NYAB Event - “Performing Franklin Furnace” Exhibition

“Performing Franklin Furnace” Exhibition

Pratt Manhattan Gallery

This event has ended.

Franklin Furnace, the New York cultural institution dedicated to the presentation and preservation of avant-garde art, will bring archival photos, video, and more from 30 of its groundbreaking projects to Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Martha Wilson, pioneering performance artist and Franklin Furnace founder, selected works from 30 years of presentations at Franklin Furnace. The exhibition follows Franklin Furnace’s December 2014 move to Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, where it is an organization-in-residence. The exhibition, titled Performing Franklin Furnace, is produced by Independent Curators International.

Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in 1976 to present and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable to a lack of institutional support due to their ephemeral nature or politically unpopular content. Franklin Furnace’s archives include artists’ books and periodicals, installation art, performance art, and other contemporary avant-garde art forms. Among the 30 projects featured at Pratt Manhattan Gallery are:

· Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, a wall-mounted digital print from 1978 featuring one-liners that are a distillation of a reading list from the Whitney Independent Study Program, where she was a student.
· Digital prints and posters from One Year Performance 1981-1982 by performance artist Tehching Hsieh, who has been called a “master” by Marina Abramovic. Hsieh spent one year outside, not entering buildings or shelter of any sort including cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or tents, and moved around New York City with a backpack and sleeping bag.
· Dona Ann McAdams’ 1984 black-and-white photograph Feminists and Porn Stars featuring women posing topless to remind the audience that sex workers are mothers, daughters, wives, and women, just like their feminist counterparts.
· Asylum NYC, a 16-minute video by Wooloo Productions of 10 young artists from 10 countries who applied for creative asylum to the United States and were detained for a week in a gallery space in Chelsea after being stripped of their belongings and supplies. The 2006 project was meant to draw attention to the difficulties faced by immigrants and asylum seekers.

The Pratt Manhattan Gallery exhibition is part of an international traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International that will culminate in New York with displays at Pratt and two additional locations. An exhibition at The Fales Library at New York University will focus specifically on Wilson’s art work. Historic Franklin Furnace performance pieces will be recreated over the course of several days by various artists at performance space Participant Inc.

Pratt Manhattan Gallery will hold a public symposium on April 22, 2015 about the economics, politics, society, and temporality of reenacting performance works.