The Visible Hand: Curated by David Borgonjon

JANUARY 7 – FEBRUARY 15, 2017

THE VISIBLE HAND

CHLOË BASS BFAMFAPhD MAUREEN CONNOR DEVIN KENNY JEN LIU CURATED BY DAVID BORGONJON

JANUARY 7 – FEBRUARY 15, 2017

THE VISIBLE HAND

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Thomas G. Devine

Lynn Crawford

Theodore S. Berger Thomas K.Y. Hsu John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan

Christen Martosella Brian D. Starer

Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Ian Cooper

Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney

Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass

STAFF

Sharon Lockhart

Corina Larkin Executive Director

Rossana Martinez

Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director

Irving Sandler

Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Manager Chase Martin Development Associate

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Juan Sรกnchez Lilly Wei

Andrea Zittel

CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through

exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines from living artists.

This exhibition is the winning selection from the 2016-17 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury

comprised of panelists Herb Tam, Curator and Director of Exhibitions at

the Museum of Chinese in America; Michelle Grabner, artist and writer;

and Leslie Hewitt, artist. This program provides one deserving curator the

necessary time and resources to realize an innovative project, with the aim of encouraging curatorial research in tandem with exhibition planning. In line

with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the curator, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition.

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Drawing on a business history term for management—the visible hand—as a corrective to the invisible forces of the market, this show posits art as a form of managerial practice. After all, artists already live, breathe and work as single-person institutions.

The artists presented in The Visible Hand set aside the too-convenient narrative of art as an oppositional critique of corporate management, and propose art as existing within and alongside institutions rather than outside of them. The works here reflect on the entire process of artistic production, from early socialization to the arts education system to market pressures to systems of distribution, consumption and storage.

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THE VISIBLE HAND RACHEL VALINSKY

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Managers in dead offices devise control systems that free the workers’ minds so they can focus on work.

Managers in living offices encourage individuals to pursue self-actualizing goals.

—Mónica de la Torre, The Happy End/All Welcome1

Let’s start by dismissing the notion that a purely agonistic relationship between artist and institution still holds. Such a strict opposition, if it ever applied, has eroded, revealing the increasing degree to which the notion of an outside—an alternative sphere of production and circulation, safe from the reaches of institutional and corporate strongholds—also must fall. Artists today operate as administrators and consultants, grant writers and promoters, developers, coders and graphic designers; they ride the wave launched in the sixties and accelerated in the nineties of the diversification of the labor force within the arts, a diversification which ceaselessly draws art practice closer to non-art professions.

Yet this diversification initially enabled greater autonomy: the sixties and seventies saw the rise of artist-run spaces and institutions, as well as growing art and labor movements born during periods of political turmoil and social upheaval, like the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). By the mid-nineties, figures like Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler helped to reframe the conversation around artistic labor within institutions in terms of services for artistic projects. These proposals would not only reframe

the relationships between artists and institutions but also better define the nature of artistic labor, proposing a model for dealing with practical and material realities and ultimately, as Fraser writes, offering “a professional model of collective selfregulation.”2 The Visible Hand, curated by David Borgonjon at the CUE Art Foundation, New York, operates within this lineage, featuring five artists who self-fashion as workers performing a range of functions, within and alongside institutions.

They engage specifically with a turn toward the managerial. Yet, rather than attempt to form purely independent, counter-economic, or supposedly autonomous practices, they offer up direct engagements, adopt executive strategies, and intervene within the quickly shifting set of relations between the artist and forms of management. In so doing, they open up opportunities for positions in consultancy, advocacy, and management that artists might occupy as skilled laborers.

It was Michel Foucault who in the late seventies developed a theory of the “entrepreneur of the self.” The neo-liberal subject becomes 7

her own producer, becomes human capital.

The entrepreneur of the self is mobile and flexible, innovative, and constantly growing.

The economic model of supply and demand here extends to social relations, and maps onto the individual’s relationship to herself as well.

Today, the enterprising self is also becoming the managerial self, as innovation meets complex logistics, meets the demand for evermore transparency and efficient workflow.

