Image: Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Blue Wedding to the Sea, 2009.

Please join us for the opening reception for As Far as the Heart Can See, curated by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful.

Friday, September 21, 2018
Curatorial Walkthrough: 5 pm – 6 pm
Opening Reception: 6 pm – 8 pm

Opening night performances by "Threat Level 3" (Billy X Curmano, John Pendergast and Steve Smith) and Praxis (Delia and Brainard Carey).

Artists: Nao Bustamante, Billy X. Curmano, Irina Danilova & Project 59, Beatrice Glow, Ivan Monforte, Linda Mary Montano, Praxis (Delia & Brainard Carey), Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, and Martha Wilson & Franklin Furnace Archive

Curated by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful — whose elusive creative path embodies intimacy, healing, empathy, and radical generosity — As Far as the Heart Can See focuses on figures who parry institutional canons and over-professionalization to pursue art as a call to the heart. In the words of Linda Mary Montano, this is art that “gives one permission to…”

Highlighting longform and durational work, the exhibition also features performance documentation, ephemera, manifestos, interviews, and artist proposals culled from nearly 20 years of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art; a testament to the transient and intransigent lifework of cultural producers.

Artists fatigued by pressure to both make and “be” objects, take note: As Far as the Heart Can See assembles those who have shifted gear, broken away, found shelter in the wilderness, or ventured astray from art-historical validation in order to find truth. Many of those in As Far as the Heart Can See refer to what they do as a ‘vocation,’ suggesting bold acts and a readiness to trade normative success for something more. These artists construct new art worlds and disrupt disciplines such as ecology, healthcare, thanatology, gender studies, economics, anthropology, and social work.