Park Conservancy’s 35th Anniversary celebration, this free public exhibition aimed to draw visitors into the park’s beautiful north end, much of which has been expertly restored by the Conservancy. The six-weekend show tempted visitors to transcend their busy lives, losing themselves along a playful trail of sensory experiences

Drifting in Daylight included performative, participatory, and perceptual work by artists Spencer Finch, Alicia Framis, Nina Katchadourian, Ragnar Kjartansson, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, David Levine, Karyn Olivier, and Lauri Stallings + glo.

Curated with Rashida Bumbrey, Rylee Ertigrosso and Elissa Blount Moorehead, from September 20 to October 12, 2014, Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center presented Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, a walkable month-long art exhibition of four community-based art commissions by Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young. Black Radical Brooklyn launched from the site of Weeksville, a Brooklyn community established by free and formerly enslaved Black citizens 11 years after abolition in New York State. Black Radical Brooklyn drew inspiration not only from this story–achieving self-determination through the claiming and holding of a neighborhood–but also from radical local battles for land and dignity from the 1960s to today.

In late spring of 2014, Creative Time presented the first large-scale public project by Kara Walker, one of the most important artists of our era. Sited in the sprawling industrial relics of Brooklyn’s legendary Domino Sugar Factory, Walker’s physically and conceptually expansive installation—a massive, sugar-coated sphinx-like woman—responded to the building and its history.

As is her custom, the artist gave this work a title that is at once poetic and descriptive:

At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected:

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby
an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

Organized with Theresa Rose as part of the Fringe Festival, this unique commission featured work by Navin Rawanchaikul, Liz Magic Laser and Mammalian Diving Reflex. An interpretive history by Indian-Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul, This is Not a Theater taps in to the stories and history of the long-established Plays and Players Theatre through a visual arts project of comic books based on interviews, a live four-piece band playing music from past productions, a theatrical installation and audio recordings. Hosted during other Fringe performances, catch this installation during The Living Newspaper: On Location by Liz Magic Laser September 11-12 and All The Sex I’ve Ever Had by Mammalian Diving Reflex September 13-14.

Nato Thompson: Curator

A herd of horses has been unleashed in Grand Central Terminal. Grazing in Vanderbilt Hall, they move at a pace perhaps too slow for the needs of a commuter, seeming to ask us to slow down. To take a second. To look. Visitors are suddenly lured into a pasture of altered perception as they come upon this visually evocative herd of Soundsuits— artist Nick Cave’s meticulously handcrafted sculptures, transformed by pairs of performers into fantastical creatures. The peculiar breeds reflect and dislocate Grand Central Terminal’s dizzying sense of wonder. Amidst the buzz of the station a swooshing sound emerges, the fibrous material of the horses’ coat brushing up against itself, a calm, windlike sound. The sound of slow time.

The otherworldly creatures in HEARD•NY bring to mind the historical evolution of the City—the predecessors of modern transportation freed from their harnesses. While the rail lines were built originally for horse-drawn passenger cars, by the early 1900s steam locomotives and electric technologies precipitated the need for a state-of-the-art terminal on 42nd Street. Whether pulling a carriage or a plow, the horse has long been a friend of getting things done and getting somewhere.

The pulse of New York City is made tangible in Grand Central Terminal. Erected as a monument to transportation, this luminous space of glorious grandeur captures the crowded rhythms of an urban nerve-center. Upon entering, one is greeted by a global city in motion. The moving figures in its Main Concourse can become abstracted, dissolving into the hypnotic pace of our contemporary moment. In the station, you can either move through the circuits of transport, or step outside of the fray to witness the beautiful choreography of humanity navigating this complexity without so much as a second thought.

Both an awe-inspiring, historical landmark and a checkpoint in the daily grind, Grand Central Terminal houses both the sacred and the profane. As a profound monument and mediator keeping the tempo of our times, it becomes a Rorschach test of this contemporary period—a period of people in movement.

On the brilliant sky that is the ceiling of the Main Concourse—rediscovered after peeling back the black tar remnants of a bygone era of cigarette-smoking commuters—there is Pegasus. Emerging from a cloud, it joins other mythical figures in a celestial canopy above the commuting population. With HEARD•NY, it feels as if this magical creature has drifted down onto the marble floors of Vanderbilt Hall, where it has summoned more horses to gather, speaking in tongues, whispering secrets in a language that may otherwise have been lost in time.

In their swaying movements, they act as temporal and visual sirens, beckoning and asking the commuter to pause. Resisting the speed of the building occupants, they speak to a pre-industrial period of gathering and groups. They do not try to sell you anything, nor tell you where to go, what to believe, or who you are.

Aesthetically imparting the festivalism of the film Paris is Burning and Mardi Gras Indians, they also mark a slow celebration happening in the dimension of our senses. In this public space, we have the chance to collectively hallucinate.

