Justin Lieberman

Please join us this Sunday, April 7th at 4:00pm for a lecture with artist, teacher, activist, curator, and critic Justin Lieberman. He will be going through six of his recent exhibitions and speaking about his creative process. Starting from the question of "What is the impetus for a work of art" Justin will examine the process by which he ended up with such widely eclectic and fascinating work. The theoretical and practical aspects of his practice will be considered, from the effects of reading german philosophy to the impact of art fairs. After the presentation there will be a lively discussion we invite you to participate in. The Lecture will be livestreaming at www.bhqfu.org You can check out Justin's work HERE Event links:  Image countesy of the PlaGMaDA The Play Generated Map and Document Archive and NYU Game Center Sunday, March 24 4pm – 6pm   Please join us THIS SUNDAY for a Game Arts themed BHQFU Lecture. We are bringing together representatives from the NYU Game Center and the Play Generated Map and Document Archive (PlaGMaDA) to discuss educational, curatorial, aesthetic and archival issues related to Game Art. The NYU Game Center (represented by Charles J Pratt) is dedicated to the exploration of games as a cultural form and game design as creative practice. Their approach to the study of games is based on a simple idea: games matter. Just like other cultural forms – music, film, literature, painting, dance, theater – games are valuable for their own sake. Games are worth studying, not merely as artifacts of advanced digital technology, or for their potential to educate, or as products within a thriving global industry, but in and of themselves, as experiences that entertain us, move us, explore complex topics, communicate profound ideas, and illuminate elusive truths about ourselves, the world around us, and each other.   The PlaGMaDA (represented by director Tim Hutchings) preserves, presents, and interprets play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space. The Archive solicits, collects, describes, and publicly displays these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right. By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations. Event links: Charles J. Pratt is an instructor at the NYU Game Center.  He has been a freelance game designer since he graduated from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 2007. He’s worked on projects for companies as varied as Adult Swim, Footlocker, and the British government. He’s also been involved with a number of independent games such as the early web-based social game Casablanca, the street game Search Brigade, and most recently a tower defense game for the iPhone called Critter Defense. In his spare time he teaches Game Studies, blogs at GameDesignAdvance, and hosts the podcast Another Castle, a series of long form interviews with people working and thinking about games in the New York metropolitan area. Tim Hutchings is the founding director of The Play Generated Map and Document Archive (plagmada.org), a quasi-scholarly project that collects and preserves the ephemeral products of games and game play.  The archive is a partner of The Strong Museum in Rochester, NY. Hutchings has mounted exhibition from the museum holdings at FACT in Liverpool, the Nikolaj Kunsthalle in Copenhagen, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, and Cranbrook among others.  The archive has also begun a publishing project, examining the space for play between game studies and fine art. Hutchings is also a fine artist represented by the I-20 Gallery.  He's had solo projects at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Long Beach Museum of Art and elsewhere.  Upcoming game/art crossover projects will be featured at the SFMOMA and PS1.

 John Connelly on Felix Gonzalez-Torres

     John Connelly is currently the Director of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, where he leads educational and archival efforts in support of the Foundation's mission to foster appreciation and study of the works of Gonzalez-Torres amongst scholars, art historians and the general public. While working at Andrea Rosen Gallery from 1994 through 2002 he had the opportunity to work directly with Gonzalez-Torres and gained a unique perspective into the artist's intentions and modes of production. In 2000, Connelly founded John Connelly Presents (JCP), conceived of as a curatorial project, JCP grew to become an internationally renowned contemporary art gallery which concluded in 2010.  During this period he co-founded the New Art Dealer’s Alliance (NADA) to support and encourage collaboration amongst his fellow art dealers and professionals; the NADA Art Fair was founded soon after. Along with the artist Andrea Zittel, Connelly also co-founded the experimental exhibition platform High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, CA. He holds a BA in Art History from SUNY Purchase and did his Master’s studies at Hunter College in New York.

     Connelly will present a summary of the malleability of Gonzalez-Torres oeuvre as seen in the recent traveling exhibition  Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, curated by Elena Filipovic.  First installed at Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels in January 2010, the exhibition travelled to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (May 2010) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (January 2011). The exhibition presented the works in Gonzalez-Torres' oeuvre which are physically permanent and those works which are manifested anew each time they are exhibited. Midway through the installation at each museum, the exhibition was taken down and completely re-installed. The re-installations were curated, without obligations to the initial checklist or installation, by three conceptually rigorous artists: Danh Vo in Brussels; Carol Bove in Basel and Tino Sehgal in Frankfurt.  Connelly will speak about how each installation revealed concepts of ownership, authority and interpretation in Gonzalez-Torres’ work and contributed to the entire exhibition’s crucial variations.

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"Enough with Dude-Centric Net Art Shows"

Sunday, February 24th, 4pm  |  34 Avenue A (BTWN 2ND & 3RD ST) 3rd Floor

Citing trends demonstrated by several exhibitions during the last year, “Enough with Dude-Centric Net Art Shows” appeared in April 2012 on popular New York-based art blogArtFCity (formerly Art Fag City). The highly contentious post drew a flood of comments from a wide swathe of artists, male and female, working online and off, serving to re-consider the question of sexism within curatorial practice.

Representatives from the editorial staff of ArtFCity (Paddy Johnson, Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch) will talk about the content of this post, discuss responses to it and continue the conversation it set in motion.

From ArtFCity's "About" page: "ArtFCity is New York-based art blog dedicated to providing exposure to emerging contemporary art and under-known artists. We believe that engaging in smart, critical debate helps us better define and shape the world we want, and that creative production of all forms is essential."

Speakers:

Paddy Johnson is the founding Editor of Art Fag City and the Arts Editor for the L Magazine. In addition to her work on the blog, she has been published in magazines such as New York Magazine, The Economist, and The Guardian and linked to by publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Awl. Paddylectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2007 she received a scholarship to attend iCommons conference in Croatia as the art critic. In 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Paddy was nominated for best art critic at The Rob Pruitt Art Awards in 2010 and has won Village Voice award for Best Art Blog for the last two years running. Paddy also writes a regular column on art for The L Magazine.

Whitney Kimball began writing for Art F City immediately after getting her painting degree in 2011. Her work appears regularly on Capital New York, The L Magazine, and Art F City. 

AFC's Senior Editor Corinna Kirsch received her MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she published a thesis on 1960s and 1970s video art. From 2009 – 2010, she worked at the Weisman Art Museum where she curated exhibitions for the Drawing and Photography Galleries. In 2010, she received the C Magazine New Critics Prize. Alongside AFC, she contributes to The L Magazine’s blog The Measure.

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CAVEH ZAHEDI
Sunday, February 10th, 4pm  

Autobiographical filmmaker Caveh Zahedi’s controversial new film, The Sheik and I (2012), was banned in the United Arab Emirates, blacklisted by Toronto International ­Film Festival Programmer Thom Powers, and named the best film at SXSW by Film Comment. 

His previous feature, I Am a Sex Addict, won the 2005 Gotham Award for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You.” His previous films include In the Bathtub of the World (2001), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Winner of the Critics’ Prize at the 1994 Rotterdam Film Festival), and A Little Stiff, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.

Zahedi will present a recent piece, Couples Therapy, and respond to questions.

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