Mikkel Carl Mitchell Charbonneau Emily Clayton Annalisa Perazzi Andrea Crespo
Kim Jong Il Ronald Justin Reagan Kemp Matt Kleenex Michael Pybus Ramon Esquiverna Laetitia Ann-Saedler Paul Wiersbinski Camilla Perowski-Wittgenstein Edo Udo Rachel Minnesota
#ArtistsBeLike Longest Curated by ProjectThe Curate with Loney Abrams Show Title of the Universe is Here From May 2 to May 23, 2014 Curated by: Opening Reception: Friday, May 2, 7-9and PM Franklin Delano Eric Sutherland NURTUREart Gallery 56 Bogart St., Brooklyn, NY 11206 From April 26 to May 28, 2012 Opening Reception: Friday, May 28, 7-9 PM NURTUREart Gallery 56 Bogart St., Brooklyn, NY 11206
Project Curate 2013- 2014: Tinia Albert Cesar Beltre Ramon Capellan Kayla Gamble Angel Montes Angelica Ortiz David Ortega Gesifed Paucar Destiny Perez Charisma Rios Yunior Rivas Madelyn Santiago Teacher Partner: Denise Martinez
Project Curate provides a class of advanced art students from Juan Morel Campos High School an opportunity to experience contemporary curatorial practices by working closely with a professional curator for an entire school year, culminating in an exhibition at NURTUREart Gallery. This year their mentor is Loney Abrams, Co-Director of hotelart.us and ThereTherebiz.biz. Project Curate is part of NURTUREart’s Education Program, dedicated to nurturing and enriching the next generation with its unique arts programs that connect professional artists and curators with students and teachers.
#ArtistsBeLike is an exhibition curated by twelve digital natives, high school students born after the Internet. Coming of age in a virtual world, we communicate in emoticons and images, through avatars and screen names. We sometimes have trouble distinguishing art from the rest of what we see online, where most everything could be art but isn’t, or is art but doesn’t look like it. This group exhibition brings together 7 artists from around the globe and found online. They offer us new perspectives on our own experiences growing up on the web.
Clockwise: Paul Wiersbinski, Justin Kemp, and Mitchell Charbonneau
Clockwise: Emily Clayton, Michael Pybus, and Mitchell Charbonneau
Clockwise: Andrea Crespo, Emily Clayton, Michael Pybus, and Mitchell Channoeau
Justin Kemp Proclaming my love at a scenic overlook on top of a mountain, 2010 Performance documentation, 24” x 18” each
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Opposite: Emily Clayton We Can’t Stop, 2014 Offset print, 18” x 24”
Andrea Crespo B.R.O.-Xplode, 2014 Video, 7:47 min.
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Mitchell Charbonneau Feeling Fatal, 2014 Creatine, mirror and hair gel, fiji dimensions variable
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Emily Clayton We Can’t Stop, 2014 Off
This page, left to right: Emily Clayton We Can’t Stop, 2014 Offset print, 18” x 24” Michael Pybus Recycle More! (Jen & Justin), 2014 Inkjet print on vinyl, 33” x 23” Michael Pybus New Life for your old bathroom (Miley Cyrus & Robin Thicke), 2014 Inkjet print on vinyl, 33” x 23”
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Opposite : Michael Pybus 2014 Bathrooms, 2014 Inkjet print on vinyl, 33” x 23”
Mikkel Carl Good ideas are bad ideas, 2014 Spray painted aluminum, 8.5� x 11 “
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#ArtistsBeLike by Loney Abrams
#ArtistsBeLike is an exhibition co-curated by 12 individuals born after 1997, after the advent of the internet. The first wave of digital natives are now coming of age and are consuming, producing, and connecting at high speeds. It’s no surprise that market analysts, media theorists, sociologists, and art professionals alike are paying attention to those who grew up online. When I was asked to participate in Project Curate, I felt as if I was gaining access to privileged information, tapping into the mindset of a generation who would soon become the next wave of emerging artists and curators. I began the semester by asking the class whether they knew what curating was. No one seemed to have a clue; (one student, thinking about the root of the word, figured it had something to do with curing people of illness.) Then I asked if anyone had ever made a Tumblr or a blog, a playlist or a Soundcloud track, a Facebook photo album, or a Youtube playlist. As I expected, everyone raised their hand. While the act of curating summons a deep understanding of contemporary artists and trends, it also requires the ability to make connections between disparate points. And for those of us who spend a lot of time on the internet, consuming vast amounts of information, editing, rearranging, and redistributing that information comes quite naturally.