The horses’ electrifyingly colorful coats reference a range of influences, from contemporary fashion, to Southeast Asian embroidery, and particularly African ceremonial costumes. Their breathtaking complexity and corollary allure are all part of an international visual language of hybridity that swirls in the eddy of Grand Central Terminal itself.

In the frantic pace of our contemporary age, in the monumental machine that is Grand Central Terminal, we are temporarily placed outside ourselves by crossing paths with Cave’s creations. We can observe these horses in the same way that we look upon our fellow travelers in the Main Concourse, sensing the texture of time and the dizzying visual seduction that is the pleasure and bewilderment of our contemporary moment.

On Saturday, October 19, 2013, Creative Time and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum presented Between the Door and the Street, a major work by the internationally celebrated artist Suzanne Lacy, perhaps the most important socially-engaged artist working today. Some 400 women and a few men–all selected to represent a cross-section of ages, backgrounds, and perspectives–gathered on the stoops along Park Place, a residential block in Brooklyn, where they engaged in unscripted conversations about a variety of issues related to gender politics today. Thousands of members of the public came out to wander among the groups, listen to what they were saying, and form their own opinions.

Between the Door and the Street grew out of a series of deep and wide-ranging conversations between Lacy and a group of activist women, held over the course of five months. Lacy considers this preparatory work to be a key part of the project as a whole, and their ideas, expertise, and principles informed the project.

This project built upon Lacy’s rich body of work devoted to issues of feminism, including Silver Action, presented at Tate Modern, London, earlier this year; The Tattooed Skeleton, at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, in 2010; and Cleaning Conditions, part of the Do It exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery, in summer 2013. Between the Door and the Street was her first major public project in New York City.

Since 1963, more than eight hundred spacecraft have been launched into geosynchronous orbit, forming a man-made ring of satellites around the Earth. These satellites are destined to become the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly floating through space long after every trace of humanity has disappeared from the planet.

Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures is a project that marks one of these spacecraft with a visual record of our contemporary historical moment. Paglen spent five years interviewing scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers to consider what such a cultural mark should be. Working with materials scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paglen developed an artifact designed to last billions of years—an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs and encased in a gold-plated shell. In Fall 2012, the communications satellite EchoStar XVI will launch into geostationary orbit with the disc mounted to its anti-earth deck. While the satellite’s broadcast images are as fleeting as the light-speed radio waves they travel on, The Last Pictures will remain in outer space slowly circling the Earth until the Earth itself is no more.

A vast exhibition at the Essex Street Market with accompanying catalogue by MIT Press. Commissioned Artists. The exhibition was both an archive, social space and site of commissions exploring the art of living. The content was selected in partnership with a team of curatorial advisors and also featured a set of commissioned projects.

Curatorial Advisors

The projects included in the Living as Form archival exhibition were selected by a group of curators, writers, artists, and historians, including: Caron Atlas, Director, Arts and Democracy Project of State Voices + Community Change Initiative; Negar Azimi, Senior Editor, Bidoun magazine; Ron Bechet, Professor of Art, Xavier University; Bik Van der Pol, Artists; Claire Bishop, Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York; Brett Bloom, Artist, Temporary Services; Rashida Bumbray, Associate Curator, The Kitchen; Carolina Caycedo, Artist; Ana Paula Cohen, Independent Curator, Writer, and Editor; Common Room, Architectural Collaborative; Teddy Cruz, Architect; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Curator of Contemporary Art, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC); Gridthiya Gaweewong, Independent Curator and Artistic Director, The Jim Thompson Art Center; Hou Hanru, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of the Exhibitions and Museum Studies Program, San Francisco Art Institute; Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter, Artists and Directors, The Trinity Session contemporary art production team; Shannon Jackson, Professor of Rhetoric and Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Maria Lind, Director, Tensta Konsthall; Chus Martínez, Chief Curator, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Sina Najafi, Editor-in-Chief, Cabinet magazine; Marion von Osten, Artist, Writer, and Curator; Ted Purves, Artist, Independent Curator, and Chair of the Social Practice graduate program, California College of the Arts; Raqs Media Collective, Artists, Curators, Researchers, and Media Practitioners; Gregory Sholette, Artist, Writer, and Assistant Professor of Sculpture, Queens College, The City University of New York; SUPERFLEX, Artists; Christine Tohme, Director of Ashkal Alwan, and Independent Curator; and Sue Bell Yank, Writer, Arts Organizer, and Assistant Director of Academic Programs, the Hammer Museum.

