Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Neuberger Museum of Art invite you to a conversation featuring the curators and four of the artists participating in the exhibition Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment. Curators Kate Gilmore (F '12), and Jonah Westerman will moderate the conversation aimed at reflecting on the exhibition and celebrating the publication of the exhibition catalog.
Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment (Feb.1 – May 7, 2023) features a series of durational, performance-based works by nine artists, each of whom transform the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase into an active site of collaboration and investigation for one week. Diverse in form and aim, all these works nonetheless ask fundamental questions about art and life in the present: How have our senses of intimacy and community been transformed over the past years? How have ideas about what makes life sustainable been challenged? What does it take to begin again?
The participating artists work in collaborative modes involving Purchase students and faculty, as well as the visiting public. Hard Return works to broaden our sense of what an exhibition can be, not least of all because it is intrinsically an opportunity to activate and engage the entire campus in an exploration of what community can be.
RSVPs are required to rsvp@skowheganart.org, with guests accommodated on a first-come, first-serve basis
*Doors open at 6:15 PM | Program: 6:30, reception to follow
About the participants
Daniel Bozhkov is New York-based artist who. He employs a variety of media, from fresco to performance and video, collaborating with professionals from different fields to activate the public space. He enters the worlds of genetic science, department megastores, and world-famous tourist sites, as an amateur intruder/visitor who produces new strains of meaning in seemingly closed systems. As a collaborator with reality, Bozhkov reuses mass-produced objects, and employs abandoned practices, attracted by ideas that are rendered banal, ridiculous, and inconsequential. Bozhkov is a recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been presented at MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, and Artists Space, New York; Queens Museum of Art, NY; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; Art House, Austin, TX; IKON, Birmingham, UK; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. He has participated in international exhibitions including the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, 6th Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art; 6th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 9th International Istanbul Biennial, and 1st Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. Bozhkov is an Associate Professor of Art at Hunter College in New York City. He has taught as a Lecturer at Columbia University and Yale University School of Art, as well as a Visiting Artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Kate Gilmore is a New York–based artist working in performance, sculpture, installation, and video. Gilmore has participated in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Moscow Biennial; and PS1 Greater New York, MoMA/PS1. Selected solo exhibitions include the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; MoCA Cleveland; Public Art Fund, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. She has been the recipient of several international awards and honors such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman, Art Prize Grand Jury Award, Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gilmore is a Professor of Art at Purchase College, SUNY.
Jonah Westerman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Chair of the MA Program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism, and Theory at Purchase College, SUNY. His research focuses on global histories of performance since the mid-twentieth century with an emphasis on how artists have sought to reimagine art’s social role and critical capabilities. His work also explores the institutional components that create contexts of reception—from galleries and museums to the political expectations placed on artworks by official government bodies, academic and critical orthodoxies, and audiences. For the academic year 2016–17, he was the Chester Dale Senior Fellow in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; from 2014 to 2016, he was the Arts and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher at the Tate in London. His research at the Tate resulted in the Tate Research online publication Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art (2017), which he co-designed and co-edited. His writing has also appeared in edited collections including The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art (2020) and Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2017), as well as Artforum. He is co-editor of Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices (Routledge, 2018). His current book project, The Invention of Performance Art: A Critical History, historicizes the changing meanings of the word performance in relation to the artworks it is meant to describe across roughly forty years and disparate locations.
Jesus Benavente earned an MFA from the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University,attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012, and more recently, was a2021–22 Smack Mellon and 2022 Chinati Foundation artist-in-residence. Recent exhibitions and performances include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Performa 13, and Chashama, New York; Queens Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; LTD Los Angeles; Acre Projects, Chicago; Find & Form Space, Boston; Shin Museum of Art, Cheongju, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Kingston Sculpture Biennial, NY; and Austin Museum of Art, TX, among others. Born in San Antonio, TX, Jesus Benavente lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. San Anto es donde está mi corazón.
Emily Coates is a dancer, writer, and performance maker whose recent work mixes movement, archival texts, moving image, dance histories, and the history of science to create intermedia performances and writing. She frequently collaborates with scientists and artists across a range of disciplines, to craft stories about forms of knowledge that tend to be overlooked or dismissed. She began her career performing internationally with the New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Highlights include principal roles in ballets by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins; duets with Baryshnikov in works by Erick Hawkins, Mark Morris, and Karole Armitage; Lucinda Childs’s seminal solo Carnation; and performing with Rainer for over twenty years. Her choreographic projects have been commissioned and presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center; Guggenheim Works & Process; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Quick Center for the Arts, Fairfield, CT; Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hanover, NH; Yale University Art Gallery; University of Chicago; and Danspace Project (New York Times Critic’s Pick 2017 and 2018), with funding and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Center for Ballet and the Arts, and Jerome Robbins Dance Division/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She is a “Trio A” transmitter and collaborated with Rainer to revive her 1965 Parts of Some Sextets for Performa 19 (New York Times Best Dance, 2019). Coates’ essays have appeared in TDR/The Drama Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Theater, and the Oxford Handbook for Contemporary Ballet (2021). With particle physicist Sarah Demers, she co-authored Physics and Dance (Yale University Press, 2019). She holds a BA in English and an MA and MPhil in American studies from Yale University. She is Professor in the Practice and Director of Dance Studies at Yale, where she created the dance studies program.
Alix Pearlstein’s practice spans the fields of video, performance, installation, sculpture, and collage. Across these forms, she describes an arena in which competitions, seductions, vanities, and judgments are both the subject and the object of scrutiny. She often works with modular figurative objects, both handmade and readymade, as well as with ensemble groups of actors, mining their professional skills and personal dramas for points of connection or dissonance. Whether staging interactions between groups of people or groups of things, her works explore human subjectivity through relationships, behavior, character, power dynamics, and social constructs, to highlight moments where the psychological and spatial overlap.
Pearlstein’s work has been widely exhibited internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include ASHES/ASHES, On Stellar Rays, and The Kitchen, New York; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Ballroom Marfa, TX; Samson, Boston; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; CAM, St. Louis; Lugar Comum, Lisbon; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Performances have been seen at the Aspen Art Museum, CO; Art Basel, Miami Beach; and Park Avenue Armory and Salon 94, New York. Selected group exhibitions include the FRONT Triennial, Cleveland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; ParaSite, Hong Kong; The New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, New York; INOVA, Milwaukee; MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, Israel; Internationale d’Art de Quebec; Annual Exhibition of Visual Art, Ireland; SMAK, Ghent, Belgium; Biennale de Lyon, France; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Pearlstein is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art Grants to Artists Award. She teaches in the School of Visual Arts, New York, MFA program and has served on Skowhegan’s Board of Governors since 2004, currently as co-chair. She lives and works in New York City and Orient, NY.