Events - Miller Institute for Contemporary Art

Salon Series: Neither Public, Nor Private

Jul 18, 2019, 6–8pm

Salon Series: Neither Public, Nor Private
Thurs. July 18, 6-8pm

Respondents: Bekezela Mguni, Betty Marin, Emma Hedditch
READ Research and References from our Guest Respondents.

Facilitator: Dana Bishop-Root

Supported by The Heinz Endowments

In concert with the Miller ICA's current exhibition, An Atlas of Commoning, Neither, Public Nor Private will be a conversation that gives space to define both implicit and explicit rules around what makes public, and what makes private - while interrupting a binary of public and private to learn about how we practice, survive and locate our selves/community in all of the spaces in between. From multiple life experiences and disciplines we will ask how many publics can exist within a public and how many things become private when we assert a singular construction of public?

The Miller ICA Salons are facilitated topical conversations that include the general public and guest respondents whose life practice explores the chosen topic. The goal of these Salons is to engage in conversation and exchange across difference and discipline in free and public space. The 2019 Miller ICA Salons are a co-organized by the Miller ICA and facilitator, Dana Bishop-Root.

Free + open to the public

Bios

Emma Hedditch (born in 1972, GB) lives in New York. Hedditch has worked with Cinenova, a feminist film and video distributor (1999–present), Copenhagen Free University (2001–2008), No Total, a site for performance (2012–2017) and Coop Fund, a member organized funding cooperative (2018- present). Hedditch has participated in group exhibitions including Coop Fund, Amalle Dublon & Constantina Zavitsanos, Devin Kenny, John Neff, Artists Space (2018), Finesse, curated by Leah Pires, Wallach Art Gallery, New York (2018) and recently completed the project +493024345953 at KW in Berlin. Hedditch has published texts in Afterall, Mute Magazine, and Art Monthly, and contributed to the books Rereading Appropriation (If I Can’t Dance, 2015) and self-published work includes A Political Feeling, I Hope So, Coming to Have a Public Life, Is it Worth it? and the e-book of scripts, I Don’t Want you to Work as Me, I Want you to Work for Me.

Betty Marín is a cultural worker from Wilmington, CA. Her work centers on creating educational spaces that encourage dialogue and solidarity between different communities. She is currently based in her home city of Los Angeles, where she continues to explore the theory and practice of popular education. She is a proud member of the language justice collective Antena LA, the pop ed and research collective School of Echoes, and the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which she helped found in 2015.

Bekezela is a creative, queer, Black Femme. She directs the Black Unicorn Library and Archives Project. She works to create libraries as sites of possibility, imagination and freedom. She celebrates memory and storytelling, and the relationship between literacy and liberation. Bekezela was selected as an Emerging Artist in the 2016 Three Rivers Arts Festival and won the Juror's Choice award for her visual artwork. She is currently a member of BOOM Concepts Studios and serves as the Education Program Director for Dreams of Hope, which affirms and uplifts the voices of LGBTQ youth through the arts and by building community spaces with queer and Trans young people in Pittsburgh.

Reception: An Atlas of Commoning

Jun 29, 2019, 5:30–7:30pm

An Atlas of Commoning
June 29–Sept 22, 2019

OPENING RECEPTION
Sat. June 29, 5:30-7:30pm

RSVP on Facebook

+ Open Space Workshop: Commoning Pittsburgh
Sat. June 29, 1-5:30pm

An Atlas of Commoning: Open Space Workshop

Jun 29, 2019, 1–5:30pm

Open Space Workshop
Sat., June 29, 1 – 5:30 pm
RSVP on Facebook
TICKETS on Eventbrite

The Open Space workshop, preceding the exhibition opening of An Atlas of Commoning, brings together community-led initiatives for building meaningful relations between people, places, and the environment in the pursuit of a more just and resilient Pittsburgh. The workshop provides a platform for the exchange of ideas, experiences and knowledge, and marks the beginning of a summer-long conversation around practices of commoning. Join us in building a network of initiatives that propose another possible world, and one which is already in the making.

For more information please contact Stefan Gruber at smgruber@andrew.cmu.edu

Salon Discussion:
Not Neutral

May 6, 2019, 6–8pm

Not Neutral - Salon Series
Guest respondents: Deana Haggag, Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Alicia Grullon, LaTanya S. Autry

May 6, 6-8pm
RSVP on Facebook

READ Research and References from our Guest Respondents.