Bik Van der Pol is the collaborative practice of Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol (both live and work in Rotterdam). Since they began working together in 1995, their installations, videos, and drawings have interrogated the temporality of physical and cultural spaces. In 2007, they designed a screening format and guidebook for the Istanbul Biennial’s Nightcomersvideo program throughout the city that broadened public access to the “high culture” event, as opposed to the traditional design of an exclusive screening structure. Their work has also been shown at the 10th Biennale de Lyon in 2010 and the Moscow Biennale in 2007. www.bikvanderpol.net

Carolina Caycedo (born in 1978 in London; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist who is invested in urban street cultures, issues of immigration, and processes of exchange. Her practice often incorporates bartering in city streets in order to develop an alternative value system to the traditional capitalist structure. In 2002, starting with a van with a full tank of gas, she subsisted for a month solely on what she could barter in Vienna for her project Daytoday, that spanned seven years. Her work has been exhibited in well-known museums and festivals worldwide, including the 2009 New Museum’s Generational, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the 2003 Venice Biennial and the 2002 Istanbul Biennial.

Surasi Kusolwong (born in 1965 in Ayutthaya, Thailand; lives and works in Bangkok) builds market environments that place an emphasis on social interaction over economic exchange. His practice navigates between public and private spaces, playing with concepts of both economic and cultural values, and the dialogue between people, art, and consumer products. In his project Minimal Factory ($1 Market)/Red Bull Party (with D.J.) (2002), Kusolwong recreated a typical Thai street market within a gallery space, selling a plethora of Thai-manufactured objects for one dollar each. He has shown internationally, including exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.

MadeIn Company was initiated in 2009 by conceptual artist Xu Zhen and has since produced work in a range of media. The company’s name refers to the mass manufacturing of goods, but also phonetically translates into Chinese for “without a roof,” evoking the sense of openness that permeates the collective’s practice.

Long March Project is an ongoing initiative that organizes international exhibitions and projects, community-based educational programs, and artist residencies. Conceived in 1999 by Lu Jie, the name of the project references the Long March (1934–35) of Mao Zedong and the Red Army of the Communist Party of China, one of the largest political upheavals in history. After establishing the Long March Foundation in New York in 2000, the project officially began two years later when its founding members invited artists, writers, curators, theorists, activists, and others to join them in retracing the historical route of the march. Since then, the Long March Project has taken on the role of art dealer, artist-run space, gallery, commercial enterprise, and publishing house.

Megawords is a free Philadelphia-based magazine that collaborates with dozens of renowned and unknown artists and thinkers to cover the world through words and pictures. Frequently moving beyond the printed page, the magazine has initiated “pop-up” storefront projects and installations, which include guest speakers, musical performances, workshops, and screenings. www.megawordsmagazine.com

OurGoods is a barter network for creative people. OurGoods connects artists, designers, and craftspeople to trade skills, spaces, and objects with each other. More work gets done in networks of shared respect and shared resources than in competitive isolation. By honoring agreements and working together, members of OurGoods will build lasting ties in a community of enormous potential. www.ourgoods.org

SUPERFLEX, founded in 1993 and based in Copenhagen, is an artist collaborative whose projects engage economic forces, explorations of the democratic production of materials, and self-organization. They describe their projects as tools for spectators to actively participate in the development of experimental models that alter the prevailing model of economic production. For the ongoing project Guarana Power (2004), the artists developed a soft drink in collaboration with Guarana farmers in the Brazilian Amazon who have organized themselves in response to the corporate monopoly on the purchase of raw material. SUPERFLEX has participated in most of the international biennials, including São Paulo, Venice, Gwangju, Istanbul, Berlin, Taipei, and Prospect1. They have also had numerous important solo shows in large institutions such as Kunsthalle Basel, Kiasma and the Van Abbe Museum. Their solo show at Peter Blum Chelsea in spring 2010 was chosen by the Village Voice as The Best Art of 2010.

Temporary Services (founded in Chicago in 1998 and currently based in Copenhagen, Philadelphia, and Chicago) is a group of three people (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer). They produce exhibitions, publications, events, and projects that blur the line between art practice and other creative endeavors. They explore the social context and the potential of creative work as a service provided to communities. The group started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago and went on to produce projects including the book and installation Prisoner's Inventions (2001–ongoing, in collaboration with Angelo) and the nationally-distributed newspaper Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics (2009–ongoing). www.temporaryservices.org/MARKET

Time/Bank (e-flux.com/timebank) is a platform where groups and individuals can pool and trade time and skills, bypassing money as a measure of value. Time/Bank, organized by the artists Julieta Aranda (born in 1975 in Mexico City; lives and works in New York and Berlin) and Anton Vidokle (born in 1965 in Moscow; lives and works in New York), is based on the premise that everyone in the field of culture has something to contribute and that it is possible to develop and sustain an alternative economy by connecting existing needs with unacknowledged resources. Time/Bank allows individuals to request, offer, and pay for services in “Hour Notes.” When a task is performed, the credit hours earned may be saved and used at a later date, given to another person, or contributed towards developing larger communal projects.

