All Projects

How can we gather now?

March 31, 2023 – April 2, 2023

[Presentation & Publication: Symposium]

Eaton DC, 1201 K St NW, Washington, DC

An experimental symposium co-directed by Asad Raza & Prem Krishnamurthy

We are living through a moment marked by many forms of fragmentation, political division, and social isolation, exacerbated by the global pandemic. WPA’s symposium explores the question of gathering within this context.

How can we gather now? is the culmination of two years of research and collaboration. It convenes artists, theorists, and organizers from all over the world as well as artworks and films. Participants include adrienne maree brown, Ambrose Nzams, Ayana Zaire Cotton, Black Techno Matters, Centre for Land Affairs, Cynthia Connolly, Ed Halter, Emily Verla Bovino, Fabiola Ching, Farrah Skeiky, Hope Ginsburg, Imka, Jonathan Yu, Leigh Ledare, Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis, Mayah Lovell, Mēlani N. Douglass, Michael Carter, Mindy Seu, Mojdeh Rezaeipour, Naoco Wowsugi, Nzinga Tull, Philippe Parreno, Renée Green, Richard D. Bartlett & Natalia Lombardo, Rob Rubba, Sarah Morris, Shawna Murray-Brown, Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab, Smoke & Tea, Stefanie Hessler, Suzie Flores, Tara Aura, Tiffany Sia, Tony Cokes, Valerie Wiseman, William Reid, and Yuma “Docta Yew” Bellomee.

How can we gather now? is also itself a gathering and a shared collective experience. It collects a rich variety of experiential modes, from conversations to cinema to shared food to a “drum circle” of synthetic techno rhythms. Raza and Krishnamurthy have offered this urgent question to invited contributors to, who in turn have used it as a prompt for artworks, conversations, performances, workshops, and gustatory experiences.

 

Program Descriptions

Keynote: adrienne maree brown & Prem Krishnamurthy

Co-director Prem Krishnamurthy will be in conversation with adrienne maree brown to kick off this three day-symposium centered around the question “How can we gather now?” This will be a hybrid conversation, adrienne will join by Zoom and Prem will be in-person.

“K is for Karaoke” organized by Prem Krishnamurthy

As a format, karaoke can generate mild to serious discomfort in people, piggyback upon existing artistic excellence, and demonstrate the possible range of vocal virtuosity (or its complete lack thereof)—while also creating community through shared vulnerability and mutual support. Whether you like to belt it out or just cheer on others, please join us for a special event to kick off the symposium and answer the question: “What song would you like to hear sung tonight?”

“Punk Solutions?” with Cynthia Connolly, Ambrose Nzams, and Farrah Skeiky

An intimate, intergenerational conversation with photographer and curator Cynthia Connolly, music writer and zine maker Ambrose Nzams, and photographer and writer Farrah Skeiky about the ways that punk and DIY culture offers solutions to gathering, and how that culture shows up in other parts of our lives.

Conjuring for kitchens, dancefloors, and the cosmos organized by Mēlani N. Douglass

In setting its eyes on the stars, The Apothecary celebrates the celestial power of Nzinga Tull and Mēlani N. Douglass as they join together to explore ancestral technology1 through the works of anthropology, archeology, alchemy and more. From dancefloors to outer space, these two creative sages of adept knowledge search for answers in light of filling our own cup. Whether it be through kitchen magic or quantum physics, the conversation will work to manifest ancestral ingredients that are essential for unlocking the essence of new rituals, theories, and practices to support soul work of the eternal now2. Join this enlightening dialogue as we gather to create collective perspectives on how to activate our individual powers and build the society that fills us all.

1 Ancestral technology, a term coined by Melani N. Douglass to describe the wisdom we intrinsically seek, know and understand from our ancestors

2 A term Mēlani N. uses to describe the past, present and future and the way time folds into itself.

“Umami Taste Development Center in DC” with Naoco Wowsugi, Rob Rubba, Suzie Flores, Yuma “Docta Yew” Bellomee, William Reid, and Tara Aura

At ‘The Umami Taste Development Center in DC,’ we collectively practice observing the different tastes of locally sourced umami broths, which are all vegan, may contain soy, and cooked by Chef Rob Rubba. This synergistic experience of umami heightens our senses and fosters epiphanic connections as we share tastes and stories related to food justice, sovereignty, security, and sustainability.