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Whether or not the students knew much about contemporary art, they did, in a sense, already know how to curate. Throughout the year, I asked the teens to post images and videos of art they found online to our class blog. The result was a mashup of content from widely differing sources - traditional figurative painting sat in between branded advertisements, amature drawings, anime screen grabs, and inspirational sayings. On the internet, there are no white walls, no museum entrances, no barriers between what is art and what is not. To the students, whether something was intended as art was less important than whether something was real or fake, entertaining or boring, worth reblogging or ignoring. After discussing the ways in which online communication affected our relationships, avatars constructed our identities, and digital images confronted our notions of reality, we put out an open call asking artists to submit work that offered new perspectives to our conversation. After seeing how open the kids were to discussing just about anything found online, I was surprised by how hesitant they were to accepting non traditional media as art. As soon as we switched contexts, from blog to gallery, and began discussing the
exhibition as an IRL space, the teen-curators started to restructure their selection criteria to reflect a generalized view of what they imagined exhibitions should look like. They had trouble accepting digital images, experimental music videos, web performances, or even found object sculpture as art, and instead leaned towards traditional media like paint on canvas or black and white photography. Relocating from the screen to the gallery was a more difficult contextual shift than I had anticipated, and I started encouraging the kids to use the logic they employed to navigate the web, to select artworks for the exhibition. We stopped talking about what was art and what was not, and instead focused on which pieces initiated the most engaging dialogue in the classroom. We made maps and flowcharts, using hashtags to summarize concepts and tag clouds to group artworks together. The result of our investigations is an exhibition that I believe to not only be the consequences of a class assignment, but a visualization of surf logic, and the manifestation of the teenage thought process informed by a life online.
and share. During the opening, our teenage curators took over NURTUREart’s social media accounts and live tweeted the event. They took pictures and used hashtags, relocating the exhibition back to the screen. After noting that most of the work we had discussed was in the form of documentation online, we decided to use the installation shots of #ArtistsBeLike as an opportunity for intervention, making our own versions of the exhibition by inserting found images into the photos. What started as a discussion of online media, materialized into a gallery exhibition, and then ended up right back to where it started, on the internet.
And the exhibition wasn’t just the end product. It was also the means to creating new content that reflected the student’s habitual desire to produce
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NURTUREart Non-Profit, Inc is a 501(c)3 New York State licensed federally tax-exempt charitable organization founded in 1997 by George J. Robinson. NURTUREart receives support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, including member item funding from City Council Members Sara Gonzales, Stephen Levin, and Diana Reyna, the New York City Department of Education, and the New York State Council on the Arts. NURTUREart is also supported by the British Council of Northern Ireland, Harold and Colene Brown Foundation, Con Edison, the Czech Center New York, Edelman, the Golden Rule Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, and the Walentas Family Foundation. We receive inkind support from Lagunitas, Societe Perrier, Tekserve, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. NURTUREart is grateful for significant past support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Liebovitz Foundation, and the Greenwall Foundation, and to the many generous individuals and businesses whose contributions have supported us throughout our history. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the artists who have contributed works of art to past benefits—our continued success would be impossible without your generosity.
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56 Bogart Street Brooklyn, NY 11206 L train to Morgan Avenue T 718 782 7755 F 718 569 2086 E gallery@nurtureart.org www.nurtureart.org Directions: By Subway: L train to the Morgan Avenue stop. Exit the station via Bogart Street. Look for the NURTUREart entrance on Bogart Street, close to the intersection with Harrison Place. By Car: Driving From Manhattan: Take the Williamsburg Bridge, stay in the outside lane, and take the Broadway / S. 5 St. exit. Turn left at light onto Havemeyer St. Turn right next light onto Borinquen Place, continue straight, street will change name to Grand Street. Turn right onto Bushwick Ave, left onto Johnson Ave, then right onto Bogart Street. Look for our entrance at the corner of Bogart Street and Harrison Place.