Takin’ it to the Streets: Performing Public Protest

Takin’ it to the Streets: Performing Public Protest panel discussion with introduction and moderation by Kris Grey featuring Jill Casid, Shaun Leonardo and Ed Woodham. The very notion of public space is one that is marked by bodies and actions. Generally, public space is social space open and accessible to people. More than just a place to gather or pass, public space is also monitored, administered, and patrolled. The use of a space by bodies in alliance constitutes that space as public. Reciprocally, when bodies gather and appear to one another in the street, on the corner, in a park, etc their presence and appearance in those spaces constitutes those bodies as the “public.” In the recent years the world has witnessed the utilization of public spaces for large-scale demonstrations with far reaching political significance from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter. Takin’ it to the Streets explores what happens when public space is activated as a site for civic engagement by social art for artistic resistance. Jill Casid is Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she founded and served as the first director of the Center for Visual Cultures. A historian, theorist, and practicing artist, her contributions to the transdisciplinary field of visual studies include her monographs, books, and many essays. Her recent solo exhibition, Kissing on Main Street, brilliantly positioned a series of polaroid objects “at the four-way intersection of sex, imaging technology, vulnerable exposure, and policing that is public intimacy”. Each photographic object was a record of intimate exchange in a public space. Shaun Leonardo is a multi-disciplinary artist and cultural producer. He has an M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a B.A. in Visual Arts from Bowdoin College. In 2015 Shaun won two Franklin Furnace awards both for his individual work and his work with collaborators Melanie Crean and Sable E. Smith on Mirror / Echo / Tilt. Leonardo’s practice interrogates the construction of masculinity at the intersections of race and class. He’ll share his recent work I Can’t Breathe, which takes as its referent a public act of violence. Ed Woodham is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator dedicated to working in public space. He is best known for the public art project, Art in Odd Places (AiOP), a festival that happens along the length of 14th Street in Manhattan every October. AiOP is a 10 day-long performance piece, created by a number of curators, artists and designers, and comprised of performances and installations from artists all over the world. Woodham and his team produce AiOP as an art project and in part as a response to the increase post-911 of policing in public space. Kris Grey is a gender-queer artist whose work exists at the intersection of communication, activism, community building, storytelling, lecture, and studio production. Grey earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University. Grey is the Exhibitions and Communications Manager at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Takin’ it to the Streets is a program run in conjunction with The 1970s: The Blossoming of a Queer Enlightenment, on display from April 8 to July 3rd, 2016 The 1970s: The Blossoming of a Queer Enlightenment explores the vibrant and liberating decade between the Stonewall Riots from 1969 until 1980, just before we heard the first rumblings of the AIDS crisis emerging, changing the nature of sexual relationships to the present day. This historic exhibition features over 115 works from the Museum’s extensive collection of over 24,000 objects including artwork made during this significant period in LGBTQ history. Works have also been borrowed from the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Fales Library, and it will include the entire "X Portfolio" by Robert Mapplethorpe (1978), recently purchased and accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection. It was this iconic body of work, made during the 1970s, that led to the Culture Wars of the following decade."The 1970s" explores themes of political activism, body/self, fashion/style, and sexual freedom/expression.”