This communal experience is developed through a collaborative effort between the artist Naoco Wowsugi, Chef Rob Rubba of Oyster Oyster, and umami experts: Suzie Flores, Yuma “Docta Yew” Bellomee, William Reid, and Tara Aura, with additional support from umami assistants Lauren Brown, Kara Harley, and Fabiola Delgado. Capacity is limited to 50 participants.

“Apparitional Experiments – Even the Demons are Censored with The Centre for Land Affairs” organized by Tiffany Sia

The Centre for Land Affairs is a research group based in Hong Kong that investigates land dispossession by property developers, governments, and other hegemonic entities. The heterogeneous group invites researchers and creative workers to compost (with and around) dispossession, art/greenwashing, extraction, and colonial-thinking. For this symposium, The Centre of Land Affairs will re-create a virtual space of an exhibition, which was censored in Hong Kong and 80% of the works were taken down. Facing criticism and pressure on their show, they were told by a Town Planning Board civil servant and a senior Leighton employee, “You can’t show this. You can’t demonize the developers!” Inspired by this prompt of having “demonized” the developers, The Centre of Land Affairs will show this lost exhibition, summoning ghosts that could only appear in a virtual space. They will talk with Tiffany Sia using concealed identities, allowing an opportunity for others to be ventriloquists for this anonymous group. This program is a part of Apparitional Experiments, organized by Tiffany Sia and Speculative Place.

“Apparitional Experiments – Mad Masters / Other Countdowns with Emily Verla Bovino” organized by Tiffany Sia

Emily Verla Bovino will talk with Tiffany Sia about encounters with the syncretic practices known as ‘Cantonese shamanism’ and ‘mediumship’ as they are practiced in Hong Kong, and their transformation into intangible cultural heritage promoted by the tourism industry. What if instead of thinking about these practices as captivating local culture—that carries with it the vestiges of peasant life under feudalism—they are understood as articulating both a sophisticated theory of the ‘apparational’, and as a philosophy that has always been threatening to inter-imperial rule over Hong Kong’s fugitive territories of refuge and escape? The conversation will be introduced with the chronotope of the ‘countdown’ in Hong Kong historiography and the entropic spatio-temporal repetitions and returns, openings and closings that it produces, speculating on its relationship to shamanistic notions of time and space. Participants will be invited to contribute imagined diagrams of ‘other countdowns’ to a collaborative document. This program is a part of Apparitional Experiments, organized by Tiffany Sia and Speculative Place.

Tony Cokes: “Black Celebration”

In “Black Celebration,” (1988), Tony Cokes pairs footage from the 1965 riots in Watts, Boston, Detroit, and Newark with text by The Situationist International, Barbara Kruger, Morrissey, and Depeche Mode’s Martin L. Gore, along with music by the industrial band Skinny Puppy.

The video was shown at WPA in 1989 as part of “The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism” exhibition, curated by Richard J. Powell.

“Memory Museum: A Tea Meditation” organized by Mēlani N. Douglass

Tapping into our senses can unlock ancient memories and remind us that we are not only grounded in our own life stories. Integrative psychotherapist Shawna Murray-Browne, LCSW-C joins Mēlani N. Douglass in The Apothecary as they use the power of smell to bridge cultures and experiences while tracing the intersections of aromas through the tapestry of emotion connecting us all. Through guided meditations and slow sips you’re invited to explore sensations around food as you connect to your deepest memories, experiences and emotions. From there, you’ll be able to share stories from yourself or from others in a meaningful way as you recognize our shared journey through healing, connection, loss and joy rather than viewing them as separate entities. Let’s harness the power of scent to open the doors wide for insightful conversations that can help ground us in the essence of who we truly are—diverse yet deeply connected through our commonalities.

“Apparitional Experiments – Banner-making Workshop with Jonathan Yu” organized by Tiffany Sia

Jonathan Yu will lead a collective banner making workshop using calligraphy components and techniques. During this event, Tiffany Sia will facilitate a conversation with Jonathan to discuss common spaces of expression and the failures of claiming public spaces. This program is a part of Apparitional Experiments, organized by Tiffany Sia and Speculative Place.