For Alfred Chandler who coined the term “visible hand,” the so-called “invisible hand” of market forces described by Adam Smith in his 18th century book The Wealth of Nations, was replaced by modern managerial enterprise in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus the “invisible hand,” an imperceptible force balancing supply and demand of goods in a free market and resulting in incidental social benefits experienced by individuals, was supplanted by the “visible hand” of management at all levels of the supply chain, turning quality into a matter of logistics, bureaucracy, and administration. This too has led to greater hierarchizing within management, a rise of professionalism within the corporate structure, and greater specialization of tasks.

At the same time, small and big business alike have, since the fifties, assimilated and adopted a model of “creativity” and “innovation” at the core of their values and strategies; we have only to think of the upsurge in research and

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development (R&D) departments and the proliferation of think tanks. If the late nineties saw the rise of a discursive paradigm of “selforganization” with its emphasis on emancipatory social relations, productive contestation, and unfixed or deregulated collective identity in the eyes of representational art world institutions,3 the emergence of start-up culture dealt these presumed independent artistic formations yet another blow. The very vocabulary and methods of collective work and co-creation, social relations and reflexive practice could easily be repurposed for businesses churning out a more and more innovating, multi-skilled, and flexible workforce, and to expand the reach of the “creative industries.”

It is within this context—quickly and by no means comprehensively sketched here—that the artists in The Visible Hand are situated. As Borgonjon specifies, the five artists in the show “reflect in their work on the entire process of artistic production.” The exhibition thus traces an arc that also reveals the many possible roles of the artist today, while understanding artistic practice as intricately complicating the artists’ relationship to administration and management, corporate structures, the art market, education, and more intimate, affective relations.

Chloë Bass’ conceptual practice weaves through situations like a choreographer or director— turning everyday occurrences, interactions, and

encounters into subtle experiments in socialization.

Testing different types of communication in both pre-determined and improvised contexts, Bass continuously reworks the contours and dynamics of collaboration, co-creation, and intimacy. In her multichapter work The Book of the Everyday Instruction, she stages a number of interpersonal situations including movement exercises, workshops, and studio-based procedures. Chapter Six takes the kitchen as an experimental laboratory: recipes are drawn up to generate emotional states while the structures of production and consumption that govern the kitchen become terrain for conceptual exercises focused on conviviality and play. In this way, Bass recalibrates proximity and intimacy by recoding its everyday vocabulary within the museum.

Maureen Connor’s ongoing project Personnel, begun in 2000, looks specifically at the artist’s embedded role within the art institution. In her interventions, she provides responses to the staff’s avowed or perceived needs and desires; creates solutions for storage, space occupancy, and exhibition design; offers methods for conflict resolution; and improves morale, amenities for staff, and staff engagement with local communities.

She takes on the role of polyvalent human resources mediator or consultant in devising direct strategies that are presented and enacted in the museum over the course of an exhibition. While staff are called upon to carry out the scripts and procedures she develops, they also perform new roles within the workplace, or perform their prescribed roles according to a new repertoire of gestures and attitudes. The notion of

a choreography or orchestration returns here at the scale of the institution to propose concrete, playful, and potentially transformational measures within the workplace.

Jen Liu addresses questions of labor and gender within broader socioeconomic and political contexts. If, like Connor, she works within a register of projection or speculation, hers take the form of fictional narratives, which privilege what she calls the “thin materiality of propaganda images, power sloganeering, and sci-fi speculation.” In the series of watercolor paintings The Pink Detachment (2016), Liu considers the aesthetics of factory lines operated by a female work force in Southern China—a gendered choreography of labor that adopts both the cold seriality of mechanized gestures and the liveliness of modelled, embodied forms. For Liu, imaging female manufacturing allows for the visualization of a utopia of production, unmediated by outsourced labor.

Devin Kenny’s work echoes the suggestion of an appropriation of the means of production and distribution inherent to Liu’s paintings. He circumvents the art market by internalizing its language and demands. His Subscription-based art (2016) is a prototypical interface, which gives patrons agency in determining certain criteria inflecting the works they commission. While market trends are under increasing scrutiny, tracked in their every peak and lull, Kenny banks on a confirmed audience and does away with the unreliability of demand. In this way he both operates under the assurance of compensation

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for artistic labor and renders more intimate the scale of his collector base, taking the reins on monitoring, interacting with, and producing works for known quantities.

