Monday, July 5, 2010

Before we left New York

Before we left New York photographer Alice O'Malley invited us to her studio. Thank you Alice! Here we are:






















Photo: Alice O'Malley

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

EVALUATION - REVELATION - REVOLUTION‏

A warm welcome to the last NPBIAC gathering on Thursday June 17th, 7.00 – 9.00 pm. We want to invite you all to meet one last time, in this setting, for a very informal evaluation. We want to see you all again and make room for comments and thoughts. Maybe read out loud from the book. Smile silently to each other. Scream in rounds, beginning and end. Eat and talk. Cheer one another. Write down our secrets and send it off into the future. If there is a room there is a crowd, a will and a way. Hope to see you there!

This last meeting is open to all, but we ask that you RSVP as usual to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com

Join us for another unforgettable evening!

Best,
NPBIAC/Johanna and Malin

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Release of the NPBIAC publication



Dear participants, friends, contributors, instigators, close and distant lovers of Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner,

We want to invite you to the release of the NPBIAC publication that is part of the Studio Program Exhibition at Art in General. Opening Reception: Friday, June 11, 6–8 pm

The publication includes texts and works by Katerina Llanes, Åsa Elzén, Jordan Troeller, MPA, Craig Willse, Dean Spade, Danna Vajda, W.A.G.E. Niels Henriksen, Johanna Gustavsson, Malmoe Free University For Women (MFK), Cathrine Lord, Paulo Freire, Dara Greenwald, Kajsa Dahlberg, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Katarina Bonnevier, Malin Arnell, Katie Cerone, Jennifer Hayashida, Rebecka Thor, Lindsay L Benedict, K8 Hardy, Theresa Marchetta, Jamerry Kim, Nina Mouritzen, Anna Sandgren and Isabell Dahlberg.

Hope to see you all!
Malin and Johanna

------------

Studio Program Exhibition
June 11–26 2010

Opening Reception
Friday, June 11, 6–8 pm

Malin Arnell, Julia Brown, Michael Cataldi, Tia-Simone Gardner, Brennan Gerard, Johanna Gustavsson, John Houck, David Kelley, Ryan Kelly, Marty Kirchner, Chelsea Knight, Hans Kuzmich, Jens Maier-Rothe, Gabriel Martinez, Mary Simpson, Danna Vajda

Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12–6 pm
Admission is free.

Art in General
79 Walker Street, 6th floor
(212) 219-0473
artingeneral.org

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Welcome to NPBIAC Monday May 24th, 7 - 9 pm. A feminist party in the parliament – a good idea?

A feminist party in the parliament – a good idea?

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering on Monday May 24th, 7-9 pm. We are proud to have former spokesperson for Swedish Feminist Initiative - Devrim Mavi as host for this meeting.

Five years ago, in April 2005, Feminist Initiative in Sweden announced its existence and its intentions to run in the elections the year after. It was the start of a new feminist experiment in Sweden, marked by activism, organizing and tumultuous politics. Devrim Mavi, former spokesperson for Feminist Initiative, will speak about how the party started, about the specific challenges for feminist politics in a parliamentary structure and the massive negative response that Feminist Initiative faced.







You are invited to a discussion about the possibilities and impossibilities with parliamentary feminism, and about the demonization of feminists.

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before May 24th at noon.

Join us for another unforgettable evening!

Best,
NPBIAC/Johanna, Malin and Devrim.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Welcome to NPBIAC Monday May 17th, 7 - 9 pm - The personal narrative in political writing.

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering on Monday May 17th, 7-9 pm. We are proud to have Rebecka Thor, Lawen Mohtadi and Devrim Mavi from the magazine Slut as hosts for this meeting.

The personal narrative in political writing.
Rebecka Thor, Lawen Mohtadi and Devrim Mavi from the magazine Slut will talk about the personal narrative in political writing. You are invited to share a text that you feel either is a good or a problematic example of this genre.
Slut is a cultural magazine distributed in Sweden that takes its standpoint from feminist and postcolonial critique.













This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before May 17th at noon.

Join us for another unforgettable evening!

Best,
NPBIAC/Johanna, Malin, Devrim, Lawen and Rebecka

Monday, April 19, 2010

Next meeting Wednesday, April 28th, 2010, 8-10 pm - The YES! Association

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering on Wednesday April 28th, 8.00 – 10.00 pm. We are proud to have the YES! Association, represented by Åsa Elzén and Hong-An Truong, as hosts for this meeting.


