In his response to the Walker Art Center's call for New Year Resolutions, Anthony Romero makes a suggestion to arts institutions to: "Recall that your institution is not part of some distant European colonial past but remains part of the ongoing project of colonial domination and that your function as a bastion of cultural legitimacy and valuation is predicated not only on your participation in the enduring colonial project of displacement and erasure but those of capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, able-ism, and white supremacy, as well." This series takes up Romero’s prompt for it’s May Salon: Not Neutral. This discussion will focus on how institutional practices assume a neutrality of place, or experience, and will explore how these false presumptions of neutrality belie the complex and often violent histories and structures that maintain its existence.

The Miller ICA Salons are facilitated topical conversations that include the general public and guest respondents whose life practice explores the chosen topic. The goal of these Salons is to animate engaged citizenship through conversation and exchange across difference and discipline in free public space. The 2019 Miller ICA Salons are a co-organized by the Miller ICA and facilitator, Dana Bishop-Root, who is an artist living and working in Braddock, PA.

Free + open to the public

Bios

Deana Haggag is the President & CEO of United States Artists, a national arts funding organization based in Chicago, IL. Before joining USA in February 2017, she was the Executive Director of The Contemporary, a nomadic and non-collecting art museum in Baltimore, MD, for four years. In addition to her leadership roles, Deana lectures extensively, consults on various art initiatives, contributes to cultural publications, and has taught at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Towson University. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art and Illinois Humanities Council, as well as on the Advisory Council of Recess. She received her MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA from Rutgers University in Art History and Philosophy.

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is the author of Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (2012; 2016). His article “Filming the Queerness of Comfort Women: Byun Young–Joo’s The Murmuring, 1995” was published in positions: asia critique in 2014. Most recently, Kim co-edited with Christopher Reed the interdisciplinary anthology Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture (2017), which includes his essay on queer temporality and late twentieth-century sculpture, “Now and (N)ever: Robert Gober’s Beeswax Time Machines.” Kim is currently working on his next book, Male Bodies Unmade: Picturing Queer Selfhood, which advances current scholarly debates on subjectivity formation by reassessing the historical narrative of corporeal incoherence in images and objects. Artists Male Bodies Unmade treats include Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, Robert Gober, David Hockney, and Andrew Ahn. Kim serves as President of the Historians of British Art, an international organization for scholars and curators specializing in British art and architecture from every area and period. In 2007, Kim received his Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where he worked with Linda Nochlin. His book “Picturing the Edwardian Family Man: The Nicholsons at Home” will be published in Art History in November this year.

As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, LaTanya S. Autry centers social justice and public memory in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public dialogue about the African-American liberation struggle, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography.

LaTanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, Tougaloo College, and the Crane Art Center. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, LaTanya has developed expertise in art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.

Alicia Grullón, a 2018-2019 Hemi Artist in Residence, directs her interdisciplinary practice towards critiques of the politics of presence, arguing for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. She is co-organizer and co-author of the People’s Cultural Plan, a coalition of artists, cultural workers, and activists responding to New York City’s first ever cultural plan in 2017. Her work has been shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, BRIC Arts, Spring/Break Art Show, and Performa 11, among others. Grullón is also a contributing author to "Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?", ed. Nicola Mann and Charlotte Bonham-Carter (Palgrave Macmillan, London) 2017 and "Building Communities through Socially", ed. Alice Wexler and Vida Sabbaghi (Routledge) 2019. Recent activities include the Shandaken Project inaugural artist residency on Governors Island and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Alum program at 80 White Street. Grullón is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts and City University of New York (CUNY).

Reception: Bounce! CMU School of Art Senior Exhibition

May 3, 2019, 6–8pm

Reception: CMU School of Architecture Thesis Exhibition

Apr 19, 2019, 6–8pm

April 18-24, 2019
Reception: April 19, 6:00-8:00pm
RVSP on Facebook

Project Reviews: April 19-20

Join the CMU School of Architecture Fifth-Years to see the work of Thesis, the final year studio where architectural ideas are developed to operate critically within the discipline. The project installations illustrate challenging proposals that explore contemporary questions. During the exhibition, students will present their work for discussion and critique.

Earth Making Workshop with Zain Islam-Hashmi

Apr 18, 2019, 2–5:30pm

Join student Zain Islam-Hashmi on Thursday April 18th for a hands-on workshop of traditional earthen construction techniques as part of the project, "Dirt Forms." Learn the basics of adobe brick-making and rammed earth, and leave your mark on the exhibit by making your own earthen pieces as part of the installation. The workshop is free and open to the public, visitors can stop by anytime between 2-5:30pm. Pieces made will be available for pick-up closing day of the exhibition on April 24th.

