Laurel Ptak | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Laurel Ptak |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Occupation(s) | artist, curator, writer, educator |
Laurel Ptak is an artist, curator, writer and educator based in New York City.
Laurel Ptak | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | Laurel Ptak |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Occupation(s) | artist, curator, writer, educator |
Laurel Ptak is an artist, curator, writer and educator based in New York City.
She previously served as director and curator of the artist-founded non-profit organization Art in General in New York City from 2017 to 2020. [1] [2] A multidisciplinary figure inside the field of culture, she has made contributions across disciplines of photography, [3] new media, [4] social practice art, [5] curating [6] and technology. [7] She was named one of 100 top Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2014. [8] She is currently an MFA professor in the School of Art, Media and Technology at The New School [9] and faculty member in the Curatorial Practice graduate program at the School of Visual Arts. [10]
Her work has looked at the social effects of technology and recent projects have taken up topics including feminism, [11] hacking, [12] and social media. [13] She is co-editor of the book Undoing Property? with artist Marysia Lewandowska. [14] Its essays, interviews and artistic projects explore themes of immaterial labor, political economy and the commons. One of Ptak's best known projects, Wages For Facebook, [15] draws upon ideas from the 1970s international Wages for housework feminist campaign to think through contemporary relationships of capitalism, class and affective labor inside social media. [16] When it launched as a website it immediately drew over 20,000 views and was rapidly and internationally debated via social media and the press, setting off a public conversation about worker's rights and the very nature of labor, as well as the politics of its refusal, in the digital age. [17] She is a co-founder of the award-winning Art+Feminism Wikipedia-Edit-A-Thon project which addresses gender disparities online and their effects on public forms of knowledge, with public edit-a-thons organized each year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and co-organized by numerous art institutions and universities around the world. [18]
Ptak studied art, critical theory and art history at Hampshire College and holds an M.A. in curating and the history of contemporary art from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College where she wrote her graduate thesis on feminist art from the 1990s. [19]
Art in General was a non-profit contemporary art exhibition space known for its vibrant and ground-breaking projects as a formidable and longstanding New York City alternative space, focused on giving meaningful resources and opportunities to artists early on in their careers. Founded in 1981 by artists Martin Weinstein and Teresa Liszka and originally located in the General Hardware building in New York City — hence the organization's name, Art in General — the institution produced and presented distinctive programs and exhibitions featuring new work by local and international artists.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, the Artforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s.
Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."
Founded in 1990, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College is an exhibition and research center dedicated to the study of art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present. The Center initiated its graduate program in 1994 and is one of the oldest institutions in curatorial pedagogy, offering a two-year graduate-degree program in curating. Hundreds of curators, writers, critics, artists, and scholars taught seminars and lectured in practicums. The Center alumni/ae include more than 200 individuals working in contemporary art field in the U.S. and internationally.
Lynne Cooke is an Australian-born art scholar. Since August 2014 she has been the Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Marcia Tucker was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice in New York City, which she ran as the director until 1999.
Rhizome is an American not-for-profit arts organization that supports and provides a platform for new media art.
An edit-a-thon is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typically include basic editing training for new editors and may be combined with a more general social meetup. The word is a portmanteau of "edit" and "marathon". An edit-a-thon can either be "in-person" or online or a blended version of both. If it is not in-person, it is usually called a "virtual edit-a-thon" or "online edit-a-thon".
Lauren Cornell is an American curator and writer based in New York. Cornell is the Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art. Previously, she worked at the New Museum for twelve years and was the Executive Director of their affiliate Rhizome (2005-2012).
Micol Hebron is an American interdisciplinary artist, curator, and associate professor at Chapman University, located in Southern California. Hebron critically examines and employs modes of feminist activism in art.
Art and Feminism is an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about women artists, which started in 2014. The project has been described as "a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionately written by and about men".
Hannah Black is a visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance. She is best known for her open letter written with Ciarán Finlayson and Tobi Haslett, The Tear Gas Biennial, criticizing co-chair of the board of the Whitney Museum, Warren Kanders, and his toxic philanthropy which comes from selling tear gas and other weapons via Safariland. The letter prompted artists to withdraw works from the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Aria Dean is an American artist, critic, and curator. Until 2021, Dean served as Curator and Editor of Rhizome. Her writings have appeared in various art publications including Artforum, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Art in America, and Topical Cream. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Foxy Production and American Medium in New York, Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, and Arcadia Missa in London. Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA, an artists project space that opened in 2015. Dean lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. She is represented by Greene Naftali.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Meg Onli is an African-American art curator and writer. She is currently the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her curatorial work primarily revolves around the black experience, language, and constructions of power and space. Her writing has been published in Art21, Daily Serving, and Art Papers. In September 2022 it was announced that Onli would co-curate the 2024 Whitney Biennial with Chrissie Iles.
Elke Solomon is an artist, curator, educator and community worker. She is known for her interdisciplinary practice that combines painting, drawing, object-making, performance and installation. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad.
Xiaoyu Weng (翁笑雨) is a Chinese curator, writer, editor and educator in the area of contemporary art.
Michelle Kuo is an American curator, writer, and art historian. Since 2018, Kuo has been a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. She was previously editor-in-chief of Artforum magazine starting in 2010.
Tim Griffin is an American writer, curator and former editor. He served as the director and chief curator of the Kitchen. He was editor-in-chief of Artforum from 2003 to 2010.