Curated with Larissa Harris of Queens Museum, Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, presented in partnership with the Queens Museum of Art, is a long-term art project in the form of an artist-initiated socio-political movement. Bruguera began the project by spending a year operating a flexible community space in the multinational and transnational neighborhood of Corona, Queens, which served as the movement’s first headquarters. Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with social service organizations, elected officials, and artists focused on immigration reform, Bruguera examined growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants. Bruguera also delved into the implementation of art in society, examining what it means to create “Useful Art”, and addressing the disparity of engagement between informed audiences and the general public, as well as the historical gap between the language used in what is considered avant-garde and the language of urgent politics.

Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City bestowed the key to New York City—an honor usually reserved for dignitaries and heroes—to esteemed and everyday citizens alike. For this participatory public art project, Ramírez Jonas reinvented the civic ornamental honor as a master key able to unlock more than 20 sites across New York City’s five boroughs and invited the people of the city to exchange keys in small bestowal ceremonies. Upon receiving a key, individuals were then encouraged to explore locations ranging from community gardens to cemeteries, and police stations to museums.

Key to the City sought to ignite the public’s imagination with a complex portrait of New York City that included both the traditional tourist attractions and new places city dwellers might otherwise never visit. The project expanded Ramírez Jonas’s longstanding interest in the key not so much as an object, but a vehicle for exploring social contracts as they pertain to trust, access, and belonging.

It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq was a dynamic and mobile project by Jeremy Deller, commissioned by Creative Time and the New Museum. Intended to stimulate unmediated dialogue about the history, present circumstances, and future of Iraq, the project initially took the form of an exhibition at the New Museum where a variety of people with first-hand experiences of Iraq—journalists, Iraqi refugees, soldiers, and scholars—engaged in conversations with visitors.

At the end of March 2009, Deller took the project on the road and was joined by Sergeant Jonathan Harvey, an American veteran of the Iraq War; Esam Pasha, an Iraqi citizen; and Nato Thompson, Creative Time Curator. The group traveled aboard a specially outfitted RV and conducted conversations at more than ten public sites across the United States, including expanded sojourns at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In tow was the ultimate conversation starter: a car destroyed in a bombing on Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad in March 2007.

After traveling across the country to glean perspectives from artists and activists on the state of democracy, Creative Time’s year-long program Democracy in America: The National Campaign culminates in the “Convergence Center”: a major exhibition, participatory project space, and meeting hall mounted in New York City’s Park Avenue Armory just in time for election season. The Convergence Center at Park Avenue Armory will provide an activated space to both reflect on and perform democracy and will be punctuated by speeches by leading political thinkers as well as community leaders and activists throughout the run of its program. As one of the largest unobstructed spaces in New York, the non-traditional setting of the Armory features interiors—such as its vast drill hall and historic period rooms—that are ideal for artists presenting multifaceted visual and performing arts productions.

Work by over 40 artists will fill the historic rooms on the first, second, and fourth floors as well as the Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. Some of the projects featured include giant, silvered surveillance balloons by Jon Kessler; wearable art by dBfoundation; an installation by Critical Art Ensemble and Institute for Applied Autonomy of the physical artifacts of the 2004 FBI investigation of Steve Kurtz; a 20-foot-tall counter-surveillance tower by Jenny Polak; a nine-foot wooden hobbyhorse sculpture by Allison Smith; and Duke Riley’s functional replica of America’s first submarine.Erick Beltrán, Center for Tactical Magic, Critical Art Ensemble and the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Annabel Daou, dBFoundation, Hasan Elahi, Feel Tank, Luca Frei, Chitra Ganesh & Mariam Ghani, Group Material, John Hawke, Sharon Hayes, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, InCUBATE, Magdalena Jitrik, Matt Keegan, Jon Kessler, Olga Koumoundouros & Rodney McMillian, Steve Lambert, Ligorano/Reese, Pia Lindman, Rachel Mason, Carlos Motta, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Trevor Paglen, Cornelia Parker, Jenny Polak, Steve Powers, Greta Pratt, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Red76, Duke Riley, Martha Rosler, Dread Scott, Allison Smith, Chris Sollars, Chris Stain, Mark Tribe, United Victorian Workers, Chu Yun, and more.

Original historic documents central to American democracy will be exhibited at Park Avenue Armory. These foundational texts include: Declaration of Independence, (a first facsimile printing commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1823); TheEmancipation Proclamation (hand-signed by Abraham Lincoln and authenticated by William Seward); The U.S. Constitution (printed in The Gazette of the United States on October 1, 1787, just 2 weeks after it was sent to the states to be ratified); and a 1789 printing of the Bill of Rights, proposing 17 Amendments.

In addition, curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy organized the inclusion of work by four international artists—Erick Beltrán (Mexico City/Amsterdam), Luca Frei (Malmo), Chu Yun (Beijing), and Magdalena Jitrik (Buenos Aires)—that will offer incisive viewpoints on the notion of democracy and some of its core principles: nation building, freedom of speech, and labor rights. 

