discussion

Hybrid Documentary

Join us at A.I.R. for Hybrid Documentary (blurring the real and the imaginary), a conversation between photographer Maxine Henryson and filmmaker Shanti Thakur on Saturday, May 20th from 4:30-6pm.

Each artist will show excerpts from their work and discuss blurring the real and the imaginary in hybrid documentary projects.

Hybrid Documentary is being held in conjunction with Maxine Henryson’s second solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery Contrapuntal. The exhibition will be on view through May 21st.

Shanti Thakur, Seven Hours to Burn, 1999, film still

Shanti Thakur, Seven Hours to Burn, 1999, film still

 

BIOs

Shanti Thakur's visually poetic films have screened at over 200 film festivals and museums around the world. Screenings include:  Cannes Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Flaherty Seminars and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Thakur’s films explore how we perceive each other and ourselves through the lens of history, memory and identity. Working easily between documentary, experimental and narrative modes, her films Red Tulips, A Story About Forgetting, Sky People, Kairos, Seven Hours to Burn, Two Forms, Circles and Domino have won 26 awards.  Her films have broadcast on the Sundance Channel and PBS, as well as in 22 countries.

Be it short or feature length, she works as director, writer, editor and producer. Thakur has received support from the National Film Board of Canada, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the Independent Film Project (IFP) in New York and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She is Associate Professor in the MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, City University of New York. 


Maxine Henryson photographs the atmospheres and color tonalities of contrasting cultural landscapes. She experiments through the lens creating a complex conjunction between personal (subjective) reality and transparent (observed) reality. Her projects trace evidence of divinity, rituals, memory, and history in the West and the East.

Henryson’s photographs are in numerous public and private collections around the world, including the former Celanese Photography Collection, Frankfurt; the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; and the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, Vermont.

Recent solo exhibitions include Contrapuntal, currently showing at A.I.R. Gallery (2017) and Ujjayi’s Journey, A.I.R. Gallery, New York (2014). Her work has been exhibited internationally, selected group exhibitions include Unscharf, Nach Gerhard Richter at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2011) as well as Marvelous Reality/Lo Real Maravilloso at Gallery Espace, New Delhi, and Lives of the Hudson at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York (both 2009). Her photography is the subject of three monographs: Ujjayi’s Journey (Kehrer, 2012), Red Leaves and Golden Curtains (Kehrer, 2007), and Presence (Artist Publications, 2003).

Maxine Henryson has been a member of A.I.R. Gallery, New York since 2012.

BOOK PARTY: THE ART OF COLLABORATION

Join us at A.I.R. on Sunday, April 9th from 4-6pm to celebrate "The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books" edited by Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone.

There will be talks by  Vincent Katz, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Kyle Schlesinger, Constance Lewallen, and Anca Cristofovici.
 

 

"The Art of Collaboration brings together the perspective and insight of a distinguished and international community of poets, artists, publishers, scholars and curators, drawing from their rich diversity of experience to identify a useful framework for documenting and understanding the recent history and practice of the old-age tradition of collaborating with text and image. This collection is an invaluable tool whose very presence is a brilliant example of its subject."
- Steve Clay, Granary Books

Contributors: Anca Cristofovici, Barbara Montefalcone, Antoine Cazé, Olivier Brossard, Michael Siebenbrodt, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, Gervais Jassaud, Pascal Poyet & Françoise Goria, Kyle Schlesinger, Antoine Coron, Constance Lewallen, Charles Bernstein & Richard Tuttle.

*This event is being held in conjunction with Susan Bee's eighth solo show, Pow! New Paintingsat A.I.R. Gallery.

ART/WRITING

Join us at A.I.R. for ART/WRITING, a reading and discussion on Saturday, April 1st at 4pm. Organized by Fellow Elizabeth Hoy, the event will feature writers: Miriam Atkin, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, and Rachel Levitsky, all of whom touch upon the visual arts in their writing practice.

ART/WRITING is being held in conjunction with Hoy's first solo show in NYC. Why does it end here? is on view at A.I.R. through April 16th. This event is cosponsored by The Felt, a journal of writing and visual art from Pratt Institute.

Elizabeth Hoy, National Priorities, Mixed media sculpture, 40 x 26 x 18 inches

Elizabeth Hoy, National Priorities, Mixed media sculpture, 40 x 26 x 18 inches

 


BIOs

Miriam Atkin is a writer and performer based in New York City. Her work has been largely concerned with the possibilities of poetry as an oral medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music, and dance. Miriam has contributed essays and reviews to Haunt journal, Art in America, and ArtCritical, and her poetry has appeared in The RecluseBoog City Reader, and This Image journal. She was a 2014 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and is a member of KAF, a performance and publishing collective. Miriam is a PhD candidate in English Literature at CUNY Graduate Center.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (New York City, 1980) is an artist chiefly concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany working in the mediums of scholarship, diorama, corporeal wisdom, archival gesture, and language. Greaves has been published in About Place JournalThe Recluse, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. She lives and works in New York City where she is young mother of The Florxal Review—a global journal of postcolonial ethnobotany foregrounding black femme plant life—and where she is completing work on The Bulletin of Wilderness and Academy: an introductory conclusion to unschoolMFA forthcoming from Organic Electric Industries. Galleries of her documentary photography and Afrofuturist dioramas are viewable on Instagram via @TerraBot and @SuperModelStudioPractice respectively.

Rachel Levitsky is the author of several chapbooks and three full length volumes of poetry and prose, Under the Sun (Futurepoem 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP 2009), and The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem 2013). In 1999 she started Belladonna Series, salons and readings that featured feminist avant garde writers. In 2009, Belladonna morphed into Belladonna* Collaborative (www.belladonnaseries.org), a multi-headed hydra of which she is one part.

Dialogue with Phong Bui and Susan Bee

 

Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1, from 2007 to 2010. He is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail, the publishing press Rail Editions, and the Rail Curatorial Projects, as well as the Host/Producer of “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio. He is a board member of the Third Rail of the Twin Cities, the Miami Rail, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Anthology Film Archives, and the International Association of Art Critics United States Section (AICA USA).

In 2006, Bui won the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Eric Isenburger Annual Prize for Installation from the National Academy Museum. In 2014, he was the keynote speaker of The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was Art in General’s Visionary Honoree. In 2016, he was given the Esther Montanez Leadership Award by Fountain House Gallery.

Susan Bee is a Brooklyn-based artist and A.I.R. member since 1996. She has had solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, Southfirst Gallery, and Accola Griefen Gallery in NY. Bee has published 16 artist's books and collaborated with poets including Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Levitsky, Johanna Drucker, and Jerome Rothenberg. She is the coeditor with Mira Schor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Bee received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

This event is being held in conjunction with Susan Bee's eighth solo show, Pow! New Paintings, at A.I.R. Gallery.

To view photos and audio of the event, please click here.