For this exhibition, Sue Jeong Ka has established a partnership with the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. Until 1945, the building was used solely as a courthouse. Their neighbor organization, Jefferson Market Garden is built on the site of the Women’s House of Detention, which operated until the Correctional Institution for Women was moved to Rikers Island between 1971-1974. In the 1970s, The New School attempted to acquire the site to house their burgeoning Center of New York City Affairs, which would have included an annex of Jefferson Market Library on the ground floor. While this arrangement never eventuated, the attempt reveals the complex interplay between public and private institutions; between libraries, universities and prisons. Ka’s work touches on the inherent tensions between the hospitality of public spaces, the covert institutional complicity of municipal services, and the property market. Such organizations have very different agendas that are nevertheless structurally connected. Her work consists of a book in which she reproduces the archival materials documenting this history, accompanied by a conversation with NYPL librarian Andrew Fairweather about the library’s potential hospitality. Throughout this exhibition, Ka will repair books withdrawn from circulation in the New York Public Library; these will be sent to the library at Rikers Island. A multi-faceted project that spans material and social practices, this piece opens doors to a variety of conversations, and resists definitive answers. Alongside Ka’s work is a piece by Sable Elyse Smith drawn from The New School’s art collection. A poetic meditation on the violence of the carceral system, this letterboard reflects on the artist’s experience visiting her father in prisons over the past 20 years.

Sue Jeong Ka’s work seeks to meet communal needs. From commemorations of female Asian immigrants from the 19th century to a trilingual community newspaper and a piece assisting queer and immigrant homeless youth in New York apply for federally issued ID, her artwork seeks to mobilize traditional art spaces for community services and in so doing, critique the public structures in which we exist. She is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program (New York) and a recipient of the 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the Create Change Fellowship, artist in residence at The Laundromat Project (New York), the Studio in the Park, Queens Museum/ArtBuilt (New York) and The Drawing Center (New York).

For this exhibition, Nikita Gale searched within The New School’s archives for texts, ephemera, class lectures, notes, and media recordings with any mention of the word “silence.” She found two videos of conversations held at The New School addressing the language used within social and political debates, as well as the role of women in journalism (speakers included Svetlana Mintcheva, Leslie Camhi, Mary Miss, L. Somi Roy, Jill Scott and Robert Atkins). Though these recordings were catalogued in the archive, their actual contents were unknown until the artist commissioned digitized versions. Gale has edited the audio from these discussions and created a script using transcribed portions of the talks - presented as a spatialized audio work played back on a directional speaker. Gale’s process in this work uncovers the often hidden and buried nature of archival materials, and how information and ideas, though documented, still have the possibility to be kept silent and hidden. The New School, with its many programs, student and faculty organizations, and informal collectives, maintains a poly-vocal conversations that overlap and, as a result, are often drowned out. Through this work, the artist expands the meaning of silence beyond a lack of sound, exposing the institutional process of muffling or concealing that happens within systems of documentation and dissemination. Nikita Gale explores objects as tools for interrogating social, political, and emotional space. Often working with sound and the objects that either produce or muffle noise, Gale creates discursive pieces that propel a deeper look into how patterns of thought and behavior are reflected in the material remnants of our world. Gale holds a BA in Anthropology from Yale University and an MFA in New Genres from UCLA. Her work has been shown at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), CUE Foundation (New York), 56 Henry (New York), among others.

Camilo Godoy, Rehearsal for Diplomacy, June 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

For this exhibition, Camilo Godoy stages performances and dance workshops that complicate dancer Jose Limon’s legacy in the context of the State Department’s support of his work during the Cold War Era. Calling attention to the power dynamics set in motion by this institutional support of Limon’s work, Godoy reveals the ways that politics and Queer Latinx identities have been have been systemically de-emphasized in Limon’s work to fit within the official, heteronormative and hegemonic portrait of the United States at the time. Through performed actions, reading of texts, and participatory workshops, Godoy reconstructs this history in a site-specific context, the Orozco Room, itself a conflicted set of political symbols and historical juxtapositions. The room is named for a mural painted there by Jose Clemente Orozco, which was one of the first site-specific artworks commission by The New School. Completed in 1931, the frescoes depict modern political and social revolutions that defied enslavement and oppression around the world, along with idealized scenes of universal brotherhood and labor, both intellectual and physical. In the 1950’s, the section depicting portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin was covered with a yellow curtain after complaints and pressure from both within and outside the The New School community. These objections were set amidst the backdrop of the anti-Communist McCarthy era. While Limon was traveling the world promoting United States arts and culture, Orozco’s murals were partially visible, succumbing to political pressures of Cold War-era New York City. Godoy’s performances and workshops explore Limon’s techniques of falling. Dropping to the ground is a tactic for subtle, personal uprisings; responding to failed interactions in the course of a day, it is a metaphor for navigating institutional and international political pressures. Camilo Godoy’s multidisciplinary practice considers performance and performativity as a means to deconstruct social and political frameworks. Incorporating research and process-based collaborations into his performances he invites a critical look into the narratives and experiences that are left in the margins of our cultural histories. An alumni of Parsons and Lang, Godoy’s work has been featured at the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), CUE Art Foundation (New York), Recess (New York), and coleção moraes-barbosa (São Paulo), among others.

