Deviance Credits
CCS Bard Galleries, Hessel Museum of Art
The Center for Curatorial Studies presents thirteen exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art. The students have organized these exhibition and projects as part of the requirements for the master of arts degree.
The concept of deviance credits, developed by Ira Shor as part of a strategy for empowering educators, argues for “one foot firmly planted in the institution so that the other foot can deviate from the norm.” It proposes an essential hinge between a full investment in an institution and an opening of space for challenging or critical practices. The thesis projects organized by the CCS Bard class of 2014 are wide-ranging in their investments, but linked by a similar kind of negotiation with notions of institution in support of individual and collective commitments.
Student-curated exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
Turn on the bright lights forefronts artists who work with abstraction to represent spaces that resist visibility.
Featuring an installation, online platform, performances, talks, and workshops, The Third Idiom initiates an experimental dialogue between education as a form or subject of art production and systems of formal schooling.
Managing Object Expectations creates a dialogue between artistic labor and readymade objects by merging the aesthetics of handcrafted artworks with everyday objects.
What if a city was not controlled by the mechanisms of an urban commodity? What would the social interrelations which happen inside the urban environment be like?
From multiple, to robotic, to the flat – the transformations of body at the intersection of the real and the virtual. In the augmented reality, even this last distinction collapses.
“NO NARRATIVE PRECEDED US” is an ongoing collaboration between Malene Dam, Bridget de Gersigny, and Ted Kerr started in October 2013 with public conversations and performances in New York and CCS Bard. Using the format of a reading group the collaboration explores the intersections of identity politics with shared queer and feminist histories across time.
The Development proposes to build an infrastructure for more adaptive, collaborative, and local models of arts-led economic development in the Hudson Valley.
By accelerating networked capital, Dark Velocity1 mobilizes contemporary art’s essential processes of valuation and distribution not as external predatory forces that invade art’s autonomy but as resources for actively negotiating agency.
1 Courtesy of Gean Moreno
An exhibition and research platform developing and articulating concepts of queer labor.
Is it Really Working? researches the possibilities and conditions of cultural production in NYC from a queer and feminist perspective. A meeting of culture agents who share critical positions regarding the status of artistic labor, the format of this encounter intersects the symposium and the crash course, as a physical symposium that re-thinks the social relations traditionally established in those socio-academic circumstances.
Open the door, enter the office, embody the institution. Now see yourself through the mirror.
The modes of production of an artwork and the forces driving its placement in an exhibition, museum, or collection are often highly inter-connected; still, participants in the field often agree that the presumably autonomous meaning of the work has to be detached from its constitutive network of power and money. But who benefits the most from this separation?
A fragmentary array of movie theater architectural tropes, cult films stills, performative environmental settings, and photographs of cinema personas, Screen focuses on the social space of cinema as a privileged subject in Tom Burr’s sculptural model.