The YES! Association is a group of artists based in Sweden and the U.S. who work towards creating a more equal, diverse and interesting art world. The basis for their work is the on-going formulation of an Equal Opportunities Agreement that demands structural changes in art institutions. This agreement exists in numerous forms and has been addressed through performances, fiction and live negotiations. During this session, Åsa Elzén and Hong-An Truong will lead us through a series of activities to get at questions around the utility, effectiveness, and problematics of categories. Should we speak the categories that we already know are at work to define us? In what ways do categories reduce and essentialize productive difference? How is naming both a powerful political act and at the same time an act that can re-produce categories that have also historically been confining? Is equality – through categorical statistics and quota provisions – a goal?

For more info please see: www.foreningenja.org

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before April 27th at noon.

Join us for another unforgettable evening!
(And please note the time of the meeting 8.00 – 10.00 pm)
Best,
NPBIAC/Johanna, Malin, Åsa and Hong-An

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Next meeting Wednesday April 21th, 8.00 - 10.00 pm - Craig Willse and Dean Spade‏

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering on Wednesday April 21th, 8.00 – 10.00 pm. We are proud to have Craig Willse and Dean Spade as hosts for this meeting focusing on different ways of conceptualizing stateness.

During this session, Craig Willse and Dean Spade invite us to think about different ways of conceptualizing stateness. How does the category of "the state" inform our understandings of violence, resistance, co-optation, law and identity? How might movements for prison abolition, wealth redistribution, native sovereignty, queer and trans liberation, and an end to immigration enforcement offer ideas that can inform theorizations of stateness? How do these themes reflect in the day-to-day art, knowledge production, and organizing work we are doing in collectives, collaboratives, coalitions, alliances and other structures?

Required reading: "broadside" by Craig Willse and Dean Spade; first chapter in Seeing like a State, by James C. Scott.
Optional reading: Society Must be Defended, March 17, 1976, by Michel Foucault

Craig Willse is a doctoral student in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he is working on a dissertation about technoscience, race, and political economies of population management. His other interests include bikes, complexity theory, Tucson, talking to artists, farms, farmers, and thinking critically about the academic industrial complex.

Dean Spade is an Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, teaching Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Critical Perspectives on Transgender Law and Law and Social Movements. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal services collective that seeks to build racial and economic justice centered trans resistance.

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before April 20th at noon.

Join us for another unforgettable evening!
(And please note the time of the meeting 8.00 – 10.00 pm)
Best,
NPBIAC/Johanna, Malin, Craig and Dean

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Next meeting Wednesday April 14th 2010, 8.30 - 10.30 pm - Maria Lind, Collaborative practices in contemporary art‏

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering on Wednesday April 14th, 8.30 – 10.30 pm. We are proud to have Maria Lind as host for this meeting focusing on Collaborative practices in contemporary art.






















Maria writes:
"In recent years the art world has shown a renewed interest in collective work and activity. Collaborations between artists and curators, artists and outside professionals and artists and other artists have become increasingly common, and have raised some pertinent questions regarding authorship and authority. Using the collective project Totally Motivated: A Socio-Cultural Maneouver (Kunstverein München 2003) as a starting point I would like to discuss collaborative practices in contemporary art, as well as more generalised working conditions under post-fordism."

Maria Lind is a curator, critic and currently the Director of the Graduate Program at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies.

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before April 13th at noon.

Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think could be interested.

Join us for another unforgettable evening!
(And please note the time of the meeting 8.30 – 10.30)
Best,
NPBIAC/Johanna, Malin and Maria

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Next meeting Wednesday, March 31th, 2010, 7-9 pm - Dara Greenwald on School as Art‏

A warm welcome to the NPBIAC gathering on Wednesday, March 31th, 7-9 pm. We are proud to have Dara Greenwald as host for this meeting.

NPBIAC has invited Dara Greenwald to discuss some of the questions she has posted on the justseeds.org blog School as Art, around the current trend of the school form as artist project. On the blog she has listed a number of examples both to inspire but also to open a discussion on who these art projects serve and if they have oppositional possibilities or are just another venue for people with privilege to socialize with each other and engage in "knowledge production"?
What does this type of art practice say about the current conditions of both official education and/or art? These and more questions can be found on this blog post School as Art and will be raised during the meeting.






















