School of Visual Arts (SVA)
MA Curatorial Practice
132 West 21st Street, 10th floor
New York, NY 10011
T +1 212 592 2274
[email protected]
While this is a call for you to consider my program, the MA in Curatorial Practice here at SVA, this is also an open call in another sense. And I do mean open precisely as a call to all concerned with the challenge to civil liberties and the rights of every person to live in a society that honors our human duty to be true citizens together and find in our actions toward one another a priority for social equity, for equally distributed justice, for the common purpose of an emancipated discussion, a truly communicative discourse about what we need to live together without harm. When people have entered into a dystopian realm of potentially or actively despotic rule, utopian longings are always felt. In the world of culture, envisioning what better means is an old story.
But the stories of Paris in May 1968 or Berlin in 1989 or Johannesburg in 1994 or the Occupy Movement in 2011 and after are about demonstrated civil engagement to the point of risk, breaking down and breaking through the crises of tyranny and the collapse of freedoms, whether they are threats to political speech or the biopolitics of our bodies, whether they endanger the sanctity of sacred beliefs or of racial differences. This is what open means. Creative acts and political acts in times of such threats cannot help but be joined. The way that we act in the world as cultural producers will affect the way we live in the world as citizens. And while there are theories of social justice and of artistic practices to be read, and should be read, there is also the call now for every one of us to enter into practices of active citizenship. By the way, there has never been a more “interesting” moment to read or re-read Kant’s little essay from 1795, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.”
I write to you now to ask you to engage in this open sense of representation—a term long used in the study of art to discuss the depiction of bodies and objects in space, but meant here as the goal of our conscious presence in a social landscape exploding beneath our feet. It is no exaggeration to look around the world and see the rise of radical conservative movements challenging every resource of our humanity. Our representation is our act in whatever medium, “writing” on the world, illuminating the great credence of our social union to form communities of reasonable fairness.
In my own program here at SVA, curating is taught in every aspect of professional practice. At the heart of this is a notion of the public sphere, an engagement with a multiplicity of interests and ideologies, of histories and perceptions, of philosophies, theories, and acts of making. There are many programs you can go to if curating interests you, but what we offer here on a street bordering Chelsea’s galleries and museums is a powerful place of study and thinking about the curatorial enterprise toward engagement, a creative framing of multiplicities in a city of immense multiplicity, a platform in New York City that remains a social cauldron of belief and cultural experiment unlike any other in the world.
Compare ours to any program in terms of our faculty, facilities, courses, environment, exhibitions, and events, and whatever choice you make, I ask you to take up the responsibility we now have before us as curators, artists, and citizens. The very idea of private and public are now, as they have been in previous times of present danger, fixed on a path of fusion. We have every tool we need to commence and continue the creative enterprise of our social calling. I ask you to pick them up. I ask you, in this arena of artistic life and public life, to join us.
Sincerely,
Steven Henry Madoff
Chair, MA Curatorial Practice at SVA
To find out more about the program and to apply, go to macp.sva.edu.