“Deep Listening: Horticultural Sound Bath by Very Sad Lab with Smoke & Tea + Imka” organized by Naoco Wowsugi

Very Sad Lab is a houseplant rehabilitation and research-based community-engaged art project developed by artists Valerie Wiseman and Naoco Wowsugi. For this gathering, DC-based sound artists Smoke & Tea and Imka will collaborate with VSL and create a space for an interspecies healing between plants and humans alike through ambient music and plant care tutorial.

“Apparitional Experiments — On Independent Spaces with Ed Halter” organized by Tiffany Sia

Tiffany Sia and Ed Halter will be in conversation to discuss what it really means to run an independent space, discussing Light Industry and Speculative Place.

Keynote: Stefanie Hessler

Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute, will present a lecture about the idea of gathering from different perspectives and sensory approaches. This talk will explore how to attune our human (and non-human) selves to others—across our differences—in order to address the climate crisis and consider the importance of convening with the non-human. Following the lecture, co-director Asad Raza will be in conversation with Stefanie.

“Future Drum Circle” organized by Black Techno Matters

Black Techno Matters, a collective on a mission to reclaim techno as a manifestation of black expression, brings together five DMV musicians for FUTUR3 DRUM C1RCL3, a two-hour jam session and dance party. Think of a drum circle, but with electronic drum machines, played by B_X_R_N_X_R_D, Diyanna Monet, Asha Santee, Stukes, and Blinkhorn. The quintet of forward thinking electronic musicians will gather to create rhythmic l00ps to move our spirits and recalibrate our consciousness to reveal the untapped potential within us to actualize our own futures when we gather around sonic vibration technology. Join us for this exploration of the unifying energy of techno! This event will be lit by black light, so dress to glow.

“Microsolidarity in Practice” organized by Richard D. Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo

Richard D. Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo have contributed a series of games and activities which will be offered throughout the symposium to inspire gathering at different scales and spur deeper connections between participants. Richard and Natalia are co-founders of The Hum, which helps decentralized organizations thrive. Richard is the author of the community practice called Microsolidarity.

“The Making of Fertile Ground” organized by Mēlani N. Douglass

11th generation farmer and founder of Africulture, Michael Carter, visits The Apothecary for an exploration of soil and its healing properties. Bring your mug and be led through a slow sip as we work collectively to uncover the hidden lessons in creating and caring for soil. Journey with us beyond a scientific observation of replenishing land and scientific analysis of this often overlooked yet vitally important alchemical process. Come with your heart open to receive sacred messages from Mother Earth as we sip slowly on offerings of the land and take a closer look at this miraculous process which holds the instructions for rejuvenating the land and our spirits. Through Michael’s ancestral and familial journey, we are reminded through the process of replenishing soil, that trauma can be transmuted into triumph and community can be born amongst great diversity. Embracing this wisdom brings us to an abundant realization that no matter what adversity we have endured, with each season, we have the opportunity for regrowth and powerful transformation. Commit with us to living and working diligently to make our internal and external part of the existence fertile ground.

Film Screenings

Featuring: Hope Ginsburg: Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy; Leigh Ledare: The Task; Lenka Clayton + Phillip Andrew Lewis: Five Hundred Twenty-Four; Mojdeh Rezaeipour: Formations of a Diasporic Body; Phillipe Parreno: The Crowd; Renée Green: Wavelinks: Activism + Sound; Sarah Morris: Sakura

“To Document a Gathering” organized by Mindy Seu

In questioning how ephemeral events might be documented, Mindy Seu has invited Ayana Zaire Cotton, Fabiola Ching, Mayah Lovell, and Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab to participate in the symposium as “Keynote Listeners.” They will participate in programs throughout the weekend and create an archive that will be shared on Are.na. They will archive their interpretations of what has occurred through sketches, poetry, body language interpretation, and other mediums and present their findings at the end of the symposium.

“SEEDED, An affirmation practice” organized by Mēlani N. Douglass

Seeded paper artfully crafted by Melani and Michael has given us all a chance to reconnect with the Earth through our reaffirmations and dream visions. This opportunity is not only a means of sending our good will into the world, but it allows each of us to tap into our power as conscious creators. As we take this moment to bid farewell until next time, writing and planting affirmations is sure to lend its support for our journey ahead in life, love and light!

 

About the Participants

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E. Butler scholarship, and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination, and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of seven published texts and the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, where she is now the writer-in-residence.

Ambrose Nzams is a music writer, zine maker, and lifelong DC hardcore devotee.