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Creative Time is pleased to present Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a project by Paul Chan, co-produced by Creative Time with curator Nato Thompson and The Classical Theatre of Harlem with director Christopher McElroen, featuring New Orleans born actor Wendell Pierce, and in collaboration with New Orleans’ partners: University of New Orleans, Xavier University, Dillard University, NOCCA High School, Lusher High School, Frederic Douglass High School, John McDonough High School, Students at the Center, Neighborhood Story Project, The Porch, and Renaissance Project. 

The Project
New Orleans is the setting for the 20th century’s most emblematic story of waiting. According to artist Paul Chan, “The longing for the new is a reminder of what is worth renewing. Seeing Godot embedded in the very fabric of the landscape of New Orleans was my way of re-imagining the empty roads, the debris, and, above all, the bleak silence as more than the expression of mere collapse. There is a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for tomorrow.” 

The Book
Published in 2010, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide brings together a rich collection of primary ephemera, photographs, articles, and essays that explore the project’s unique community-centric process from conception to completion. Hardcover copies of the book are available for purchase from the Creative Time store, and PDFs of each chapter—along with unpublished, exclusive photos and texts from the Waiting for Godot project—are available for download at www.creativetime.org/godotbook.

The Play
Four free site-specific outdoor evening performances of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot will take place over two weekends in November in two New Orleans neighborhoods — the middle of an intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward, and the front yard of an abandoned house in Gentilly.
November 2 & 3, N Roman St & Forstall St., Lower Ninth Ward, 7:00PM 
November 9 & 10, Robert E Lee Blvd & Pratt Dr., Gentilly, 7:00PM

Collaborations and Shadow Fund
The project has evolved into a larger social production involving free art seminars, educational programs, theater workshops, and conversations with the community. A “shadow” fund will be given to local organizations for rebuilding efforts in neighborhoods where the play is presented. 

Background 
For the past nine months, Paul Chan has worked with New Orleanian artists, activists, and organizers to formalize the shape of the play and broaden the social scope of the project. Visiting New Orleans for the first time in November 2006, the artist was struck by the disquieting stillness: no hammer sounds banging in the distance, no construction crews yelling to one another, no cranes visible on the skyline. His immediate response to the city was to imagine an outdoor performance of Samuel Beckett's legendary play, Waiting for Godot. “The longing for the new is a reminder of what is worth renewing. Seeing Godot embedded in the very fabric of the landscape of New Orleans was way of re-imaging the empty roads, the debris, and, above all, the bleak silence as more than the expression of mere collapse,” stated Chan. This production continues the presentation of the play in politically charged environments, including San Quentin prison (1957), a performance directed by Susan Sontag in war-torn Sarajevo (1993), and Classical Theatre of Harlem’s post-Katrina inspired production featuring New Orleans native Wendell Pierce in Harlem (2006).

As an arts organization that for 33 years has enlivened public space in NYC and challenged the notion of what art can be, Creative Time immediately signed on to present this project in New Orleans and launch its national program. “We traveled with Paul Chan to lay the groundwork with the goal to involve and benefit the local community in all facets of the production. Meetings were held with neighborhood groups and individuals to listen to concerns, learn from their insights, and adapt planning with their challenging advice,” stated Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director, Creative Time. “More than a play, the work is a socially engaged performance at the heart of a national crisis,” added Nato Thompson, Curator and Producer, Creative Time. 

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from the poetic to the empirical. The more pragmatic techniques include those used by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in projects made with students and other non-art groups that aim to strengthen peoples’ roles as agents of change in their own environments. See, for example, their map intended to help longshoremen and truckers identify chokepoints in the cargo trade network. In their similarly empirical projects, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, examines the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface. CLUI embraces a multidisciplinary approach that forces a reading of the American landscape (such as the disfiguring effects of culling natural resources from the picturesque banks of the Hudson River), thereby refamiliarizing viewers with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.

ARTISTS

Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, kanarinka (Catherine D’Ignazio), Julia Meltzer, David Thorne, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker, Alex Villar, Yin Xiuzhen, Lize Mogel

Curated with Elizabeth Thomas. Featuring Bas Jan Ader, Theo Jansen, Icelandic Love Corporation, Yoshua Okon and Fritz Haeg, CarianaCarianne, Erkki Kuriennemi, Breyer P Orridge, Jonathon Meese, Sister Corita, Panamerenko, Witch Vortex.

Meticulously crafted animals that move on their own, healing machines that exude beneficial energy, love-filled performances, and statues that honor past and present deities — these were some of the works that made up The Believers, an exhibition that opened at MASS MoCA on April 7, 2007. The Believers wasn’t about “belief” per se, but rather about the believers themselves, whose deeply held personal truths fly in the face of skepticism, irony, and often, reason. The exhibition included new work by three of the artists.