Reading: Liberation School for Women, author(s) unknown

Dara Greenwald is a media artist, writer, and researcher. Her current research is about collective cultural production and creative public action coming out of social movements.
More info: www.daragreenwald.com

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before March 29th at noon. (The reason for the early reply is that Dara has a text she would like to share with participants to preferably read before the meeting.)

Join us for another unforgettable evening!
Best,
NPBIAC/Dara, Johanna and Malin

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Next meeting Friday March 26th 2010, 7-9 pm - Amy Scholder, editorial director of the Feminist Press


A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering, Friday, March 26th, 7-9 pm. We are proud to have Amy Scholder, editorial director of the Feminist Press as host for this meeting.

Amy Scholder writes:
I would like to generate a conversation/think tank for how to enact feminist publishing. I became the editorial director at the Feminist Press a year and half ago. (FP is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year; I have been editing books for independent publishers for over 20 years.) The Press had had a mission to publish books by women/for women. I felt such an idea of feminist publishing was outmoded, and have now changed the mission to something more about choice, gender equity, and social justice. You can read the new FP statement here.

With this new program, I have published a dozen books or so, and have another dozen in the works (and many more proposals to read!). I list a number of them below, with a shorthand to describe what they're about. This list should give the NPBIAC group a good idea of what kind of feminist publishing I'm doing.

My interest for the meeting would be for each person to come up with and present an idea for a new Feminist Press book. Not a general idea of what I should be publishing, but a specific idea that promotes a particular subject, author, title, or project.

Any book that I publish at FP needs to have a potentially wide readership (3,000 readers or more), so I can not publish artist books, monographs, or books that have a singularly contemporary art audience. That said, I am very open to ideas, and want to learn what young feminists want to read. FP books can be for scholarly discussion or for a popular audience (or both). What I hope is obvious from the list below is that I’m interested in books that challenge what we mean by gender, books that question issues of race and class in dominant culture, books for activists and thinkers and poets (but no poetry!). FP publishes fiction and nonfiction (including memoir, essays, biography, etc), and graphic books. Please also see the FP website.


This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before March 31th at noon. 



Join us for another unforgettable evening!

Best,

NPBIAC/Johanna, Malin and Amy

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Next meeting March 10th 2010, 7-9pm - Expressions of anger and reason for action

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering, Wednesday, March 10th, 7-9 pm. Malin Arnell, one of the NPBIAC organizers, will host this meeting.

We will follow up the last meeting in which Catherine Lord and the group shared some strategies and methods using anger as driving force. For this meeting we suggest to collectively explore some expressions of anger and reason for action. (You can definitely attend even if you were not in the last meeting!)

Between 2002-2007 Malin Arnell was one-fourth of the feminist performance and artist group High Heel Sister (together with Line S. Karlström, Anna Linder and Karianne Stensland). The starting point for High Heel Sisters collaboration were their shared, yet varying, experiences of physical attributes of height (minimum 178 cm), shoe size (minimum 41) and age (minimum 30yrs). With a large dose of humor and a burning feminist zeal High Heel Sisters examined and took on many of society’s (and their own) expectations and accepted norms primarily associated with gender, sexuality and class.



We will start the meeting by screening two of High Heels Sisters videos: Scream (2007) and a documentation of our last performance, Screaming Mountain (2007) (now showing in the exhibition Gestures - Performance and Sound Art, at Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark). From this body of work - let's try to embody some collective emotions...

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before March 10th at noon.

MARCH 8TH - WE CELEBRATE!


German Socialist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) initiated International Womens Day. Here togehter with Rosa Luxemburg and an anonymous feminist.

Monday, March 1, 2010

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

Did you ever dream of a collective mode - your body as part of a mass of bodies?



NPBIAC makes a guest appearance at VOLTA NY on March 6th, 5.30-7 pm. Come together to share dreams, wishes, fantasies and desires. Join us in our search for collective solutions to individual problems! The workshop will include speaking in rounds, physical exercises, intimate discussions and of course end with an orgasmic enegry massage.

The workshop is open to an exclusive group of 10 participants. Registration can be made at Holistic Healing Center, Scaramouche Gallery, VOLTA NY. Location: 7 West 34th Street (betw. 5th Ave. and 6th Ave. ) ny.voltashow.com

Friday, February 26, 2010

A little snow aint stoppin us!

