Artists Take the Street!

SubCulture, 45 Bleecker St. between Mulberry and Mott Sts.
Free with essential RSVP: bit.ly/artiststakethestreet

Word on the Street artists unite to discuss power and identity in their work, and the relationship amongst public art, activism, and social and political change. Moderated by Carmen Hermo, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Artists Take the Street! is part of a yearlong collaboration between Times Square Arts and House of Trees, and a larger Word on the Street project with recent iterations at Socrates Sculpture Park and The Watermill Center. From August 2017 to February 2018, the Word on the Street {Fall Edition] exhibited works in Times Square by Anne Carson + Amy Khoshbin, Carrie Mae Weems, and Wangechi Mutu. The Word on the Street [Spring Edition] features works by Laurie Anderson + A.M. Homes, Tania Bruguera; and House of Trees + Naomi Shihab Nye from March through August 2018. Other events in the series include opportunities for public participation - Workshop on the Street and Workshop on the Street: May Day.

Tania Bruguera (b. 1968. lives and works in Havana, Cuba  and New York, NY) is an installation and performance artist. Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions. Her work is also in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts a and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.

A.M. Homes (b. 1061, lives and works in New York City) is the author 12 books among them, the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, and The End of Alice, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, and the best selling memoir, The Mistress's Daughter. DAYS OF AWE, a new book of stories is forthcoming in June 2018. Her work appears frequently in Art Forum, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Zoetrope. She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb, and Blind Spot. Homes often collaborates on book projects with artists—among them Eric Fischl, Rachel Whiteread, Cecily Brown, Bill Owens, Julie Speed, Michal Chelbin, Petah Coyne, Carroll Dunham, Catherine Opie and Todd Hido. She has also created original television pilots for HBO, FX and CBS and was a writer/producer of the Showtime series The L Word and most recently was Co-Executive Producer and Writer of the USA series Falling Water and the Stephen King/David Kelly TV Series, Mr. Mercedes. A.M. Homes has been the recipient of numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, Poets and Writers For Writers, Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement. In addition she is Co–Chair of the Board of Directors of Yaddo, and serves on the boards of Poets And Writers and previously on The Boards of New York Foundation for The Arts, Pen American Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown. A.M. Homes teaches writing at in the Lewis Center For The Arts at Princeton University and lives in New York City.

Amy Khoshbin (b. 1981, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY)  is an Iranian-American artist merging performance, video, collage, costume and sound to examine our individual and collective compulsion to create, transform, and sometimes destroy the stories of who we are and who we think we should be. She produces media and mythologies using humor and a handmade aesthetic to throw a counterpunch at the high-definition, profit-generating codes and signals that American audiences are trained and accustomed to consuming. She has shown at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Times Square Arts, The High Line, Leila Heller Gallery, Mana Contemporary, National Sawdust, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She has received residencies at spaces such as The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts. She is a 2017 Franklin Furnace recipient and has received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant. Khoshbin has bachelor's degrees in Film and Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Tina Barney, and poets Anne Carson and Bob Currie among others.

Carmen Hermo (b. 1985, lives in Jersey City, NJ) joined the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s curatorial team as Assistant Curator in 2016. There, she curated Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making (through March 4 2018) and co-organized Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty (2016–17). She is currently coordinating Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (opening April 13 2018) as well as a collection exhibition (opening summer 2018). Previously, she was Assistant Curator for Collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2010–16), where she served on the museum’s Young Collectors Council acquisition committee devoted to acquiring and supporting the work of emerging artists. While there, she researched and promoted the Guggenheim’s permanent collection, overseeing the Collection Online and the outgoing loans program, and worked on acquisitions, collection management, and special projects. She co-curated the contemporary collection exhibitions Now’s the Time: Recent Acquisitions (2012–13) and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim (2015). She has previously worked with the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Carmen received her B.A. in Art History and English from the University of Richmond and is pursuing an M.A. in Art History at Hunter College. Her institutional and academic interests include contemporary performance in the museum context, politically engaged artist projects, early video art technologies, and the postwar artists of Latin America and its diasporas.

PEN World Voices (founded 2005) is America’s only international literary festival, attracting the best known writers from across the globe. Since its founding, it has presented more than 1,500 writers and artists from 118 countries speaking 56 languages in venues across New York City in a weeklong series of literary events with a human rights focus. The Festival was founded by Salman Rushdie, Esther Allen, and Michael Roberts in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, with the aim of broadening channels of dialogue between the United States and the world—a mission that, today, has never been more relevant.

Artists at Risk Connection (founded 2017) is committed to improving access to resources for artists at risk, enhancing connections among supporters of artistic freedom and raising awareness about artistic freedom.

We believe that artists benefit from collaboration and also from better visibility for themselves and the organizations that serve them. Autocratic regimes fear artists because they express cultural identity, advance new ideas, promote dialogue, and bear witness to inhumanity. Artistic freedom is an indicator of a healthy and free society. ARC is a collaborative project led by PEN America, which has been committed to protecting open expression in the United States and worldwide since 1922. PEN America, a champion of the freedom to write, stands at the intersection of literature and human rights. It is the largest of more than 140 centers of PEN International.

The Watermill Center (founded 1992) by avant-garde visionary and theater director Robert Wilson, is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities located on Long Island’s East End. With an emphasis on creativity and collaboration, Watermill integrates performing arts practice with resources from the humanities, research from the sciences and inspiration from the visual arts. The Center is unique within the global landscape of experimental artistic practice and regularly convenes the brightest minds from across disciplines to do, in Wilson’s words, “what no one else is doing.”