Spring 2016 R&D Season: LEGACY
Cheryl Donegan, Whoa Whoa Studio (for Courbet), from the series The Janice Tapes, 2000 (still). Video, sound, color; 3:21 min. Courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix
Organized by the Department of Education and Public Engagement, the New Museum Spring 2016 R&D Season: LEGACY explores the ways and means by which our connections to the past are actively produced, evaluated, maintained, reproduced, and refuted. Operating across various presentational and pedagogical formats, the Season includes new projects by three artists: Cheryl Donegan, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Michael Kliën (in collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company). Here, LEGACY and its constructs are considered with respect to fashion, the readymade, utopian communities, institutional histories, and social choreographies.
“Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials”
January 20–April 10, 2016
Fifth Floor
Working across video, painting, and performance, Cheryl Donegan (b. 1962) explores the production and consumption of images in mass culture, middlebrow design, and art history. In her performance and video work spanning from the early ’90s to the early ’00s, Donegan often used her body as an apparatus for mark-making, parodying conventions of commercials and music videos while considering the politics of self-representation. Over the last decade, she has continued her exploration of the mediated image and her interests in surface, compressed space, and the mark’s indexical relation to the body in paintings and sculptures produced in her studio and in videos distributed on social media.
Donegan’s New Museum residency and exhibition, presented as part of the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY, tackle the ways and means by which our connections to the past are produced, fabricated, and renewed, particularly in fashion and art history. “Scenes + Commercials” comprises works from throughout Donegan’s career, bringing together key projects with others that represent new, though related, directions in her practice. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the Resource Center will feature a major new installation by Donegan, titled “Concept Store,” that displays garments, textiles, objects, videos, and works on paper she has created, alongside elements she has sourced from websites such as eBay and Vine. In these and other works, the artist engages in a process she calls “refashioning the readymade” by alluding to longer histories of repurposing in both art and culture.
Panel: Fold, Screen, Skin: Contemporary Space in Contemporary Art
Saturday January 23, 3 PM
Exploring slippages between tactile and virtual worlds, artists and curators Howie Chen, Matt Connors, Jess Fuller, Josh Kline, and Andrew Ross will examine the compression of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surfaces of the screen and the canvas.
Panel: Refashioning the Readymade
Thursday February 11, 7 PM
A panel of artists, designers, and writers, including Eric Mack, Mary Ping, and Emily Spivack, will consider how online shopping, social media, performance, and legacies of craft have allowed them to push the boundaries between art and fashion in their recent work.
Screening and Panel: Marjorie Keller’s Daughters of Chaos
Friday March 11, 7 PM
This screening of Marjorie Keller’s film Daughters of Chaos (1980) will be followed by a panel discussion on her legacy and unusual trajectory as an artist. Panelists will include artists Robert Buck, Alika Cooper, and Cheryl Donegan, and film scholar P. Adams Sitney.
“EXTRA LAYER” Fashion Show, produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me
Thursday April 7, 7 PM
Cheryl Donegan will premiere “EXTRA LAYER,” a collection of outerwear commissioned by the New Museum and produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me, during this event.
Support for “Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials”
“Beatriz Santiago Muñoz”
April 20–June 12, 2016
Fifth Floor
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s (b. 1972) projects blur the lines between ethnography, fiction, and documentary film and examine the symbolic and material histories of the local communities she observes with her camera. Her engagement with LEGACY will grapple with the ways in which our connections to the past are actively produced, maintained, and refuted, with an eye to utopian communities, institutional histories, and social choreographies. For her exhibition on the Museum’s Fifth Floor, Santiago Muñoz will premiere a new body of work that includes a series of 16mm portraits of anthropologists, activists, and artists working in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Her films capture the aspirations and imagined futures of dissidents, feminists, and political organizers who are deeply invested in alternative models of being, and use these individuals’ stories as allegories for larger political possibilities in these regions.
Support for “Beatriz Santiago Muñoz”
Michael Kliën, Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A.
January 16, 2016, 3–7 PM
Off-Site Location: Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune Street, Floor 11, New York
A further extension of the New Museum’s engagement with LEGACY will take the form of a special off-site performance at the Martha Graham Studio Theater, organized by R&D Season artist and choreographer Michael Kliën. In this one-time-only dance event, a multigenerational group of performers from the Martha Graham Dance Company’s past, present, and future will excavate their relationships to Graham and the underlying “movement forces” that bind them to one another, to Graham, and to the Company. Organized by Kliën with dramaturge Steve Valk, Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. will bypass the institutionalized social structures of the Company to uncover new paths of organization and potential between its participants. Audiences will be invited to explore the work for any length of time. Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. is copresented with the Martha Graham Dance Company, as part of its ninetieth season, and Performance Space 122, as part of the COIL 2016 Festival.
Support for Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A.
New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas around LEGACY
Sessions: March 7–May 23, 2016
Applications due: January 11, 2016
Consortium: May 21, 2016
Aligned with R&D Season themes, New Museum Seminars provide a platform for discussing and debating ideas as they emerge and for developing scholarship directly referencing art’s place in culture. A group of ten to twelve adult participants from diverse backgrounds will meet regularly for twelve weeks to plan and implement a bibliography as well as a public event featuring leading figures whose work has shaped the topic of study.
Visit New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas for more information, a full list of supporters, and program applications.
Experimental Study Program
Classes: February 4–April 21, 2016
The New Museum’s Experimental Study Program (ESP) pairs youths (fifteen to twenty years old) with artists in residence to collaborate on projects and research related to Season themes. Over the course of a full semester, teens have the opportunity to learn about contemporary art and engage in critical discussions about culture. This Season, through close work with peers and in interactive workshops, participants will collaborate with artist in residence Cheryl Donegan on the premiere of her outerwear collection.
Support for ESP
About the R&D LEGACY Season Team
The New Museum’s Department of Education and Public Engagement is spearheaded by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement. Cheryl Donegan’s residency and exhibition is curated by Burton, with Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator. Donegan’s “Concept Store” is curated by Burton, with O’Keeffe and Alicia Ritson, Research Fellow. Michael Kliën’s Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. is curated by Travis Chamberlain, Associate Curator of Performance and Manager of Public Programs. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s residency and exhibition is curated by Burton and Lauren Cornell, Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives, with O’Keeffe. New Museum Seminars are organized by Burton with Amanda Parmer, Education Associate, and Ritson. The Experimental Study Program is organized by Shaun Leonardo, G:Class and Community Programs Manager, and Emily Mello, Associate Director of Education. Cory Tamler is the New Museum’s Spring 2016 Season Fellow.