Wednesday September 6, 2023 | 6:30-8:00pm
Location: Residency Unlimited
360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)
Manon Slome, Curator and co-founder of the nomadic arts organization, No Longer Empty, will be in discussion with curator and cultural critic, Laura Raicovich, author of Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, to discuss how art and exhibitions can be created to increase community and foster civic exchange. As Raicovich wrote in the forward of No Longer Empty: Building Art and Community in Unused Spaces, art in accessible and public spaces, “has the potential to reflect the lived experiences of diverse publics back to them, or to break open entirely other possibilities of encountering the world as audiences engage in common experiences.”
No Longer Empty: Building Art and Community in Unused Spaces is a publication that re-evaluates and reflects on the work of New York City–based nomadic arts organization, No Longer Empty. The book, amply illustrated with photographs of artworks and events, details the development of a curatorial program that aimed to create a democratic access to art through site- and community-responsive exhibitions and radical educational programming deeply grounded in local research. Divided into three sections – How it Happened, Making it Accessible and Making it Replicable – essays by six key participants trace the evolution of the group’s highly innovative curatorial, educational and collaborative programmatic strategies. Case studies of selected exhibitions, short accounts by a host of artists and educators, and replicas of forms and checklists function as a kind of manual to inspire the next generations of makers and agents of change—curators, artists, community organizers, educators—who want to take cultural production and the power of art into their own hands and into their own communities.
Click below to see images from the program
About
Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator. She is curator and editor of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring artists’ perspectives on transcontinental political, social, economic, and environmental concerns; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito and Protocinema in 2022. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published in 2021 by Verso Books. This summer she and a collective of artists, musicians, and culture workers, opened Francis Kite Club, a bar/cultural and activist space in the East Village, NYC. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Director of the Queens Museum; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at Hyperallergic.
Manon Slome, co-founder and Curator of No Longer Empty, is deeply committed to opening up spaces and discourses that lead to a more democratic access to art. Leading No Longer Empty through a twelve year cycle and through some 40 exhibitions, the organization harnessed the power of art to explore community narratives and key issues of social justice, collaborating and co-programming with local organizations, residents and civic leaders to ensure relevance and highlight the cultural vibrancy and narratives of host neighborhoods. The model also championed the freedom of artistic production not bound by institutional and commercial constraints allowing artists, through a program of commissions, to expand their practice and engage with wider audiences. Slome continues to curate internationally and write extensively on contemporary art.