Kenny’s Subscription-based art also speaks to the specific economic pressures that are at the heart of BFAMFAPhD’s (the collective’s name is made up of acronyms for art school degrees at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral level). Ten Leaps: A Lexicon for Art Education (2015-ongoing) is a multi-platform work composed of a set of cards, an informative website, a number of workshops, and freely-circulating syllabi. Through this project, the collective provides exemplars for conceiving of diverse economies in the arts. With a focus on generating solidarity economies and networks of support, mutual aid, social justice, and democracy, Ten Leaps: A Lexicon for Art Education effects a rigorous mapping of all the stages of artistic labor and practice along the supply chain, covering everything from sourcing materials to transferring goods to representing your project.

As a group which advocates for cultural equity and reform in arts education, BFAMFAPhD’s work is all the more prescient in its attempt to answer urgent questions such as “What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?” What alternative economies of production can be put in place to support artists and producers as they work their way through the burdens of precarious living and heavy loans within the existing economy?

Accompanied by a series of public programs,

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including workshops on artists’ administration of institutions and a symposium on art as service focused on the model of the artist as consultant, The Visible Hand expands the notion of the managerial to a range of practices that are not merely art analogues, but rather have implications for broader discussions of labor, political economy, and institutions today. As art economies and forms of artistic labor face increased precarity and duress under the new Trump administration, The Visible Hand boldly proposes that a reconsideration of the role of the artist in social and economic relations could be beneficial to the generalized reconfiguration of social, economic, and political life that is required today.

1 Mónica de la Torre, The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017).

2 Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service” (lecture, The Depot, Vienna, October 1994).

3 See Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies, and Jackob Jakobsen’s “There is no alternative: THE FUTURE IS

SELF-ORGANISED,” last accessed November 17, 2016, http://societyofcontrol.com/llibrary/culture/davies_

dillemuth_jakobsen_TINA1_future_selforganised.htm.

This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which appoints established art critics to serve as mentors for emerging writers. In 2014, CUE joined forces with Art21, combining the Art Critic Mentoring Program with the Art21 Magazine Writer-in-Residence initiative. Each writer composes a long-form critical essay on one of CUE’s exhibiting artists for publication in CUE’s exhibition catalogue, which is also published by Art21 in its online magazine. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation. org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org.

Writer Rachel Valinsky is an independent curator, writer, and translator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in East of Borneo, Millennium Film Journal, BOMB, C Magazine and The Third Rail, and she is the editor of Warm Equations (Édition Patrick Frey, 2016). Rachel is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, a library, reading room, and writing space in Bushwick and a contributing editor at Éditions Lutanie, Paris. In Spring 2015, she was an art writer in residence at the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Rachel holds a BA in art history and comparative literature from Columbia University and is a doctoral student in art history at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Mentor Charmaine Picard is an art historian, curator and editor trained at the University of Chicago. She is currently editing a book on art collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz to be published by Rizzoli in 2017. She is also the editor of a monograph on Cuban artist Yoan Capote published by Skira in 2016. She writes about modern and contemporary art for publications including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, Art in America, and Modern Painters. She is a former associate editor at The Art Newspaper and her curatorial experience includes positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Artists and institutions (separation) Artists vs institutions (antagonism) Artists w/ institutions (support) Artists in institutions (embedding) Artists as institutions (embodying)

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The artist

the institution

DAVID BORGONJON

“[In the 20th century], in many sectors of the economy the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith referred to as the invisible hand of market forces.” —Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. and “The museum is not to engage in extra-artistic activities,” writes the director of the Guggenheim. It’s 1971. He’s explaining why it’s OK to remove an artwork that also happens to be an expose of the shadier dealings of a museum trustee.1 What little relation the artist and the institution have to each other should be kept to a pleasant minimum.

The artist and the institution—that “and” has expanded significantly since 1971, as artists have expanded beyond the figure, the frame, and the room to the ultimate context: the institution.

What is an institution? As logician John Searle puts it, “a collectively accepted set of rules (or procedures) that enables institutional facts.” By this he means facts of the type, “this counts as that.” Think bills of currency, sports goals, artistic merit; these are all institutional effects.2 The institution provides a collective hallucination, a permitted one. (Sounds like something that art could be good at.) We could lift business historian Alfred Chandler’s phrase for the intentional production of the economic, “the visible hand,” and reapply it to the social to describe an ideal for the artful act.

