
April 14, 2017 (Washington, DC) -- Washington Project for the Arts is thrilled to support NoMüNoMü -- a DC-based arts collective -- by providing gallery space, financial resources, and additional outreach for this project. We believe that artist-driven programming is critical to a healthy arts eco-system, and celebrate NoMüNoMü's drive, collaborative ethos, and commitment to confronting some of the gravest challenges facing our society at this moment in time. With this project, NoMüNoMü is carrying on the important work of CoLab (with whom WPA worked in 1983), Group Material, Occupy Museums, and many other socially concerned artist collaboratives near and far.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
We are at a critical moment wherein the ruling class is once again manipulating citizens to vote against their own interests through a delusional framework of a 'greatness' that never was. This toxic right-wing rhetoric was not enough to divert support from the multitude of voters who have been left behind by liberal elitism and continue to be exhausted by post-industrial despair. Now more than ever it is necessary to collectively struggle for a future without oppression. Therefore, we must collaboratively examine and deconstruct the mechanisms within our culture that promote and maintain classism, misogyny, and white racial privilege.
PARTICIPATING artists
Ani Bradberry, Billy Colbert, Adrienne Gaither, Aaron Maier, Joseph Orzal, and Justin PoppeABOUT NOMÜNOMÜ
NoMüNoMü is a DC-based arts collective dedicated to creating new spaces for other articulations of art, based primarily on the idea that art should be a collaborative, educational, and fun cultural exercise that always looks to challenge and critique the status quo. NoMüNoMü maintains a diverse selection of artists whose make-up cuts through the lines of race, age, gender, and orientation in order to create shows that can push dialogues and audiences towards a truer understanding of the intersectionality within the field of art, so as to transform it entirely.
Related Programming
Jeffrey Perry is an independent, working-class scholar educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia universities whose work focuses on the role of white supremacy as a retardant to progressive social change and on the centrality of struggle against white supremacy to progressive social change efforts. He lives in New Jersey.
Gray Leonard is an artist and freelance developer currently doing computer science research at American University. He produces Exmilitary, 'an anthology of revolutionary theory in late capitalism', and other publishing projects. For this talk, Leonard will present his research on how mass surveillance is used to exploit people around the world and preserve U.S. hegemony.
Daniel Tucker works as an artist, writer, and organizer developing documentaries, publications, exhibitions, and events inspired by his interest in social movements and the people and places from which they emerge. Tucker recently curated the exhibition and event series Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements. He is the founding Graduate Program Director in Social and Studio Practices at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.
Noah Fischer works at the crossroads between economic and social inequity and art practice and its institutions. His sculpture, drawing, performance, writing, and organizing practice fluctuate between object making and direct action as well as an ongoing theatrical collaboration with Berlin-based andcompany&Co. He is the initiating member of Occupy Museums and a member of GULF/ Gulf Labor. With Coco Fusco, he organized The Artist as Debtor platform, concerned with sustainability of arts communities.
Jessica is a systems thinker, facilitator, and instigator of arts and social-change projects. As director of the social enterprise Art in Praxis, she transforms spaces, institutions, traditions and perceptions through design, engagement, and collaborative arts practices. Based in Washington, DC but working nationally, Jessica embraces creativity in organizational development.
Date
April 14, 2017