Caroline Woolard, The Meeting (Installation View). 2019. Laminated walnut with satin finish, nylon net, foam, mycelium, glass, wooden spheres. Courtesy of the artist.

Sometimes meetings are vibrant exchanges. Sometimes they are a bureaucratic chore. Occasionally they are tense stand-offs—a conflict zone. The New School has been a site of thousands of meetings between artists working together across disciplines. Born out of the artist’s experience at The New School as adjunct faculty, The Conversation Game honors the many collaborations that have been hosted by this institution, from John Cage’s mushroom class in 1959 to Jean Gardener’s ‘threeing’ practices (which continue to be shared and used in informal networks of faculty at the New School) and Sekou Sundiata’s America Project. And yet The New School is not a utopia of collaboration; only 19% of New School faculty are employed on a full-time basis and adjuncts’ economic precarity shapes pedagogy and interpersonal relationships within and beyond the institution. With this work, Woolard asks how the New School might support research about equity and cooperatives while maintaining inequitable labor conditions for faculty. The piece occupies three spaces: a wall of the gallery, the conference room adjacent to the gallery, and the office of a staff member and curator at The New School. In the conference room, where the artist herself has often attended meetings and nurtured collaborations, a collection of objects come to life as part of an evolving game. Spheres made from timber and glass can be rolled across the table from one participant to another during a meeting. Their circulation on the table both facilitates conversation, and reveals the power dynamics that underpin institutional meetings. The room remains a working meeting space throughout the exhibition; anyone who uses it can use the tools that the artist has installed there. Indeed the game will evolve throughout the exhibition in response to user feedback. In playing on the institutional script of the meeting, Woolard proposes strategies for collaboration that nevertheless raises the issue of adjunct labor within a hierarchical power structure. Woolard’s practice spans sculpture, installation, performance and pedagogy and includes barter networks and collaborative educational models. She is the co-founder of barter networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop, the Study Center for Group Work, BFAMFAPhD.com, and the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative. Her work has been commissioned by MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Time, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others and has been written about in The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times.Making and Being, her forthcoming book about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda, will be published in the fall of 2019.

Shevaun Wright, Double Redaction (detail). 2019. Paint, neon light, archival documents. Courtesy the artist.

Shevaun Wright draws our attention to a history of litigation. In 1990, The New School sued the National Endowment for the Arts to remove an obscenity clause put in place during the ‘Culture Wars’. The clause—which draws a false equivalence between obscenity, homoeroticism, and child pornography—responded to was put in place following two controversies surrounding NEA-funded projects in 1989: a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work that included homoerotic photographs, and Andres Serrano’s infamous ‘Piss Christ’. The artwork for which the school received funding—a collaboration between the artist Martin Puryear and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh—was not impacted by the clause. The New School was one among several institutions that contested it on the principle of freedom of expression. Inscribing this clause on the wall, Wright restages its erasure using neon and opalescent paint. A slash of light at once crosses out and illuminates this section, reminding us that while redacted, it remained in the contract ‘under erasure.’ Wright’s accompanying legal advice speculates as to the etymological origins of obscenity, which is said to derive from ‘off scene,’ denoting that which is not on stage. Understanding the university as a platform with the power to include and exclude, she indicts The New School’s historically white and male curricular focus. Perhaps the university’s focus on the lofty ideal of freedom of expression itself left the clause’s target of how eroticism under erasure. Wright is an artist and lawyer. Her work uses the legal contract as a medium to explore the law from a postcolonial and feminist perspective. She addresses themes of sexual violence, institutional corruption, the ongoing effects of colonialism and (drawing on her Australian Aboriginal heritage) critical race theory. She is an alumni of the Whitney Independent Study Program (New York), an Art & Law Program Fellow (New York) and an Australian Cultural John Monash Scholar.

Jonathan Gardenhire, Memoranda/Speculations 1 (I Ain’t Dead Yet, Mother Fucker) (detail). 2019. Digital chromogenic prints. Edition of 3 + 2APs. Courtesy the artist.

Jonathan Gardenhire’s installation pays homage to a work in The New School’s art collection. Gardenhire first encountered Glenn Ligon’s diptych Condition Report (2000) in the corridor of The New School en route to class. Ligon’s piece, which is an etching of his earlier painting with a conservator’s annotations, replicates the sign worn by striking sanitation workers in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. Taken out of context, the phrase ‘I AM A MAN’ can mean many meanings; for Ligon, the condition report’s documentation of damage and decay signaled the passing of time and with it, the ongoing negotiation of civil rights legacies. For Gardenhire, the question of race and masculinity resonates in this piece, and his own photographic practice reflects a deep engagement with portraiture that pulls the moniker ‘man’ into a personal focus. In these thick accumulations of research materials, reproductions of Condition Report appear alongside photographs and texts by Thelma Golden and Henry Louis Gates, Marvin Gaye, bell hooks, Langston Hughes, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Marriott, Herman Melville, Walter Mosley, Walt Whitman, and Richard Wright among others. The artist notes that, coupled with pornographic images (some of which are appropriated), a tenderly inverted portrait and a smile sporting grills—the last photograph that the artist took as a student at Parsons—they “become like a muscle with a peculiar role in the larger body or constellation.” This orrery shows the material practices of citation and the public life of Black male embodiment; is “history [as] not only what hurts but what arouses, kindles, whets, or itches.” Gardenhire is a photographer and cultural producer whose work considers the erotics of Black masculinity and questions of value and commodification. He is a graduate of the photography program at Parsons School of Design where he worked under the tutelage of Bill Gaskins and the late photographer George Pitts. His work has been shown at Aperture Foundation (New York), Medium Tings (New York), the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), among others.