Some artists in the exhibition pondered (and suggested answers for) some of the most fundamental questions that have long captivated philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists alike, from the nature of matter, the possibility of immortality and the elements of identity, to the dynamics of human interaction, the limits of physical capacity, and the power of the human mind. Bas Jan Ader’swork, for example, was fueled by an unrelenting desire to search despite his constant failure. While making In Search of the Miraculous, a multi-part work that would challenge the boundaries between art and life, Ader attempted to cross the Atlantic in a 13-foot sailboat. He was never seen again. The Believers featured a photographic series from In Search of the Miraculous.

The Icelandic Love Corporation (ILC) wrote that their work is “fueled by champagne, a natural capacity for mayhem and a devout respect for Dolly Parton.” An all-female art collaborative, the ILC works to break down the barriers between artist and spectator by encouraging audience participation and by staging events in public places. Their belief that “love redeems us all” is neither cynical nor ironic. Through light-hearted, humorous, love-filled and sometimes absurd artworks and happenings, the ILC seeks to provide an alternative to the cold and sometimes harsh reality of consumer culture and technology.

Yoshua Okón and Fritz Haeg installed a new work which included Plan B: Dymaxion Projections, a 70′ × 20′ mural/graphic of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map of the earth. It served as a legend to the locations of significant alternative communities of the 20th century. Located in front of the map was Plan B: Geodesic Dens, made up of three geodesic domes which visitors could enter. Inside the domes were binders of collected research and documentation of the utopian communities referenced on the map. The dome consisted of a pre-fab aluminum frame with a fabric cover featuring digitally produced graphics by the collaborating graphic designer.

The work that some of these artists created is decidedly intimate, providing a window into their personal reality, with little delineation of their art as a category separate from their life. CarianaCarianne, for example, is the name of two distinct individuals, Cariana and Carianne, who occupy the same physical body and create work for, and in response to, each other. CarianaCarianne operate within both legal and artistic spheres to publicly proclaim the fact of their existence. Their multi-media gallery installations typically include framed legal documents, gifts exchanged between Cariana and Carianne, and dual video projections in which Cariana and Carianne engage in a dynamic dialogue. By making their personal dialogue public, CarianaCarianne address issues of freedom and acceptance as they strive to expand our notion of what constitutes the individual and the self. They are creating a new work for the exhibition.

Enigmatic and difficult to characterize, the sheer magnitude and diversity of Genesis P-Orridge’s work, as well as that of his public profile, attests to his ongoing process of reinvention against the status-quo. In an artistic reinvention, Genesis P-Orridge and his partner Lady Jaye (who passed away in 2007) underwent parallel plastic surgeries to achieve increased physical similarity, becoming a third being: Breyer P-Orridge. The series of work that accompanied this transformation, entitled Pandrogeny, is part of Breyer P-Orridge’s ongoing exploration into the realm of human identity. Breyer P-Orridge created a new installation for The Believers.

Several of the artists employed objects, sayings, and concepts from popular culture to create a new personal reality. Sister Mary Corita Kent gained international fame for her vibrant serigraphs during the 1960s and 1970s. Her early works were largely iconographic, using phrases and depicted images from the Bible. By the 1960s, she began to lift images from popular culture (such as advertising slogans and song lyrics) as raw material for her works, which have been characterized as spiritual and inspirational “bursts of text and color.” Corita’s art reflects her spirituality, her commitment to social justice, her hope for peace and her delight in the world.

Jonathan Meese‘s prodigious output ranged from large-scale installations and wild performances to graffiti-style paintings and bronze sculptures. As a self-proclaimed “cultural exorcist,” Meese freely brought together a wide range of cultural zeitgeist and media images to develop narratives that exploited the nature of power, corruption, and contemporary mythology.

A belief in extraordinary powers of objects and auras characterizes the work of several of The Believers: Emery Blagdon, a former hobo who, at the age of 43, settled on a farm in central Nebraska, spent the last 30 years of his life creating what he referred to as “healing machines.” He lived as a recluse, and his work remained unseen by the public until after his death. Blagdon believed that his intricate constructions — made from wire, metal, lights, and wood scraps — exuded healing energy fields, a phenomenon that he did not, and could not, explain.

A scholar of the work of film-maker, occultist, and Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger, Walter Cassidy is a practitioner of Magick, a system of occult beliefs established by British occultist Aleister Crowley. In his artistic practice, Cassidy makes photographic records of spells and their ritual ingredients. Roger Davis, known as Witch Vortex, resided in Savoy, Massachusetts, approximately 20 miles from MASS MoCA, until his death in 2011. An admitted recluse, Witch Vortex produced numerous large wooden statues on his remote property including those of Pan, a moon goddess, an altar for the phases of the moon, and a steer. He used the statues to both honor deities as well as to enhance various ceremonies he intermittently held on his property. For The Believers the artist created a ritual space in MASS MoCA’s galleries.

