96 hours into the student occupation of the Cooper Union’s historic clock tower, Jolene Travis, Assistant Director of Public Affairs, Media Relations at Cooper Union released a statement to the press and on Cooper’s website today regarding the situation. The press release may have been timed to coincide with a second Day of Action planned by students, faculty, and alumni in support of the protesters taking place today.
Janelle Grace
Janelle Grace is the #TalkBackTuesday editor of our tumblelog Hyperallergic LABS. In some of her previous professional lives, she's written essays for the Studio Museum in Harlem, coordinated gallery talks at MoMA, and checked coats at the Museum of Sex. She's also known for her role as @RudyHuxtable on Twitter.
Posted inNews
Student Protests at Cooper Union Continue into Fourth Day
Yesterday, over sixty students in solidarity with the eleven clock tower occupiers demonstrated outside at the school’s board of trustees meeting, where plans for charging tuition were discussed. According to The Local, three students managed to enter the boardroom before the doors were blocked by security.
Posted inNews
Student Occupiers Call for Cooper Union President’s Resignation
Students for a Free Cooper Union held a press conference this afternoon, addressing a set of frequently asked questions regarding their occupation of the college’s Foundation Building. Undergraduate art students Rachel Appel and Audrey Snyder served as spokespeople for the 11 students occupying the building’s clock tower and read a prepared statement to a crowd of about 100 press, students, faculty, and other staff and community members.
Posted inNews
Students Occupy Historic Cooper Union Clock Tower to Protest Tuition Charges
Eleven Cooper Union students have barricaded themselves within the school’s Foundation Building clock tower since noon on December 3rd in protest of the administration’s plan to begin charging tuition for graduate studies for the first time in 110 years.
Posted inArt
Collection (Not) as Curation: How Exhibitions are Different From Libraries
Does an understanding of professional collecting, as is done in libraries, give us a better understanding of what’s happening on Tumblr, or at least help us better understand how we define curation? I turned to the founder and organizer of the Reanimation Library, artist and professional librarian Andrew Beccone, for his thoughts.
Posted inArt
Stumbling upon Serendipity at the Havana Biennial
I have never felt I more fully embodied the role of “cultural tourist” than when I visited the 11th Havana Biennial for its opening week.
Posted inArt
The Many Views of Christopher Columbus
October 12, observed yesterday as a holiday, is most commonly known as Columbus Day in the United States, but is also recognized as Dia de la Raza throughout Latin America, as well as Indigenous People’s Day. Fraught with controversy, the various iterations of this holiday reflect the range of perspectives on Christopher Columbus and his legacies. The Columbus Day of my youth celebrates the heroic “discoverer” of the Americas, playing up mythical stories of his genius on insisting the world was round, and often neglecting the icky bits about the ensuing genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Posted inArt
Can Living As Form Relieve My Liberal Guilt?
In order to properly follow up on my experience with Creative Time’s social practice summit, and given my heretofore lack of involvement with #OccupyWallStreet protests, I was pretty much obligated to visit Creative Time’s Living As Form exhibition at the historic Essex Street Market. I mean, the art included, for the most part, is all about progressivism and alternative modes of operating within our faulty society. And community! I love that word, community! As a dutiful citizen of the world, surely taking in an exhibition dedicated to valuing people doing stuff together over commercially-based, materialized practice would amount to me contributing something, somehow. Right?
Posted inOpinion
A Question of Community and Conversations About Community: Creative Time’s Summit
Last Friday, I attended Creative Time’s third annual progressive social practice-centered summit, this year held in conjunction with their Living As Form exhibition. The summit was a day-long affair, stuffed to the gills with presentations about current examples of the intersections of art and politics. Over thirty artists, groups and thinkers presented in quick-fire, 8-minute succession, tackling a wide range of concerns, from the recent protests in Madison against the union-busting legislature to squatting to abortion, among other, less specific but otherwise community-oriented projects.
Posted inArt
How Jonathan Safran Foer Taught Me About Roofies
LONDON — I thought I was going to see Jonathan Safran Foer live and in person Monday night. Sure, it seemed odd that he would randomly be in London with no very recently published book to tour, but who am I to know the details of an acclaimed author’s personal schedule? Literary fun plus art means I’m in.
Posted inArt
Looking at London, Revolting!
LONDON — We are now six days into the unrest that started in the Greater London neighborhood of Tottenham, spread throughout London and then erupted across England. London has been relatively — but tenuously — calmer than it was on Monday night, when looting, arson and violence escalated and reached new and disparate parts of the city … What’s been more interesting to me, however, has been the ways in which many denizens of England have established identities as non-rioters or anti-rioters and expressed criticism through social media and images circulated through it.
Posted inBooks
A Connected White Hedonist’s Guide to Young British Art
A Hedonist’s Guide to Art may as well be called A Hedonist’s Guide to the Art World. Released last winter, the book is a collaboration between Artica, an eGallery for contemporary art, and Hg2, a series of luxury travel guides. It’s comprised of short essays from about 60 people from various reaches of the upper echelons of the London art world. The essays are divided between five chapter headings — ideas, lifestyle, the market, the art itself and “inner workings.” The content is most often in the form of a personal anecdote. That said, these tidbits are best nibbled on in small doses — it’s slow-going to read very many of these essays all at once.