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vs Every statement needs its straw man: a specious argument that can take endless amounts of abuse because it can’t talk back. Mine is the idea of the artist as outsider.

There are outsiders, of course: people are excluded from good jobs, golf clubs, Lower East Side bars and the Whitney Biennial. Paradigmatic oppositional figure. But nobody is outside their own exclusion; a line separates a space into inside and outside, but it also proves that there is no distance between the two.

For many reasons, we like to think of art and management in opposition, or at least some significant tension. Private equity types take up collecting to get away from business; artists complain about floods of emails that keep them from the studio.

These fantasies drive the linked histories of art and management. Things have changed since Chandler wrote his paean to American managerialism; Chiapello and Boltanski’s The New Spirit of Capitalism explains best how the artistic ideals of flexibility, autonomy, and expressiveness were adapted into new forms of productivity in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The artist as hero, as genius, as critic, as the privileged perspective beyond the charmed circle of the institution. Nah. We can’t really plead ignorance anymore.

(NB: I’m all for healthy competition. But the artist, in general, will always and eventually lose to the institution; unless (wait for it!) the artist is an institution, of course.)

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w/ So, say that the artist is not oppositional. Say that, as Andrea Fraser put it so indelibly, it’s time to move beyond the critique of institutions to the institution of critique.3 The institution is embodied and cannot be escaped, let alone subverted. (The word “subverted” is on an art blacklist, by the way.)

Critique is a Greek tragedy: note the ruthless irony with which art worlds commodify their own criticism. (How many ways can a painter insult their collector? How much will a company pay a consultancy to maim their staffing structure? Is this getting kinky?) The tragedy of critique is an old story. In other words, we’ve had fair warning.

Recovering critics (ENTPs in the Myers-Brigg test, imagine) often encounter the austere, bipolar temptation. We start out criticizing our contexts, but end up celebrating our complicity. (The words “co-opt” and “capitalism” are not far away, now.)

Complicity is not much different: it’s tragicomic. It’s simply a vs2, a performed critique of the critique. But this approach gives us the worst of all worlds—a moral high ground that leads nowhere, the accusation of having sold out, with none of the typical benefits that come with selling out. (Think Berlin Biennale. Think Dis.) If you’re getting in bed with the Man make sure you’re getting the Money.

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in We are, in a trivial sense, always in the institution. Of course, sometimes we are in a specific institution, and some of us are especially in.

An artist can embed within an institution, like a journalist in a military unit.

They may be cordial and even useful; but their loyalties lie to something external. Practices of embedment, of the kind descripted in Marisa Jahn’s Byproduct: On The Excess of Embedded Art Practices, run through at least two parallel traditions: an American tech-centered tradition that includes every overuse of the term “lab” you can imagine, and a more European tradition that focuses on administration.4 These traditions are, needless to say, newly invigorated by Silicon Valley, which has combined techno-libertarianism with old-school management to produce one of the most scaled art projects since the New Soviet Man.5

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as It is perhaps trivial to point out that the artist is the prototypical manager— she often manages herself as a one-person enterprise. Even when she has the ability to scale into a full studio or even corporation, still, the work of maintaining the social brand (at openings, in interviews, in the moment of making) comes down to one person.

The jump from this simple observation to the new prevalence of what Carson Salter has called the enterprise artist is no surprise.6 Artists ape the trappings of institutions; perhaps they need the free reign that a corporate front provides, both figuratively (a pseudonym and a bluff at once) and legally (in the case of limited liability and tax structure).

This puts us on the track of institutional liberation, as Not An Alternative put it.7 “Institutional liberation isn’t about making institutions better, more inclusive, more participatory. It’s about establishing politicized base camps from which ever more coordinated, elaborate, and effective campaigns against the capitalist state in all its racist, exploitative, extractivist, and colonizing dimensions can be carried out.”

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1 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate and the Museum,” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 159-92.

2 For Searle, the basic institution is language—though he doesn’t necessarily mean grammar so much as symbolic reasoning. See John Searle, “What is an institution?” in Byproduct: on the excess of embedded art practices, ed.

Marisa Jahn (Toronto: YYZBooks, 2010), 22-32.

3 A classic: Andrea Fraser, “From the critique of institutions to an institution of critique,” Artforum, September 2005, 278-266.