Some of the artists’ inspirations come from science and technology. Panamarenko’s machines, one of which will be on display, are intended to liberate people from gravity enabling onlookers to escape the forces of terrestrial and magnetic attraction and to experience new forms of travel and movement as well as exceptional, remote and hitherto unknown locations. In this sense, they are far more than just inventions. They help the viewer to discover how everyday aspects of his life — the way in which he moves from A to B — could be indescribably different and enjoyable.

Theo Jansen, fascinated with technology and the process of biological evolution, developed a series of programmed worms that live, procreate, and die on the computer screen and later began to fashion his own creatures out of plastic PVC tubes, using computer programs to calculate optimal walking motions. Since then, Jansen’s animals (who he refers to as Strandbeest or “beach animals”) have evolved through several generations. Powered by the wind, the most complex of these animals can walk, flap their wings, discern obstacles in their paths and even hammer themselves into the sand in preparation of a storm. Ultimately, Jansen hopes to “release” his animals in herds where they can live out their own lives. The exhibition featured one of his majestic deceased animals plus a video of the creature in its natural habitat.

One of the undeniable pioneers of Finnish electronic music, Erkki Kurenniemi built electronic instruments for himself and also for other people, such as M.A. Numminen, for whom he first created a “singing machine,” with which Numminen participated in a singing contest in 1964. His most ambitious project was the series of digital synthesizers, called DIMI, in the early 1970s. The video synthesizer DIMI-O converted any movements recorded by the video camera into real-time sound and music. In 2002, Finnish film director Mika Taanila made a documentary film on Erkki Kurenniemi, called The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, was screened as part of the exhibition.

At a time when the very idea of history seemed under siege — by governments grown forgetful, by media assaulting already shortened attention spans with ever tighter news cycles, and by historians themselves, provocatively re-interpreting long-held truths — artists exploited the material of history to shape and give new meaning to the present. Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History spotlighted the growing interest in historic reenactment and revision in contemporary art. The show included over 30 works ranging from video to sculpture to photography. Participating artists included Paul Chan, Jeremy Deller, Felix Gmelin, Kerry James Marshall, Trevor Paglen, Greta Pratt, Dario Robleto, Nebojsa Seric Shoba, Yinka Shonibare, and Allison Smith, plus a new site-specific commission by Peggy Diggs.

In the first large-scale art exhibition to explore the closing gap between human and animal existence, MASS MoCA presented the work of 12 artists from five countries in a major show that opened on May 29, 2005. Becoming Animal: Art in the Animal Kingdom included large-scale sculpture, paintings, drawings, video installation, and major new commissions from Mark Dion and Natalie Jeremijenko and Phil Taylor and work by Jane Alexander, Rachel Berwick, Brian Conley, Sam Easterson, Kathy High, Nicolas Lampert, Michael Oatman, Motohiko Odani, Patricia Piccinini, and Ann-Sofi Sidén (in her largest showing in the United States).

Over the course of the 1990s, the term “intervention” was increasingly used by politically engaged artists to describe their interdisciplinary approaches, which nearly always took place outside the realm of museums, galleries, and studios. A decade later, these “interventionists” continue to create an impressive body of work that trespasses into the everyday world — art that critiques, lampoons, interrupts, and co-opts, art that acts subtly or with riotous fanfare, and art that agitates for social change using magic tricks, faux fashion, and jacked-up lawn mowers. The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, MASS MoCA’s 2004-2005 exhibition, opened May 28, 2004, and surveyed recent and current interventionist practices, showcasing the works of 29 artists and collectives, including eight newly commissioned works.

In contrast to the sometimes heavy-handed political art of the 1980s, interventionist practitioners carve out compelling new paths for artistic practice, coupling hardheaded politics with a light-handed approach, embracing the anarchist Emma Goldman’s dictum that revolutions and dancing belong together. The projects in The Interventionists — whether discussions of urban geography, tents for homeless people, or explorations of current labor practices — were often seasoned with honey rather than vinegar.

The Interventionists, as an exhibition and as a catalogue, was divided into four subcategories:

Nomads: The works in this section were tools for a mobile society — tents or vehicles which in many cases are intended for displaced peoples — made by e-Xplo, Haha, N55, Lucy Orta, William Pope.L, Michael Rakowitz, Ruban Ortiz Torres, Dré Wapenaar, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. This section featured new commissions by William Pope.L, e-Xplo, and Haha.

Reclaim the Streets: Actions that occur within the public sphere — on sidewalks, in parks and malls, and tailored to specific communities — were featured in this section. Artists included: Craig Baldwin’s Billboard Outlaws, Biotic Baking Brigade, God Bless Graffiti Coalition, Haha, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, William Pope.L, Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini, Reverend Billy, StreetRec, Valerie Tevere, and Alex Villar.

Ready to Wear: These artists produced tools and clothing for specific political uses. Designed like a suit of armor or gear for a specific sport, these clothes provide shelter and protection and facilitate political activism, among other things. Artists included: Lucy Orta, Ruban Ortiz Torres, Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Yes Men, and YOMANGO.

