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

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

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

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

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