Ayana Zaire Cotton is an anti-disciplinary worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. Based in Dawn, Virginia—tucked in between the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund—they are answering the call to steward land that has been in their family for four generations. Ayana recently founded Seeda School, a skill building platform for learning how to code through a black feminist lens, where she publishes a newsletter and podcast titled Soft, Where?. Through the ecosystem of their practice Ayana braids abstraction, teaching, and worldbuilding to engage our collective imagination around the technologies we need in the world we desire.

Black Techno Matters is a DJ Collective based in Washington, DC. Their mission is to reclaim techno as a manifestation of Black expression in a society that has oppressed it by creating spaces, both virtual and IRL, that celebrate the black roots of techno. An assertion and a reminder that Techno IS Black.

Centre for Land Affairs is a research group based in Hong Kong that investigates land dispossession by property developers, governments and other hegemonic entities. The heterogeneous group invites researchers and creative workers to compost (with and around) dispossession, art/greenwashing, extraction, and colonial-thinking.

Cynthia Connolly is a photographer, curator, letterpress printer and artist who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She graduated from both the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and Auburn University’s Rural Studio, worked for Dischord Records, and booked an avant-garde performance venue, d.c. space. In 1988 she published Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes From the DC Punk Underground (79–86) through her independent press Sun Dog Propaganda. Internationally shown and a prolific artist, her photographic work, postcards, and books were exhibited in Beautiful Losers in the United States and Europe from 2004–2009 establishing herself as a pioneer in DIY culture. Her artwork is in private collections including those of Michael Stipe, Jem Cohen, Nick Hornby, Gary Hustwit, and Ian Mackaye as well as the The J. Paul Getty Museum, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Smithsonian Museum of American History, and American University Museum at the Katzen. As Special Projects Curator for Arlington, Virginia, she launched the Arlington Art Truck with a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 2018. The Arlington Art Truck brings curated short interactive artist designed projects to open public spaces. She has been curator for Arlington for nearly twenty years and continues to search the world both as curator and artist to connect disparate places, people, and things.

Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City, and a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York.

Emily Verla Bovino is an artist and art historian based in Hong Kong.

Fabiola Ching is a literary curator and writer researching playful and lavish methods of publishing and communicating around literature. Their practice is guided by curiosity regarding what we have been taught; asking questions such as how can literature be used as a method of rest and enjoyment? What methods of learning and showing love have we not dreamed of yet? Inspired by Afro-nowism theory and their lifestyle as a black lesbian poet, Fabiola writes and curates programming aimed at exploring the ways that storytelling can translate to communal care and liberation within our current ecologies.

Farrah Skeiky is an Arab American photographer, creative director, and writer based in DC. Her work celebrates those who make and do in their element—subcultures, and underrepresented communities—and those familiar moments that make you feel warm and welcomed. In 2020, she self-published a photo book called Present Tense: DC Punk and DIY Right Now.

Hope Ginsburg has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Baltimore Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and Contemporary Art Center Vilnius. Her projects have received support from Women & Philanthropy at The Ohio State University, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She is the recipient of a Wexner Center for the Arts Artist Residency Award in Film/Video, a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship in Film and Video, and an Art Matters Foundation Grant. Ginsburg is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and lives and works in Richmond, VA.

Jonathan Yu is a Chinese calligraphy artist, teacher, and farming apprentice based in Hong Kong.

Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy, and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension. Ledare’s projects have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Ledare’s work has been the subject of major surveys at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013), and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2012). Ledare’s work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2017, Ledare was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Lenka Clayton is a British-American conceptual artist and educator based in Pittsburgh. Her work contemplates, exaggerates and defamiliarizes accepted rules and practices of everyday life, extending the ordinary to the poetic and absurd.

Mayah Lovell is a black lesbian latinx from suburban-area DC. Her artistic studies are synthesized by moiling essence through materials such as 2D visual arts, 3D structures, performance, and prose-poetry. The multidimensional planes of her work reveals the fluidity and vulnerability of lesbianism. These intimacies beckons the psyche of neo-erotica, computation, reclamation of science fiction paradigms, and African spiritualities as transformative resolutions. Lovell’s work is published both online and in print, including a self published chapbook. She has exhibited and performed in Baltimore, Connecticut, DC, and Philadelphia.