The Experimental University: Artists in this section used anthropology, biology, geography, and other scientific disciplines for artistic or political purposes, rather than for scientific goals. By taking experiments out of the laboratory and placing them in new contexts within the museum or on the sidewalk, these artists seek to give viewers access to new information, and the capacity to reach their own conclusions about technical or environmental matters that might otherwise seem remote and untouchable. Artists included: 16 Beaver, Critical Art Ensemble with Beatriz de Costa, Tana Hargest, J. Morgan Puett, Spurse, subRosa, and The Atlas Group.

The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere was curated by MASS MoCA assistant curator Nato Thompson. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog which serves as an introductory guide to — and survey of — interventionist strategies. This user’s manual of interventionist practices includes essays by Gregory Sholette, founding member of the New York art collective REPOhistory (1989-2000) and PAD/D or Political Art Documentation and Distribution (1980-1986), Nicolas Mirzoef, Associate Professor, Art History at SUNY Stony Brook since 1998, and Thompson. The catalog is distributed by MIT Press.

On July 3, 2003, MASS MoCA presented the first United States one-person exhibition of the work of French artist Alain Bublex, featuring selections from his series Plug-in City (2000) in the Works on Paper and Meehan Galleries. Alain Bublex’s artistic practice hovers somewhere between thoughtful historical investigations of city planning and a fanciful, poetic interface with urban reality. In some of his projects, Bublex dusts off urban planning proposals of the 20th century that were dismissed as utopian, and attempts to bring them to life. His photographic works become vantage points from which to view the potential transformation of the environment. The show was presented in conjunction with Fantastic, MASS MoCA’s exhibition of the works of five artists who embraced a world of hallucinatory, visionary, and utopian ideas.

The Plug-In City (2000) project was based on a proposal drawn up in 1964 by the English architect Peter Cook, a member of the experimental Archigram group. Cook, a visionary architect and urban planner, imagined a form of disposable and mobile urban design in which homes and bridges can simply be snapped on or plugged in. The proposal consisted of enormous building frameworks where many standardized and interchangeable cells could be connected. In providing a continually shifting landscape, the town would meet the immediate needs of its inhabitants, in a permanent state of movement and change. Peter Cook’s project was, of course, dismissed as utopian and never built. However, Bublex has found its legacy alive and well in the form of the prefab bungalows used on large construction sites. His Plug-In City series allows a viewer to entertain the possibility of Peter Cook’s proposal coming to life with the assistance of these modular, transitory homes. Bublex finds hints of past utopias in the contemporary world.

Alain Bublex was born in 1961 in Lyon, France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Macon and the Ecole Superieure de Design Industriel in Paris. He lives in Lyon and works somewhere else. A former designer for automobile-maker Renault, Bublex’s most recent solo exhibition was at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris. His work is in the collection of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain; Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; and FRAC Rhone-Alpes, FRAC Provence, FRAC Basse-Normandie, and FRAC Alsace.

Fantastic featured two major bodies of work by Gregory Crewdson, Twilight and Hover, and new works by Miguel Calder, Nils Norman, Alicia Framis, and Temporary Services and Angelo. This imagery, populated by alien lights, levitating hippies, and utopian schemes, teeter in the fantastic moment, beguiling us to linger there with them on the precipitous cusp of possibility. Philosopher Walter Benjamin believed that meaningful social transformation required these disorienting moments just beyond the real: In his view, the fantastic is a powerful tool for preconceiving — and reordering — our world.

DSLR was a weekend campaign of April 27, 28, and 29th, in 2001 that attempted to reclaim all the space, land and visual culture of Chicago back to the people who work for it, live in it and create it. It was curated/organized by Nato Thompson, Josh MacPhee and Emily Forman.

Reclamation projects, those that actively trespassed with the intent to resist, took place across the city and throughout the weekend. Whether they were spilling out of the sewers, taking the parks, invading the steps of City Hall, scrambling up trees or cramming the sidewalks, these projects actively engaged everyday life. A huge array of measures were taken to infuse Chicago with the passion that a socially conscious movement demands.

The theme of this exhibition came out of discussions where we, a small collective of responsible citizens, recognized a pattern among a diverse range of art and activist practices. As the movement to resist capital and control grows to global proportions, artists/activists/radical citizens have once again found common ground. The umbrella term, reclamation, seems to encompass the wide array tactics in use. Whether this is through squatting, guerilla gardens, pirate radio, graffiti, hacking, billboard manipulation or performative public interventions, these practices all resist the encroachment of top down centralized control and private capital. Projects of reclamation situate the producer at a critical intersection of power. It is at this nexus that we intended to position the DSLR campaign. Important in this goal was the connecting of people with disparate practices and backgrounds. We hoped to reveal connections and energize people on the robust range of strategies that are possible.