An in-person reading at EFA Project Space by Ron Broglio, with prints by Marina Zurkow.

Animals of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Join us for a reading and book launch of Animal Revolution by Ron Broglio and accompanying pop-up exhibition of the curious book illustrations by Marina Zurkow. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, we report to you these creative nonfiction incidents accumulate to reveal how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. Books and archival limited edition prints will be available for sale at the reading. The book is also available for sale here.

A selection of 18”x24 digital prints on Hahnemühle German Etching 310, Edition of 25, are for sale for $300. Each print will be accompanied by a copy of the book.

Proceeds from print sales go to Liberty Wildlife, a Phoenix area wildlife rehabilitation program including work with the critically endangered California Condor

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and other collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and willful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS

Ron Broglio writes books and essays on nonhuman phenomenology and animal studies. He has curated and produced a number of art exhibitions on contemporary environmental art. Broglio is director of the desert humanities initiative at Arizona State University and Associate Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. He is author of Animal Revolution and Surface Encounters: thinking with animals and art among other books and edited collections including the recently published The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. He co-edits the Desert Humanities book series for Texas Tech University Press. Broglio was collaborator and co-curator of Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories in which artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson examine the cultural life of endangered species in the Grand Canyon. He has performed as Field Marshal of the Animal Revolution and created a number of animal art interventions including Teat Tweet and Santio’s Gift. Currently, he is working on desert phenomenology experiments with the arts, designers, and science collaborators in an art book series Strata (first issues on saguaro, rocks, and lines & borders). As Director of Desert Humanities, he is engaged in a number of long-term thinking-making experiments in the deserts of the American Southwest.

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes with humor and affection. Her work has been featured at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Storm King Art Center, New York; the 7th Moscow Biennale; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

Soft and Wet Publication Launch & Conversation
featuring Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, Judy Blum Reddy, and Sadia Shirazi

Please join us at EFA for the closing event and launch of Soft and Wet, a publication reflecting on the exhibition of the same title curated by Sadia Shirazi. The evening will feature readings of excerpts from the Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States (1980) catalog by Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, and Judy Blum Reddy. The curator will read excerpts from the newly commissioned texts for the publication it accompanies, followed by a conversation with the speakers about “Third World Women Artists” in the 1970s and 80s and the linkages with Soft and Wet.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and early arrival is recommended

RSVP here.

About the Participants

Kazuko Miyamoto is a preeminent feminist figure of minimalism, and a pioneer of a new and radically warm brand of rigorous abstraction, introducing handmade, irregular, and intimate elements that both modulated the movement’s unforgiving visual language and advanced it, by critique. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Miyamoto moved to New York in 1964, studied at the Arts Student League, and assisted Sol LeWitt, she helped produce and execute his open cube sculptures and early wall drawings. Miyamoto’s work has shown in numerous institutions and galleries, both domestically and internationally, including Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria; Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, New York; A.I.R. Gallery, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary, New York; among many others, and is represented by Exile Gallery, Berlin.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979). In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she is now a full professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York), Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2014), and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2015).

Pindell often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. She cuts canvases in strips and sews them back together, building up surfaces in elaborate stages. She paints or draws on sheets of paper, punches out dots from the paper using a paper hole punch, drops the dots onto her canvas, and finally squeegees paint through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had punched the dots. Almost invariably, her paintings are installed unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few finishing nails. The artist’s fascination with gridded, serialized imagery, along with surface texture appears throughout her oeuvre. Even in her later, more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses in order to address social issues of homelessness, AIDs, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.

Judy Blum Reddy lives and works in New York. Blum received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. Most recently she has exhibited at CCS Bard, 2019; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2015; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2016; Villa Vassilief, Paris, 2016; Dak'Art Biennale of African Contemporary Art, Senegal, 2016; Station Independent Project, New York, 2015; 33 Orchard, New York, 2016; FIAC, Paris, 2016; Clark House Initiative, Bombay, 2014-16; Asian Cultural Centre, Gwangju Biennale, 2016; and Art Dubai, 2015. Reddy's work is included in public collections at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Fond National d'Art Contemporain and Centre National d'Art de Grenoble, France.

Sadia Shirazi is a writer, art historian, curator and sometimes architect based in New York. Her reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, MoMA post, C Magazine, The Funambulist, Jadaliyya and ArteEast and she has written monographic essays on Zarina and Jessica Vaughn. Shirazi has curated exhibitions internationally including Three days in the desert at the Lower East Side Printshop (2018), welcome to what we took from is the state at the Queens Museum (2016), and 230 MB/Exhibition Without Objects at Khoj Artists’s Association in Delhi (2013). Her work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Performance Space New York and the Devi Art Foundation. Shirazi holds a MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from the University of Chicago. She is the Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP), teaches at The New School and Cooper Union, and is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

This event is presented with support from ICI and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, with special thanks to A.I.R. Gallery.

Independent Curators International (ICI) produces exhibitions, events, publications, research and training opportunities for curators and diverse audiences around the world. Established in 1975 and headquartered in New York, ICI is a hub that connects emerging and established curators, artists, and art spaces, forging international networks and generating new forms of collaboration.

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University was established in 1996 in response to student interest combined with the University’s commitment to global excellence. It provides a space in which research and public programs, with a focus on community and intercultural studies, are made accessible to faculty, students, and the New York community within a broad, rigorous international and comparative framework.

The A/P/A Institute at NYU produces programming, publications, exhibitions, new research, and a long-running artist-in-residence program, attracting leading academics and practitioners. The Institute's multiple archival collection initiatives have also continued to build a foundation of, and preservation and access to, important historical documents and previously overlooked materials for present and future researchers and students.

Located in Greenwich Village, the Institute serves the community highlighting research, cultural production, and scholarship on contemporary issues facing Asian/Pacific American communities, and provides a nexus for scholars, community leaders, and artists who are working on advancing scholarship in the field and bringing theory into practice.

During the event, an A/P/A representative will be present with copies of DIRECTIONS TO MY HOUSE by Zarina Hashmi with Sarah Burney for purchase. “Memory is the only lasting possession we have,” begins Zarina Hashmi, the A/P/A Institute at NYU’s 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence. In the pages that follow, the artist writes about her life for the first time—her family’s experience during the 1947 Partition of India, her long career as an artist, and the many cities that she has called home. The book includes never-published material, and chronicles the artist’s travels and life around the world through a collection of essays, poems, artworks, and personal photographs. More information on the publication can be found here.