Herstory Inventory | Ulrike Müller, Tiffany Malakooti, Barbara Schröder, Gregg Bordowitz, Nicole Eisenman, Jonah Groeneboer, Thomas Lax | Moderated by Arezoo Moseni | Artist Career Development Series Event
FREE - Berger Forum doors open at 5:30 p.m.
On the occasion of the publication of Herstory Inventory, artist and educator Ulrike Müller is joined by writer and artist Gregg Bordowitz, artist Nicole Eisenman, artist Jonah Groeneboer, curator Thomas Lax, designer Tiffany Malakooti, and author Barbara Schröder of Dancing Foxes Press to discuss this collaborative endeavor in the context of contemporary feminisms. The discussion is moderated by Arezoo Moseni.
In 2007, Ulrike Müller found an inventory list describing a collection of feminist T-shirts at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Over the next few years, she selected and handed out descriptions to 100 artists, inviting them to retranslate the texts into drawings. The result, Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists (2009–12), is a collaborative rethinking of feminist imagery that enacts a wide range of political desires and representational strategies. The publication reproduces the full drawing inventory alongside a narrative chronology of the project, edited from Ulrike’s e-mail correspondence with the participants. It lovingly transposes this thought-provoking and open-ended collaborative endeavor onto 272 printed pages.
Ulrike Müller is an Austria-born, New York–based artist, whose practice investigates form as a mode of critical engagement. Her work moves between different contexts and publics, invites collaboration, and expands to other realms of production in processes of exploration and exchange. Recent solo exhibitions include Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (2014); Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Brooklyn Museum (2012); and the Cairo Biennial (2010). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently Outside the Lines, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2014). She is the editor of Work the Room: A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006), and from 2005–8 was a coeditor of the queer feminist art journal LTTR. She currently serves as the co-chair of the painting department in Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Tiffany Malakooti is an independent graphic designer and head of Special Projects at Bidoun Projects. She has collaborated on archival projects and events with the Beirut Art Center, Cabinet Space, PS1, the Serpentine Gallery, UbuWeb, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Dancing Foxes Press, founded in 2012 by Barbara Schröder and Karen Kelly, is an independent publishing platform whose mission is to render into distinctive form ideas that emerge from the minds of artists, writers, and scholars. Projects are driven by content and collaboration. Through research, editorial support, and hands-on production and craftsmanship, the Press develops and produces tangible representations of inspired concepts. Recent publications include Leidy Churchman: Emergency (2013), Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries (2014), and Zoe Leonard: Available Light (2014).
Gregg Bordowitz is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. He has performed his poems and improvisational lectures at Tate Modern (London), Iceberg Projects (Chicago), Murray Guy (New York), Temple Gallery (Philadelphia), and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), among other places. His publications include General Idea: Imagevirus (Afterall Books, 2010) as well as The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986–2003 (MIT Press, 2004). His films have been widely shown nationally and internationally. He is the director of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Low-Residency MFA program, and serves on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Nicole Eisenman is a New York–based artist. Her paintings and sculptures have been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Studio Voltaire (London, 2012), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2013), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2014), and the ICA Philadelphia (2014). She has participated in group exhibitions internationally, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011) and Museum Ludwig Cologne (2006). Eisenman is participating in Manifesta St. Petersburg and the Gwangju Biennale (both 2014). Her work was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in Prospect II (New Orleans and Los Angeles, 2011) and she is the winner of the Carnegie Prize for the 2013 Carnegie International.
Jonah Groeneboer is a Postminimalist abstract artist with a focus on sculpture, installation, and drawing. His work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and internationally in London, Berlin, and Oslo. He has given artist talks at the Drawing Center, Ox-Bow School of Art, and New York University. His work has been written about in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and most recently in Art Journal in a conversation between Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy on Queer Formalism. This summer Groeneboer will be a resident at the Fire Island Artist Residency. He has taught studio, art history, and theory classes to both undergraduate and graduate students. He lives and works in New York City.
Thomas Lax was appointed associate curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art in May 2014. For the previous seven years, he worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he was most recently assistant curator. His interests include American and international contemporary art, with a focus on performance and video, as well as politically and socially engaged practices in all media. At the Studio Museum, he has organized exhibitions including When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2013); and Ralph Lemon: 1856 Cessna Road (2012). Lax has written locally and internationally for many venues and is a contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, and Mousse. He is a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts; is a member of the Catalyst Circle at The Laundromat Project; and serves on the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Advisory Committee, the Advisory Board of Recess, and the Vera List Center Advisory Committee. Lax holds a Master’s degree in Modern Art from Columbia University.
Arezoo Moseni is an artist. Her work has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions at major venues in the United States and abroad, and it is held in numerous public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Mead Gallery and Musee de La Photographie. She is the recipient of several fellowships and grants including the Carnegie Corporation of New York | New York Times award, Kentler International Work on Site grant, Yaddo Fellowship and Artists Space Independent Project grant. She received a BFA at Utah State University, a MA and MFA at the University of New Mexico, and a MLIS at Pratt Institute. She curates exhibitions and events at The New York Public Library where she has initiated several exhibition and program series featuring the work of emerging and renowned artists, authors, critics, designers and others.
Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, Artist Career Development Series have addressed the growing needs and concerns of independent creative workforce in New York City since 2006.