Black Radical Imagination:
Fugitive Trajectories
at Kelly Strayhorn Theater

Mar 30, 2019, 8–9:45pm

Saturday, March 30
8-10pm / Kelly Strayhorn Theater
5941 Penn Ave

Get tickets here.

RSVP on Facebook

“A carefully selected body of work responding to what it means to be Black in the 21st Century.”

—CCH Pounder

Co-presented with Miller Institute for Contemporary Art

With afrofuturist, afro surrealism and magical-realist aesthetics, the experimental short films in Black Radical Imagination highlight new stories from within the African diaspora. Fugitive Trajectories is the latest edition in the series, and this program meditates on the various ways Black people attend to their lives, despite traumatic histories—both personal and collective—and a troubling present. In addition to films curated by Jheanelle Brown and Darol Olu Kae, live performances by Pittsburgh luminaries share the stage to invoke powerful expressions of grief, kinship and the dynamism of Blackness and Black culture.

Co-founded by Erin Christovale and Amir George, Black Radical Imagination is a touring program of visual shorts that delves into the worlds of new media, video art and experimental narrative.

Reception: Above, Below, After, Until: CMU MFA Exhibit

Mar 22, 2019, 6–8pm

ABOVE, BELOW, AFTER, UNTIL
CMU MFA EXHIBIT
March 16–April 7, 2019

Artists: Nicholas Crockett, Joy Poulard Cruz, Shohei Katayama, Erin Mallea

Reception: March 22, 6–8pm
RSVP on Facebook

Featuring new work by 2019 School of Art MFA candidates, Above, Below, After, Until examines the dynamic relationships between land, labor, and cultural memory through experiential installation, sculpture, and video. In a moment marked by political and ecological precarity, the artists create spaces of ritual, reflection, and fantasy in search of moments of solidarity and human / non human kinship.

Reception: CMU School of Design Exhibition

Feb 21, 2019, 6–8pm

Generous Feedback
CMU 2019 School of Design Exhibition

Thursday, Feb. 21, 6-8pm: Reception

Join the CMU Design Seniors as they celebrate their accomplishments and share their most recent projects! The work featured in the show offers insight into the culmination of four years of study, pushing the boundaries of medium and method in the field of design.

Workshop:
Not The Only One
at BOOM Concepts

Feb 3, 2019, 3–5pm

WORKSHOP: Not The Only One
Sunday, Feb. 3, 3-5pm
BOOM Concepts, 5139 Penn Ave
RSVP on Facebook

In this workshop artist, Stephanie Dinkins will talk the importance of black communities participating in the creation, testing and design of the AI future and the making of N'TOO, a voice interactive artificially intelligent storyteller trained on oral histories collected from the artist's family. Workshop participants will also have the opportunity to interact with the AI.

Related exhibition
Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI
Curated by Elizabeth Chodos
On view through Feb 3
http://miller-ica.cmu.edu/exhibitions/#48/upcoming-paradox-the-body-in-the-age-of-ai

Symposium - Paradox: Frames and Biases in Art and AI

Jan 28, 2019, 5:30–8:30pm

Symposium
Paradox: Frames and Biases in Art and AI

Jan. 28, 5:30–8:30pm

RSVP on Facebook

Organized by Eunsu Kang and Elizabeth Chodos

Panel members: Manuela Veloso, Alexandra Chouldechova, Sey Min, Jillian Mayer, and Kerry Doran.

This panel discussion explores the ways bias is inherently built into the structure and function of Machine Learning. In order to make predictions or identify patterns, AI requires that a person set specific instructions that have the potential to reinforce bias and oppressive social structures, particularly when ML is being used in everything from policing to determining someone’s credit score. This panel will also explore the role that contemporary art can play in challenging and refiguring these biases by calling into question the frameworks underpinning our assumptions. As ML and AI continue to influence more aspects of everyday life, conversations around how we can use these tools to undo harmful biases, as opposed to reinforcing them, is increasingly urgent.

Manuela Maria Veloso

Manuela Maria Veloso is a world renowned AI expert. Currently she is the head of artificial intelligence research at J.P. Morgan. She was the head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University & Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American …

Manuela Maria Veloso

Manuela Maria Veloso is a world renowned AI expert. Currently she is the head of artificial intelligence research at J.P. Morgan. She was the head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University & Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics and also a known supporter in solving ethical issues of AI.