Lucia Cuba, Wearables To/For Protest. 2019. Hand-sewn garments, felt. Courtesy the artist.

They are on the body and about the body–about the constrictions of gender norms, the stigma of female anatomy, the control of reproductive rights, the unwillingness of institutions to pay for healthcare or childcare. Many of these pieces are in Spanish, and playfully exploit the political possibilities of its grammar. In one piece, Cuba plays on the Spanish form of abortion: while the English word ‘abortion’ is a noun, the Spanish ‘aborto’ is a verb. Conjugating the verb across the opening of a tunic, Cuba slips between agencies. This exhibition includes eight garments, several of which can be tried on. While from a distance they resemble banners held aloft in a protest, wearing them reveals the intimacy of garments and stories they tell. An alumni of and faculty at Parsons School of Design, Lucia Cuba is a designer, textile artist and scholar based between New York and Lima, Peru. She approaches fashion as a political and performative device, exploring how it can expand beyond commercial and aesthetic contexts. Cuba’s work engages with textiles and wearable forms as objects that convey political, social, environmental, and public health issues. Cuba’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), BRIC Arts Media (New York), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam), Museo Amparo (Puebla), OCT Art & Design Gallery (Shenzhen), ART LIMA (Lima), among others.

Yonkers International Press, The Book is Someone to Touch. 2019. Performance. Courtesy the artist.

In The Book is Someone to Touch, Yonkers International Press brings together the disciplines of dance and publishing to show the intimate choreographies of holding, reading, writing, coding and printing. Reflecting the history of dance and its challenges with documentation, this work simultaneously engages with and resists the archive. The artist asks what, if anything, of movement can be captured in the archive, and what does an archival impetus do to movement? For In the Historical Present, YIP is creating a course reader collating writing by students and professors, transcripts of chat-room conversations, materials gathered on forays around the school, and whatever gallery visitors choose to scan. Seeking to capture the movements of and through this exhibition, it will be a running commentary, a container to catch the spillage of what cannot be recorded contained in the exhibition and its catalogue, a register of bodies moving through the space of the gallery. In September and October, Yonkers International Press will host workshops writing, performance and publishing workshops.

Benjamin Van Buren is a graduate of Lang’s Arts In Context program with a focus on dance and philosophy, as well as an alumna from The New School for Social Research with an MA in Liberal Studies. He founded Yonkers International Press (YIP) as an experimental publishing house that archives and re-disseminates materials collected at live performances and dance festivals.

Domestic Performance Agency

Domestic Performance Agency (DPA), led by Athena Kokoronis, is an open and process-based platform foregrounding the often hidden, ephemeral labor of hospitality, and the social dynamics that underlie the daily tasks that maintain our domestic spaces. The artist has prepared a meal that is shared with the exhibition’s visitors during the closing reception, which is the culmination of a process of mushroom cultivation and collaborative conversations with New School Sustainable Design faculty Jan Mun and Christopher Lee Kennedy, whom Kokoronis met on mushroom foraging expeditions to search for and cultivate fungi growing on the natural surfaces of city life like trees and grass. This collaboration calls back to John Cage’s experimental pedagogy at The New School in the 1960s, when he led students on mushroom hunts. Mycelium grow upon vegetables, producing mushrooms and other edible fungi, a network of intertwined growths that depend on their proximity and ability to mix with one another. Here mycology becomes a vector for interconnected social life, a point of departure for hospitality. Instead of depicting the collaborative process through objects, DPA serves its result to the audience, privileging the audience’s experience over the gallery’s orientation towards fine-art objects.

Domestic Performance Agency (DPA) is the name and space of Kokoronis' current choreographic process exploring aspects of performance production, curation, food, clothing, and searches for the creative economy within these realms, which begins and extends out of domestic scale with hospitality. DPA Soup Subscriptions, for example, fun year round. DPA has collaborated with Jasmine Hearn, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Jessie Young, Angie Pittman, David Thomson, Marion Spencer, Tyler Rai. Athena Kokoronis published CookBook Domestic Performance Agency with Yonkers International Press (YIP) in conjunction with the Dance & Process series at The Kitchen in 2018. A second edition will come out in Fall 2019 in conjunction with In the Historical Present. DPA is also represented by the Lydia Rodrigues Collection (LRC).