#SEARCHUNDEROCCUPY An exhibition at The New School’s Sheila C. Johnson Design Center |
#searchunderoccupy NEW YORK, February 27, 2012—The New School presents #searchunderoccupy (March 1 – April 1, 2012), an exhibition at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center that explores the energies of the archival impulse of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) through critical, documentary and performance projects. The public opening reception, on Thursday, March 1, at 6:30 p.m., will feature an interactive OWS crossword puzzle challenge and a participatory performance installation using the People's Mic. Like many social and political movements of our time, OWS is instantly archival. Continually documented by traditional and new forms of digital and social media, OWS produces an active conversation with itself, even as events unfold in cities across the United States and around the world. #searchunderoccupy engages the public to participate in this process, exploring the implications and ambiguities of OWS as a "living archive." #searchunderoccupy features work in a range of media including video, photography, audio, live feed tag clouds, posters, blogs as well as performance projects that examine the participatory techniques of OWS. Created by members of The New School community, the exhibition reflects and critically explores the university's relationship to these events, which included hosting and organizing teach-ins as well as briefly serving as home base to a group of occupiers. An interactive website, www.searchunderoccupy.org, invites online participation through the submission of further content and continued engagement. The exhibition and programs are being organized by a group of faculty members and students from across the university, which includes students Brianne Cole, Piril Gunduz, Reena Katz, Daniel Kim, and Laura Trager; faculty members Melanie Crean, Julia Foulkes, Melissa Friedling, and Nitin Sawhney; Carin Kuoni, director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School; and Radhika Subramaniam, director and chief curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design. "This collaboration became a forum to think through The New School's ongoing intersections with OWS, both collaborative and contentious, and particularly, to see how this was being created in our classrooms," said the exhibition organizers. "We were emphatic that this wouldn't be OWS as an 'art project' in the gallery but instead, a way both to occupy and open up the crevices of meaning that fix even the most mobile archival tagging." A series of teach-ins, performances and public programs will broaden the conversation through the duration of the exhibition. These include filmmaker, educator and media activist Martin Lucas of the Paper Tiger Television Collective on the proliferation of media around OWS (March 29); artist and writer Gregory Sholette on "archival agency" and "swarmchiving" (March 7); as well as remix workshops and performances. A full schedule will be available at searchunderoccupy.org. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the CuratorialDesignResearch Lab, the School of Art Media and Technology and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, all at Parsons The New School for Design, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as well as the Office of the Dean at The New School for Public Engagement. The exhibition design is by MFA Interior Design student Lee Gibson, and web design by MA Media Studies student Laura Scherling and MFA Design + Technology student Dan Selden. #searchunderoccupy is one of a number of exhibitions on view at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center this spring. Other highlights include Where do we Migrate To? (through April 15, 2012), an exhibition exploring the experience of migration and displacement, featuring work by Acconci Studio, Svetlana Boym, Andrea Geyer, Adrian Piper, Xaviera Simmons, among others. Please visit the SJDC website for more information. The mission of the CuratorialDesignResearch Lab at Parsons is to create new opportunities for The New School community to engage in research towards designing innovative curatorial platforms that generate trans-disciplinary learning opportunities, provoke critical and cross-cultural public dialogues about the function of visual and material culture in contemporary daily life, and ultimately inspire hands-on, participatory design projects that aim to effect change within local and global communities. The mandate of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics is to curate a public conversation on core issues underlying cultural, political and social developments in society. It does so through programs that take on distinct and topic-specific formats, ranging from lectures, panel discussions, conferences, and colloquia to exhibitions, performances, fellowships, and publications. Driven by the live encounter of artists, scholars, activists, critics, and other thinkers and makers from diverse backgrounds, the programs provide platforms for emerging and established artists and creative thinkers to experiment, theorize, and develop new audiences. For more information, please visit www.newschool.edu/vlc. The New School for Public Engagement emphasizes the core values of democratic citizenship, social action, and cultural engagement that inspired The New School's founding 93 years ago. It brings together professional, social, and cultural programs that stress learning in action. We connect theory to real-world practice, training students to address civic life, create new forms of culture, and respond to contemporary urban, social, and global needs. For more information, please visit www.newschool.edu/nspe. |
| The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center is an award-winning campus center for Parsons The New School for Design that combines learning and public spaces with exhibition galleries to provide an important new downtown destination for art and design programming. The mission of the Center is to generate an active dialogue on the role of innovative art and design in responding to the contemporary world. Its programming encourages an interdisciplinary examination of possibility and process, linking the university to local and global debates. The center is named in honor of its primary benefactor, New School Trustee and Parsons Board Chair Sheila C. Johnson. The design by Lyn Rice Architects is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects.
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