If any doubts - the meeting tonight (Feb. 26th) with Catherine Lord is definately on!
See you soon, best NPBIAC

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Next meeting February 26th 2010, 7-9pm - Catherine Lord

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering, Friday, February 26th, 7-9 pm. We are proud to have Catherine Lord as host for this meeting.

Catherine Lord is an employee of the state of California. Having come of age in the 1970s, she’s stumped by the current fascination with the decade. She doesn’t know how to be ironized, mediated, resituated, contextualized, etc. etc. etc. and at the same time inhabit her memories of anger and of unlearning, among other things. She needs help.






















This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before Feb. 26th at noon.

Join us for this unforgettable evening!
best,
NPBIAC/Johanna and Malin

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Next meeting February 15th 2010, 7-9pm - Barbara Steveni

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering, Monday, February 15th, 7-9 pm. We are proud to have Barbara Steveni as host for this meeting.



Barbara Steveni conceived and co-founded the Artist Placement Group (APG), in London in 1966 with a vanguard of artists, including Ian Breakwell, David Hall, John Latham, Anna Ridley and Jeffrey Shaw working in emerging fields of Multi-Media and Conceptual Art of that time. Steveni’s innovative concept, based on a more holistic and intuitive view of Art than was current at the time, would take another 20 years to enter the mainstream. APG, later renamed O+I, acted as the precursor to current notions of ‘Artist in Residence’ and Public Art programmes.

Steveni is currently active as artist, curator and lecturer, in particular addressing Art and the ‘new’ Economics, Art and Business and ‘Socially Engaged Art Practice’ from and on behalf of the artist voice. Additionally, Steveni is engaged in a personal work under the title; I AM AN ARCHIVE, tracing through a series of walks, revisits and interviews, her life and role within APG / O+I, in relation to today’s circumstance, and to current and future art practice.

This occasion is open to 20 participants and you need to RSVP to nobodyputsbabyinacorner2009@live.com to be able to join, please do so before Feb. 14th at noon.

Read more about Artist Placement Group (APG) and O+I here >>

PUBLIC PROGRAM at Apexart, February 16 - 20, 2010 in conection to the exhibition The Incidental Person >>

Monday, January 18, 2010

ENCORE: Next meeting January 27th, 7-9 pm - New Feminist Economy

It's so good we're doing it again!

We are very proud and happy to let you know that the meeting on Wednesday 20th is fully booked. But the New Feminist Economy group - Dana, Jordan, Tia and MPA have offered to host a second gathering next Wednesday on January 27th, 7-9pm.

"if i had a hammer i would smash patriarchy"


If first-wave feminism of the early twentieth century demanded the right to vote, and if second-wave feminism of the 1960s demanded equal economic opportunities and sexual self-determination; then, what are the demands that would propel a tidal wave of current feminisms? What could feminist theories of 'difference' offer a strategic need to unite demands?

This overarching question of strategy will motivate this night's gathering. Questions of domestic labor, social reproduction, and alternative structures of economic exchange will be put to use in trying to develop a praxis of difference and a critique of disparity. What can political economy learn from feminist critiques of phalocentric language? What is the role of negativity in juggling the anti-patriarchal position and an anti-capitalist one? Taking into consideration the tensions between demands for recognition and demands for redistribution, identity and class, we will ask ourselves and others: as feminists, what precisely are we working for?

So, if you want to work it, or you want to work for it, or want to work it out..... come on out.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Next meeting January 20th, 7-9 pm - New Feminist Economy

A warm welcome to the next NPBIAC gathering, Wednesday, January 20, 7-9 pm, focusing on New Feminist Economy

"if i had a hammer i would smash patriarchy."




If first-wave feminism of the early twentieth century demanded the right to vote, and if second-wave feminism of the 1960s demanded equal economic opportunities and sexual self-determination; then, what are the demands that would propel a tidal wave of current feminisms? What could feminist theories of 'difference' offer a strategic need to unite demands?

This overarching question of strategy will motivate this night's gathering. Questions of domestic labor, social reproduction, and alternative structures of economic exchange will be put to use in trying to develop a praxis of difference and a critique of disparity. What can political economy learn from feminist critiques of phalocentric language? What is the role of negativity in juggling the anti-patriarchal position and an anti-capitalist one? Taking into consideration the tensions between demands for recognition and demands for redistribution, identity and class, we will ask ourselves and others: as feminists, what precisely are we working for?
So, if you want to work it, or you want to work for it, or want to work it out.....
come on out.

/ Dana, Jordan, Tia, MPA & NPBIAC