Alexandra Chouldechova

Dr. Chouldechova is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. Since receiving her Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University, Chouldechova’s research has centered on fairness in algorithmic decision making. Her research studies computational and statistical issues surrounding algorithmic bias in systems deployed in public sector domains such as criminal justice and child welfare. Her work has been published in venues such as NeurIPS, CHI and FAT*, and has received media mentions from outlets including ProPublica, New York Times Magazine and Nature.

Sey Min

Sey Min is a data visualization artist and designer, who is interested in dealing with live data sets in various media formats. She makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technologies, to societies and cities, and to environments. Combining elements of environmental studies, visual art, programming, and data storytelling, her projects range from building a real-time interactive information graphics system for a music club (Gender Ratio, 2007) to visualizing Seoul City expenditure data (City DATA: Seoul Daily Expenditure, 2014).Her work has been shown at NIPS 2018, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; TED 2011; TEDGlobal 2012; Art Center Nabi in Seoul, and Lift Conference, and featured on CNN Asia, Lift09 etc. After serving as an urban information design researcher at MIT SENSEable City Lab, She was selected as a 2011 TED Fellow and Senior Fellow from 2012 to 2013. Her work is also available at ttoky.com

Jillian Mayer

Jillian Mayer’s artistic practice is a means of processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in a digital landscape.Through videos, photography, painting, performance, sculpture, and installation, Mayer’s projects explore how technology affects our identities, lives, and experiences. Mayer flows between the points of tension between our online and physicals worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two.

Her works and performances have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally such as MoMA, MoCA:NoMi, BAM, Bass Museum, MoMa PS1, the Contemporary Museum of Montreal and film festivals such as Sundance, SXSW, Rotterdam, and New York Film Festival. She's been featured in Art Papers, ArtNews, Art in America, and Art Forum discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices. Her video was selected for the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany.

Mayer is a recent recipient of the prestigious Creative Capital Fellowship for 2015, the South Florida Cultural Consortium's Visual/Media Artists Fellowship 2011 and 2014, Cintas Cuban Foundation Fellowship 2012, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. She is also a fellow of the Sundance New Frontiers Lab Program for 2014 and the Zentrum Paul Klee Fellowship in Bern, Switzerland for 2013. Recently, she has been included in Prospect 5, PST LA/LA, and currently has solo shows at the Kunsthalle Aarhus (Denmark) and the UB Art Galleries in Buffalo, New York.

Kerry Doran

Kerry Doran is a writer and curator based in New York and Buenos Aires. The writing and shows she produces center around time-based media and performance because of their particular engagement with new technologies. Her research looks at the critical applications of such tools by artists to better understand their cultural implications—economically, politically, and socially. Doran contributes to exhibition catalogs, artist books, and independent publications, including BOMB, Flash Art, Foam, Rhizome, Terremoto, and SFMOMA’s Open Space. Her curatorial projects have been featured in Artforum, ARTnews, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Página/12, Rhizome, and The Village Voice, among others. She has presented her research at the British Computer Society, Harvard, the ICP Museum, Goldsmiths, M+ Museum, MIT, and Virginia Tech. Previously, Doran was the director of bitforms and Postmasters, respectively, and a member of the inaugural team at the New Museum’s NEW INC. She holds a master’s with distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was an Associate Scholar at the Research Forum.

Eunsu Kang

Eunsu Kang is a Korean media artist who creates interactive audiovisual installations and AI artworks. Her current research is focused on creative AI and artistic expressions by Machine Learning algorithms. Creating interdisciplinary projects, her signature has been seamless integration of art disciplines and innovative techniques. Her work has been invited to numerous places around the world including Japan, China, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, and the US. All nine of her solo shows, consisting of individual or collaborative projects, were invited or awarded. She has won the Korean National Grant for Arts three times. Her researches have been presented at conferences such as ACM, ICMC, ISEA, and NeurIPS. Kang earned her Ph.D. in Digital Arts and Experimental Media from DXARTS at the University of Washington. She received an MA in Media Arts and Technology from UCSB and an MFA from the Ewha Woman's University. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Art and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University.

PARADOX: THE BODY IN THE AGE OF AI

Curated by Elizabeth Chodos
Oct. 5, 2018 - Feb. 3, 2019

RSVP on Facebook

event on all three floors

Reading Women
Autumn House Press Reading + Reception

Sep 7, 2018, 6–8pm

6–7pm: Autumn House Press Reading featuring Adriana Ramirez, Sherrie Flick, Judith Vollmer, and Toi Derricotte
7–8pm: Reception

RSVP on Facebook

event on first floor