Mēlani N. Douglass is a socially engaged artist and curator and is the founder of the award-winning Family Arts Museum—a migratory institution focused on the celebration of family as fine art, home as curated space, and community as gallery. Mēlani’s art and life practice is rooted in rituals of healing informed by ancestral and communal connections. She currently serves as the director of public programs at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and as a consultant on numerous projects. Her work has been highlighted by The New York Times, Atlas Obscura, Shondaland, Bmore Art, American Museum Alliance Magazine, Baltimore Magazine, Artnet, and National Geographic.

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist whose practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Her latest writing surveys historical precursors of the metaverse and reveals the materiality of the internet. Seu’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum in its online form. Its print form received a Graham Foundation grant. Seu holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from UCLA. She is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and a Critic at Yale School of Art.

Mojdeh Rezaeipour is an Iranian-born artist whose interdisciplinary practice bridges her varied backgrounds as an architect, storyteller, and community organizer. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in a wide range of venues, from DIY project spaces in Berlin to museums such as The Phillips Collection. Mojdeh is currently based in Washington, DC, where she is an Artist-in-Residence at Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion.

Naoco Wowsugi is a community-engaged artist who lives and works in Washington, DC. Wowsugi’s cross-disciplinary projects range from portrait photography, and participatory performance to horticulture, exploring the nature of belonging and inclusive community building while they highlight and fortify everyday communal and interpersonal identities. Wowsugi’s art practice blurs the lines between being an artist and an engaged citizen.

Natalia Lombardo is a member of Enspiral, founder of the Newtown Tool Library, and co-founder of The Hum. Her background is in community development, permaculture, and creative activism. She has more than a decade of experience working in self-organizing teams. As a facilitator, coach and consultant, she helps groups to cultivate a collaborative culture through behavioral change and peer-to-peer support.

Philippe Parreno was born in Oran, Algeria, and raised in Grenoble, France. He now lives and works in Paris. His early works include video-conference lectures incorporating footage from television shows and films. In 1999, Parreno collaborated with Pierre Huyghe to buy the copyright to a manga character named AnnLee and create a series of videos titled No Ghost Just a Shell. Other artists created works involving AnnLee, and their collective work culminated in a group exhibition. Parreno continued collaborating on films, creating Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which followed soccer player Zinedine Zidane through a 90-minute match, in 2006; and June 8, 1968, a film about the train that carried Robert Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington, in 2009. Parreno’s films can start anywhere—during a conversation with a friend, from an observation made during a soccer game—but nearly always follow a single person or idea.

Phillip Andrew Lewis is an artist working in a variety of media including photography, video, objects and sound. His creative research often responds to historical events, psychology, and phenomenology. This work consistently examines duration, perceptual limits and attentive observation. Lewis is actively involved in collaboration with artists and various groups. Phillip has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. He received a 2012 Creative Capital Grant in Visual Art for his ongoing long-term project entitled SYNONYM. He has also received generous support for his research from Black Cube, Headlands Center for the Arts, Culture and Animals Foundation, Center for Creative Photography, Foundation for Contemporary Art in New York, Fathomers, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Midway Contemporary Arts Fund, Tennessee Arts Commission, University of Tennessee, Urban Arts Commission, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Sabrina Merage Foundation. He teaches at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. In collaboration with his wife, Lenka Clayton, he runs a project space in Pittsburgh called Gallery Closed which is open 24/7 via two street facing windows.

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker known for her highly layered and formally complex multimedia installations in which ideas, perception, and experience are examined from myriad perspectives. Her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. Green’s exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums and art institutions. In the last decade, her work has been featured in solo or group exhibitions at moCa Cleveland; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; KW Institute for Contemporary Art and daadgalerie, Berlin; Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; MAK Center for Art + Architecture at the Schindler House, West Hollywood; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, all in New York.

Richard D. Bartlett is a Director at Enspiral, a network of self-managing, purpose-driven companies. He co-founded Loomio, a worker-owned company that builds collaboration software, and The Hum, helping decentralized organizations thrive. He’s the author of a community building practice called Microsolidarity. He’s enthusiastic about co-ownership, self-governance, and building relationships of partnership instead of domination to create collaborative workplaces.

Sarah Morris is an American artist. She was born in the United Kingdom, and lives in New York City, in the United States.

Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab is a designer, educator and publisher who was born but not raised in Khartoum, Sudan. She is interested in language, form and specificity, alongside media, Black studies and popular culture. In her work and research, Gallab pursues text as a generative device and publishing as a source of disruption. She is the founding curator and co-author of Samples and Parallels, a publication that invites participants to respond to an appropriated text. In 2018, she wrote and released Headgear, a collection of fragmented passages designed and programmed by Becca Abbe. In 2017, she published Sapphire Tears, a soft poster that addresses her emotional downpour.

Stefanie Hessler is a German-born contemporary art curator, an art writer, and the current director of Swiss Institute in New York.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. She lives and works in New York City.

Tony Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. In 2022, he was the subject of a major survey jointly organized by the Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein in Munich. Other recent solo exhibitions include De Balie, Amsterdam (2022); Greene Naftali, New York (2022, 2018); Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester (2021); MACRO Contemporary Art Museum, Rome (2021); CIRCA, London (2021); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2020); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020); BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Luma Westbau, Zurich (2019); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2019); The Shed, New York (2019); Kunsthall Bergen, Norway (2018); and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012). His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthallen, Copenhagen; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Valerie Wiseman is an artist, administrator, and horticulturist based in Washington, DC.

 

About the Artistic Directors

Asad Raza creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Using actions and processes such as soil-making, tennis, and horticulture, his projects create encounters within and beyond the exhibition setting. They have been realized by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; Gropius Bau, Berlin; the Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Portikus; Metro Pictures, New York; Urbane Kunst Ruhr, Essen; the Lahore Biennale; and his one-bedroom apartment.

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, writer, and teacher. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters. He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design consultancy and organizes Department of Transformation, an emergent, itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. He has directed and curated large-scale exhibitions including “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows”, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; “Our Silver City, 2094” at Nottingham Contemporary; and “Ministry of Graphic Design” in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.

Supporters

Generously supported by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Eaton Workshop, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, Goethe Institut-Washington, and Terra Foundation for American Art

Upcoming

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2024 | 7 - 11pm
2024 Collectors’ Night Gala

Past

Thursday, March 21, 2024 | 5-7pm
Currency: An Exchange of Artist Solidarity
Thursday, June 18, 2020 | 8–8:45pm
Film Screening: ‘Land of Friends’ by Carolina Caycedo
Thursday, September 17, 2020 | 7:30–8:30pm
Artist Talk with Vyette Tiya, and Theresa-Xuan & Antonius Bui
Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 7:30–8:30pm
Artist Talk with Akela Jaffi & Emily Ames
Thursday, September 10, 2020 | 7:30–8:30pm
Artist Talk with Jamie Garcia & Juliana Pongutá Forero
January - March 2021 |
Bound
Friday, March 12, 2021 | 8–9pm
Radical Disobedience
Thursday, March 11, 2021 | 7–8pm
Moving Verse
Thursday, February 18, 2021 | 7:30-9pm
El Fondo Como Protagonista (The Background as Protaganist)
Friday, January 23, 2021 | 6:30-7:30pm
Virtual Arepera with Mercedes Golip
Friday, November 17, 2023 | 7-8pm
meta-meta: Conversation with Colby Chamberlain
Thursday, November 2, 2023 | 7-8pm
meta-meta: Performance with Joshua Coyne
Thursday, October 26, 2023 | 6-7:30pm
meta-meta: Workshop with Some People Press
Saturday, March 11, 2023 | 1:30pm
Destroy the World
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | 5:30-7pm
Queer Life Force: Breathwork + Embodiment Practices
Thursday, March 2, 2023 | 7-9pm
How to build a world (one kiki at a time)
Saturday, February 18, 2023 | 1:30pm
Abolition of Policing—A Critical Theory of Police Power
Saturday, September 9, 2023 | 1-4pm
2023-2024 WPA Season Kick-off & BBQ
Thursday, September 21, 2023 | 7-9pm
2023 Wherewithal Research Presentations
Thursday, July 27, 2023 | 6–7pm
Ama BE: We (too) Grow On Water
Saturday, September 30, 2023 | 1-4pm
Ama BE: Open House
Calling all artists What question fuels your practice? Submit Your Idea How does your process manifest?
Calling all artists What question fuels your practice? Submit Your Idea How does your process manifest?
Calling all artists What question fuels your practice? Submit Your Idea How does your process manifest?