4 For examples of the former, look into Experiments in Art and Technology, the LACMA Art and Technology Program, and Eyebeam. For examples of the latter, look into Artist Placement Group, WochenKlausur, and Diakron.

5 Boris Groys, Art power, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

6 Carson Salter, “Ambi_: enterprise artworks, the artist-consultant, and contemporary attitudes of ambivalence,” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013).

7 I cannot recommend Not An Alternative’s contribution to e-flux, “Institutional Liberation,” highly enough. Published in e-flux Journal #77 (November, 2016). Available online http://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76215/ institutional-liberation/.

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David Borgonjon is Curator at Eyebeam, a Brooklyn-based studio for technology by artists. He believes that it’s high time for us to apply artistic power to the hard problem of better institutions. His projects include Face to Interface, an on/offline project on digital intimacies for SCREEN, and Really, Socialism?!, an exhibition focusing on socialist history as speculative art. His writing appears in Randian, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Golden Age: Perspectives on Abstract Painting Today, and the Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art (forthcoming). He has been supported by the New Museum Seminars, the Laundromat Project, and Wave Hill. Projects have been covered in Art in America and Yishu, among other publications. www.davidborgonjon.com

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CHLOË BASS Name an institution that you: Are for: Activism Are against: White Supremacy Are outside: Marriage Are inside: CUNY Are: New York City

The Book of Everyday Instruction is an eight-chapter project about one-on-one social interaction, investigating different iterations of “the pair.” Chapter Six: What is shared, what is offered, focuses on the process of pairing, of blending together flavor as an act of emotional continuity. Structured as a meal in four courses (engagement, maintenance, romance, and healing), this work offers conceptual pairings to guide participants past a scarcity mentality of emotional economy. The pair extends beyond two people, to include the relationships between people and institutions.

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ChloĂŤ Bass Gather the house around the table (House of Ceramic, Glass & Metal), 2016. Installation detail.

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BFAMFAPhD

Ten Leaps: A Lexicon for Art Education is a free resource for educators that can be used to analyze and reimagine power relationships in the arts. The text, workbook, and card game are tools that prompt investigations into the whole life of projects—the ways materials are sourced, how the labor for producing a project is organized, how tools are accessed, how an artwork is supported, copyrighted, narrated, encountered, acquired, and how it finally departs, ready for another life cycle.

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Emilio Martinez Poppe and Susan Jahoda, Ten Leaps: The Card Game, 2016.

Part of Ten Leaps: A Lexicon for Art Education, 2015-ongoing.

Cards, website, book, syllabi. BFAMFAPhD Contributors Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Caroline Woolard.

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MAUREEN CONNOR Name an institution that you: Are for: friendship Are against: hierarchies Are outside: adolescence, youth Are inside: late middle age Are: urban life

Office storage was one of the most pressing problems afflicting an overworked and understaffed institution; Connor developed a set of shelving units, that served as clothing, furniture and architecture simultaneously. Constructed to overwhelm the wearer, they made movement awkward even while monumentalizing the employees’ work. This project is one in a decade-long series focused on human resources in the cultural institution.

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Maureen Connor Personnel 3, Portable Storage, 2002.

Nylon, vinyl, steel, storage items.

Dimensions variable.

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DEVIN KENNY Name an institution that you: Are for: Any institution that pays its employees equitably, and allows them to have a decent life outside of the 50+% of their waking hours spent laboring. People should be able to thrive as a result of their work. I’m for individuals and organizations that challenge and improve institutions, if even on a temporary basis. I wish for that process to be less transitory.

Are against: I’m against institutions that pop up to maintain inequity under new names, more covert processes, and arcane techniques.

Are outside: Nothing, though I court the outside and its potential. Even the spaces that exclude me know that I exist; they produce or maintain structures to keep me out.

Are inside: Nothing fully. I’m interested in finding strategies for making the interstitial roles, those neither ‘outside’ nor ‘inside,’ more important.

A platform for ameliorated commission systems will be displayed at the CUE Art Foundation. Are you a collector? Have you ever wanted to commission a piece, but also didn’t want to step on the toes of the artist and backseat drive their work? The answer is here!

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Devin Kenny, Prix Fixe, 2012.

Digital audio files, plastic, inkjet prints, network. Special thanks to Kevin Chen.

