BIO
Mission:
Founded in 1982, Exit Art is an interdisciplinary cultural center that presents innovative exhibitions, films and performances that reflect a commitment to contemporary issues and ideas. We support emerging, under-recognized, mid-career and international artists, emphasizing new and experimental forms of expression. We are interested in art that explores environmental, political and cultural issues as a means of initiating or instigating social change. The diversity of Exit Art’s programs reflect the multiplicity of our audience, which includes artists, activists, scholars, scientists, students, cultural critics, educators, collectors, and the New York community at large.

History:
During our first decade, Exit Art presented artists whose work challenged notions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and equality. We mounted a series of mid-career retrospectives which helped to bring wider public attention and critical acclaim to artists who are now firmly established, including Jimmie Durham, Willie Birch, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tehching Hsieh, Martin Wong, Adrian Piper, David Wojnarowicz and David Hammons.

In our second decade, we identified a new generation of young, emerging artists with diverse backgrounds and organized a series of exhibitions, launching the careers of artists such as Shirin Neshat, Fred Tomaselli, Nicole Eisenman, Roxy Paine, Patty Chang, Julie Mehretu, Sue DeBeer, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Chakaia Booker. Fever (1992), the first exhibition in the series, was named one of the ten most important shows of the decade by Peter Plagens in Newsweek.

Now Exit Art is a leading voice in experimental art, producing exhibitions that illuminate the pressing issues of our time while supporting artists whose works reflect the transformations of our culture. By 2012, our 30th year, Exit Art will have organized over 200 exhibitions, events, festivals and programs featuring more than 2,500 artists.
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EVENT

Final Event: La Ultima Noche Que Pase Contigo/The Last Night I Spent With You


Dates:
Sat May 19, 2012 21:00 - Sat May 19, 2012

Co-founder and Artistic Director Papo Colo will present a farewell celebration performance as an exit from Exit Art and the entrance to his next full-time project, Tricker Theater.

The hour long performance will be a collage of old works (2010’s Distant Sex) and new works meditating on
time and memory, the political and sexual, the economic and monetary, and current modes of unrest in the spirit of the Occupy movement. The performances will be followed by “Sweeping Memories,” a ritual cleansing of Exit Art's space that acts as a metaphor for Exit Art's closing and
Colo’s retirement as Artistic Director. Performers include Ernesto Nodal, Elinor Thompson, Zoe Metcalfe-Klaw, Jolie Pichardo, among others.

Trickster Theater is a multinational, polyglot theatre company, creating new works for a global audience in New York City. This project, which will serve as Papo Colo’s next artistic feat, explores the process and union of art, music and language in the context of performance. Trickster
productions will be produced out of Colo’s apartment loft on Canal Street, where Exit Art was originally conceived. This breeding ground will allow for intimate performances for select audiences to engage with the actor in startlingly discreet and simple ways.


OPPORTUNITY

Pablo Helguera: Academia de los Nocturnos


Deadline:
Tue May 15, 2012 18:00

Part of the exhibition Collective/Performative, Helguera will host a series of gatherings, culminating in a 3am performance, inspired by the 16th-century Spanish Academia de los Nocturnos (Academy of the Night Revelers) who created the first "tertulia," an intellectual soiree, that functioned as a secret literary society.

The Academia de los Nocturnos (Academy of the Night Revelers), which emerged in in Valencia, Spain, in the 1590s, was one of the first artistic social gatherings in the form of the soirée. Part a secretive fraternity meeting late at night, part a gathering of wannabe poets, the academy held literary contests on a regular basis and became a support group for the then emerging modern literary art forms. In tribute to the closing of Exit art, artist Pablo Helguera revives this golden age community in the form of a week-long sonnet workshop, culminating with a very late night (3am, in fact) performance and literary contest on the last day of operation of Exit art.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!
The Academia de los Nocturnos is looking for participants to be official fellows of the academy. The workshops will include discussions on poetry and speech and will generate material for presentation on the public performance. No experience in poetry is necessary. Performers, writers, and non-writers and non-performers are welcome to apply. Participants must commit to attend the workshops on Tuesday, May 15; Wednesday, May 16; and Friday, May 18 from 6 - 8pm and the performance on May 19 at 3am. If interested, send an email with your CV to verity@exitart.org with the subject line "Sonnet Workshops."

The 3am performance and poetry contest will be open to the public. The Academia de los Nocturnos fellows will act as judges for the contest.


