Asia Stewart, FAH, 2023. Enlarged polaroid print. 20 x 20 inches.
Expression and Power
Saturday, February 3, 2024 at 6pm ET
A.I.R. Gallery
Presented by A.I.R. Gallery and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) in conjunction with CURRENTS: Free Expression and the Inexpressible
To RSVP, click here.
The question of whether expression can be “free” is often the question of how it engages or eludes systems of power. Sometimes this engagement is overt, as with recent legislation enabling book bans in public schools and the removal of artwork from state-funded exhibition spaces. Other times, limits on free expression are harder to detect. This panel brings together three artists from the 2024 CURRENTS exhibition, Avram Finkelstein, Viva Ruiz, and Asia Stewart, as well as NCAC’s Arts & Culture Advocacy Program Director Elizabeth Larison and exhibition curator Aliza Shvarts, to discuss censorship as well as the state-mandated silencing, medically enabled violence, cultural gatekeeping, and mediatized overexposure that circumscribes what we can and cannot express.
Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He is a 2023 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient, and has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, was nominated for an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing. He has written for frieze, BOMB, OnCurating, and Art21, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton and NYU.
As Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Arts & Culture Advocacy Program, Elizabeth Larison leads initiatives in advising and educating artists, writers, playwrights, as well as curators, institutions, and other cultural intermediaries, in how to address the presentation of controversial works. Elizabeth is also an active member of Don’t Delete Art, a collaboration between free speech organizations and activists working to defend the freedom of artistic expression online. With academic degrees in Human Rights (BA) and Curatorial Studies (MA), and over fourteen years of working with and in support of artists and curators, Elizabeth brings a depth of understanding to the fundamental importance of defending artistic expression. Prior to joining NCAC, Elizabeth worked in curatorial, programmatic, and directorial capacities for arts organizations and venues such as Flux Factory, the Park Avenue Armory, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the 5th Moscow Curatorial Summer School, and apexart.
Viva Ruiz (she/they) is the Latinx progeny of Ecuadorian immigrants and a community and sex work educated advocate and multi hyphenate artist from Jamaica, Queens, New York. Ruiz is building power and birthing pro-abortion propaganda with the Thank God for Abortion (TGFA) initiative whose mission sits at the intersection of abortion access, queerness, and spirituality. Ruiz is a 2022 Creative Capital grantee and 2022 Art Matters fellow. S/he stands on the shoulders of many, eager to celebrate and be in service to the spirits that love and walk with them.
Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. Her central goal is to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. Stewart has received various honors and support for her works in performance from organizations that include The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marc Straus Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, the Watermill Center, and the Brooklyn Arts Council.
Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Tate Modern, Athens Biennale, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Galerie Maria Bernheim, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Participant Inc, Art in General, and SculptureCenter. Her writing and interviews have appeared in October, Artforum, The Cut, e-flux, Art in America, Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, Art Journal, TDR/The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. She was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum, Recess Critical Writing Fellow, A.I.R. Artist Fellow, and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee. She has lectured and taught widely, including at Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She holds a BA from Yale University and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University.