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JEN LIU Name an institution that you:Â Are for: those that advocate for self-determination and equality amongst people Are against: zero-sum gamers gaming on hate and bigotry, with sophistries and guns Are outside: inner sanctums of highbrow privileges Are inside: outer sanctums of lowbrow privileges Are: the loose biological confederacy of Jen Liu

The Pink Detachment paintings depict a series of large feminine fingers pushing and prodding, across a semi-abstract manufactured landscape. Liu’s exploration of power in the soft, affective form it often takes today draws on the colors and images of meatpacking, ballet, and Foxconn. These figures stand in for forces that are all around us but still too slippery to point to.

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Jen Liu The Pink Detachment: Principle of Perpetual Catastrophe, 2016 Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, gold watercolor, and gesso on paper 51.125 x 33.125 in

Jen Liu The Pink Detachment: Principle of Secure Infrastructure, 2016 Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, gold watercolor, and gesso on paper 51.125 x 33.125 in

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ARTIST BIOS

Chloë Bass is a conceptual artist co-creating performances, publications, situations, and installations. Her work investigates scales of human intimacy, starting with the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), and eventually encompassing entire cities. Chloë is currently in residence at Triangle Arts, and has also been in residence at the Laundromat Project, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Elsewhere, and the Luminary. Recent work has been seen at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; EFA Project Space, Weeksville Heritage Center, the James Gallery, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum, Momenta Art, and Flux Factory in New York; Salisbury University; SPACES, Cleveland; and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, among others. Chloë holds a BA in theater studies from Yale University, and an MFA in performance & interactive media arts from Brooklyn College. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in social practice and sculpture at Queens College, CUNY. You can find her writing most often on Hyperallergic.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective that works at the intersection of art, technology, and political economy.

Advocating for cultural equity since 2014, BFAMFAPhD creates reports, pedagogical tools, and practices. Their work has been exhibited at The Museum of Art and Design, New York, Cleveland Art Institute, and The Brooklyn Museum, New York. Current BFAMFAPhD core members are Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.

Maureen Connor’s work combines installation, video, interior design, ethnography, human resources, feminism, and radical pedagogy. Current projects include Dis-con-tent, a series of community events in NYC that considers the human story behind certain medical advances, particularly how they impact the poor, people of color and women and Labor Relations; a collaboration with Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Poland which continues the work of Personnel, her ongoing project about bringing more democracy to the workplace (since 2000); and the Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT) the collective she co-founded in 2008. In 2012 she co-founded the Pedagogy Group, a cooperative of art educators (artists, curators and writers) who meet to share and collectivize syllabi and readings and to consider how to embody anti-capitalist politics in the ways we teach and learn. She is Emerita Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY where she co-founded Social Practice Queens (SPQ) in 2010 in partnership with the Queens Museum.

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Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and independent curator. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, he relocated to New York to begin his studies at Cooper Union. He has since continued his practice through the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SOMA Mexico, and collaborations with DADDY, pooool, Studio Workout, Temporary Agency, and various art and music venues in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere including: Recess and MoMA PS1 in New York; Theater de Roode Bioscoop, Amsterdam; REDCAT and Freak City in Los Angeles; and the Glue Factory, Glasgow. He received his MFA in 2013 from the New Genres department at UCLA and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Jen Liu is a New York-based artist working in video, performance, and painting, on topics of national identity, gendered labor, fantasy economies, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. Her most recent video, The Pink Detachment, premiered in the 2016 Berlinale Forum Expanded exhibition, and her recent performance commission for six dancers, The Red Detachment of Women, premiered at the Whitney Museum in 2015. She has also presented work at The New Museum, New York; Royal Academy and ICA in London; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Aspen Art Museum; Vleeshal and De Hallen Haarlem, in the Netherlands; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, León; as well as the 2014 Shanghai Biennale. This year she is a resident artist at Para Site in Hong Kong, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space in New York. Jen has current and upcoming projects with LAXART, Los Angeles; The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; and the International Video Art Festival VIDEOFORMA 4, St Petersburg.

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with

the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Agnes Gund The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA) Inc. CAF American Donor Fund Compass Group Management LLC Compass Diversified Holdings Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation The Joan Mitchell Foundation Lenore Malen and Mark Nelkin The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. Squire Patton Boggs William Talbot Hillman Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

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All artwork Š the artists.

Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst.

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