EVENT

Exit Art Printed Histories: 15 year of Exit Art Print Portfolios 1995-2011


Dates:
Fri Dec 16, 2011 19:00 - Tue Jan 31, 2012

Location:
New York, New York
United States of America

Exit Art is pleased to announce EXIT ART: PRINTED HISTORIES, 15 Years of Exit Art Print Portfolios 1995-2011. Over the course of the last 30 years, Exit Art has published fourteen print portfolios containing works by ninety-seven renowned artists. Due to the untimely passing of its co-founder Jeannette Ingberman, this year’s 14th portfolio will be the last to be published. It will however stand out for its celebration of the mission of Exit Art, which has been to mount experimental, historical, and manifestly unique exhibitions of aesthetic, social, political, and environmental issues.


EVENT

RICO GATSON: Three Trips Around the Block


Dates:
Fri Sep 30, 2011 19:00 - Wed Nov 23, 2011

Location:
New York, United States of America

Exit Art is pleased to present RICO GATSON: Three Trips Around the Block, a 15-year retrospective of work by New York artist Rico Gatson. This exhibition is the third in Exit Art’s SOLO program, aimed at providing public visibility for under-recognized,mid-career artists though one person shows at Exit Art.
 
Brooklyn-based Rico Gatson was born in 1966 in Augusta,
Georgia and raised in Riverside, California. His work generates collective memory through the exploration of symbols and images
culled from popular culture and the mass media, questioning issues of identity, racial intolerance, and the status quo.
 
Three Trips Around the Block is a survey of Gatson’s sculpture, painting, video, drawings, and installations, including several new pieces created for the exhibition. The title of the retrospective stems from a powerful experience Gatson had with his brother who, after spending fifteen years in prison, reconnected with the artist by taking a long walk around the block. The conversation that occurred
during their “trips around the block” inspired Gatson to creatively explore their own disparate lives – a personal excavation made public in this poignant and provocative exhibition.
 
In Two Heads in a Box (1994), the earliest work included in the
exhibition, Gatson inverts the racial stereotype made popular by the white American singer Al Jolson, who performed in blackface
during the 1920s and ‘30s. The artist, in whiteface and adorned with a white smile and cardboard tie, tirelessly sings the lyrics to “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy” until his exhaustion is visible. A compelling and haunting endurance test, Two Heads in a Box marks the beginning of Gatson’s exploration of racial and identity rhetoric.
 
Merging history, current events, and mass culture, Gatson’s videos, paintings, and sculptures are politically and racially charged commentaries on American culture. His two- and three-dimensional works are as thought provoking as his videos—abstractions in black and white become politically loaded symbols, and sculptures turn to totems of racism and hate. In the newly commissioned work, Gatson creates landscapes that harness the power and energy of the 1965 Watts riots, which spawned the Black Panthers and other
social organizations of the 1960s. Critic Ida Panicelli wrote in Artforum: “Gatson works with precision, exploring power symbols as elements of collective imagination and bringing to
light their potential for manipulation.”
 
Rico Gatson received a BA in Studio Art from Bethel College, St. Paul, MN and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been
shown at Prospect.1 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; New Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Cheekwood Museum, Nashville, TN; and in two seminal exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY that traveled to The Santa Monica Museum of Art: Black Belt and FREESTYLE. His work is included in numerous public and private collections: the Denver Art Museum, Norton
Family Foundation, and The Studio Museum of Harlem, among others. He is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University.
 
PUBLIC PROGRAM
 
Friday, October 14 / 7:30pm
RICO GATSON: Video Works
This one-night only program compiles Rico Gatson’s complete
discography of single-channel videos and presents a special single-channel version of Gatson’s important work “Spirit, Myth, Ritual and Liberation” (2008). A mini-retrospective, the 15-years of videos represented here reflect themes of racial antagonism, social rhetoric, and political commentary.    
Q&A with the artist after the screening.
$5 general admission. Cash bar.


EVENT

Contemporary Slavery


Dates:
Fri Jun 03, 2011 19:00 - Fri Aug 05, 2011

Location:
New York , New York
United States of America

CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY 
June 3 - August 5, 2011 
Exhibition Opening Friday, June 3, 2011/ 7-9pm 
One Day Symposium Saturday, June 11, 2011 / 10am-6pm 
SEA Poetry Series, June 14, 2011 / 7-9pm
Preview of DIGIMOVIES, Tuesdays starting July 5, 2011 
CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY, a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics) and the second annual ECOAESTHETIC exhibition, investigates various forms of contemporary slavery—from human trafficking and the sex trade; to the exploitation of farm and domestic workers, immigrants and prisoners; to sweatshop, bonded, and child labor—through a bombardment of images taken by leading photojournalists documenting this issue. A symposium will unite scholars, humanitarians and activists in dialogue in order to draw critical attention to this under-recognized local and international issue.