Join us for the next Open Window Events: an experimental dialogue between Lynn Book and Jay Buchanan (April); and a presentation by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo (May).
Open Window Events are a series of online public talks that take place at the last weekend of every month. They are aimed at giving the outside world a moment to connect with the institute’s internal, topic-based intensive sessions.
Impossible Embrace, a Dialogue
Saturday, April 29, 3–3:45pm UTC
Conducted by Lynn Book & Jay Buchanan
Lynn Book and Art Historian-in-the-making, Jay Buchanan have been thinking together for some years about the implications of bodies experiencing, re-collecting, co-making, and re-making inventive structures of time and action. An exquisite conversation qua language-event will soon appear in the peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins University journal, ASAP/J (Association for the Study of Arts of the Present). This live inter-change event for Transart Institute, will feature Book and Buchanan in dialogue on the (practical, theoretical, chimerical) making of the Lynn Book Projects Archive which is full of works at the outer limits of performance, experimental media and practice ephemera. Part interview, part poetics and proposal, the two unapologetic interlopers will spark urgent and complicated understandings that provoke fresh speculative action for those attending and further an emerging collaborative book project that the two will launch in 2024.
Lynn Book is a transmedia artist whose adventurous work interrogates and theorizes Bodies. She deploys extended voice, material practices and technologies to make performance, video, text, new music, exhibition and collaborative culture projects that take shape in galleries, clubs, fields, streets, online and in concert halls. Her work has been performed, heard and/or seen in New York City, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, Budapest, Hong Kong, Bali, London, Manila, Brisbane and elsewhere. In 2022, she launched the “Lynn Book Projects Archive” online, representing a corpus spanning 45+ years and produced, “Instructions for Deranging”, a major exhibition of multimedia works for the international festival of contemporary art, Art Stays, in Slovenia. lynnbook.com
Jay Buchanan’s research centers states of encounter in global contemporary art. Methods and areas of interest include: performance studies; queer theory; Black and Chicana feminisms; critical poetics; ecocriticism and land use; networks, supply chains, and infrastructure; and industrial formations in the culture sector. Jay is a Graduate Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2). Jay’s recent work examines the contemporary instantiations of empire. His scholarship and criticism appear in Chiricú (The Journal of Latina/o Arts, Literatures, and Cultures), Theatre History Studies, ASAP/J, and Miranda. Jay is the founding Digital Director for the Lynn Book Projects Archive, and Managing Director of the twenty-part collective sonic artwork Idiosynchrony.
On Decentering Art as an Individual Endeavor
Saturday, May 27, 3–3:45pm UTC
A presentation by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles
It all came to be at the very height of the Covid pandemic, while we were surrounded by the wailing of ambulances in the South Bronx and waited expectantly for the Governor’s daily radio updates on the emergency situation in New York State. I would sit in the backyard to meditate on a rusty pink chair, and observe the downloads that I was receiving as to where to go next creatively. This marked the birth of The Interior Beauty Salon, an organism living at the intersection of creativity and healing, and also serving as a space where that which is not necessarily seen or manifested in tangible ways is seeded, nurtured and given room to grow safely. Examples of this include processes melding art, ritual, ceremony, rites of passage, and consciousness. Now in its third year, The Salon continues to challenge notions of art-making as an individual endeavor, to rethink the future of creativity as being collaborative, and to open up to the concept of building a network of joy within the arts. And similarly, it offers space to visionaries in an unusual confluence of fields and unprescribed ways of being and approaching life. But is it an artwork? In “On Decentering Art as an Individual Endeavor”, Nicolás will draw on The Salon’s herstory/history/theirstory to launch a conversation on cooperation, kindness, generosity, and care in the arts.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively or through experiences where the quotidian and art overlap. He has exhibited and performed extensively in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05 and 07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, The Pontevedra Biennial, The Queens Museum of Art, MoMA, Printed Matter, PS122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Princeton University, Rutgers University, The Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, The MacDowell Colony, Provisions Library, El Museo del Barrio, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, The Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. During the past seven years Estévez has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Montano and Estévez have also collaborated on several performances. Residencies attended include PS1/MoMA, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He has received grants from Art Matters, Lambent Foundation, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Printed Matter and Puffin Foundation. Estévez holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Estévez has curated exhibitions and programs for El Museo del Barrio, the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, Longwood Art Gallery/Bronx Council on the Arts, New York; and for the Filmoteca de Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain. Publications include Pleased to Meet You, Life as Material for Art and Vice Versa (editor) and For Art’s Sake. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, in 2011 Estévez was baptized as a Bronxite; a citizen of the Bronx. Website here.
RSVP for the Open Window Events here. Find our full programming here. Final call for one-year MFA & Practice PhD applications is May 1. Find out more here.
