PARTICIPANTS
MONTH2MONTH will hold events four nights every week for the month of May. These events will range from serious discussions or information-sharing sessions to satirical or uncomfortable performances to participatory activism. Most events will be organized by invited participants and will include housing policy experts, artists, politicians, doormen, journalists, activists, developers, and many more. Some events will also be generated through an open call. If you would like to present an event get in touch!
We are thrilled to be working with the following people to present events at MONTH2MONTH:
Sharon Butler
A painter and arts writer, Sharon Butler is widely known as the publisher of the NYC art blog Two Coats of Paint. She has received grants from Creative Capitol, the Andy Warhol and Pollock Krasner Foundations, and a 2015 Patricia Highsmith-Plangman Residency at Yaddo. She is an artist-in-residence at Counterproof Press at the University of Connecticut and recently had a solo show in Bushwick at Theodore:Art that was selected as a Critic’s Pick in Time Out New York.
The Center for NYC Neighborhoods
Aisha Cousins
Aisha Cousins was raised in Brooklyn, NY. She writes performance art scores (flexible, do-it-yourself instructions for live art projects) which she then uses as a medium to create socially engaged art. Her scores engage black audiences in exploring their contrasting histories and aesthetics (ideas of beauty), while processing their shared sociological shifts (changes in society). Her work has been performed independently on the streets of historically black neighborhoods from BedStuy to Brixton, as well as with institutions such as Weeksville Heritage Center, Project Row Houses, the Museum Of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, MoMA PS1, and Fourth Arts Block. Recent awards and artist residencies include The Rema Hort Mann Foundation's ACE Grant (2015), The Franklin Furnace Fund (2014), and The Laundromat Project's Create Change Residency in BedStuy (2013).
Cousins' MONTH2MONTH event stems from the series of scores she developed during BRIC's Fireworks Residency (2014-2015). The initial performances of these scores focused on engaging black Brooklynites, as a way of determining the plot of the residency's culminating performance "Brer Rabbit the Opera: A Funk Meditation on Gentrification." Although the majority of Cousins's work is meant to be performed by black audiences, this particular series was composed as a set of tools for New Yorkers from the full spectrum of NYC's cultural rainbow to perform and remix in ways that empower us in our respective battles with gentrification.
Cousins is currently working on a series of scores about black life during the Obama era which you can learn more about here. You can catch her intergenerational iteration of Mapping Soulville: BedStuy Remix #2 at the Brooklyn Children's Museum's Our City exhibition through September 4, 2016.
Oasa Duverney and Mildred Beltre (Brooklyn hi-art machine)
Oasa DuVerney, a New York native, is an artist and mother. DuVerney’s work focuses on issues of race, class, gender and their intersections. Selected exhibitions include Thanks For Writing, 601 Artspace, NYC (2014); Crossing the Line, Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC (2013); MYLFworks Revenge, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY (2013); Through A Glass Darkly, Postmasters Gallery, NYC (2012); and Planet of Slums, Mason Gross Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ (2010). DuVerney was awarded the Smack Mellon Studio Artist Residency (2014-2015) the LMCC Workspace program residency (2012-2013), a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council (2011), a grant award from the Citizens Committee For New York City (2010, 2013), and the Aljra Emerge Fellowship by the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (2007). Publications include The New York Times (2012, 2011), The New York Daily News (2010) and The Guardian UK, 2015. She received her B.F.A. from the Fashion Institute of Technology and her M.F.A. from Hunter College, CUNY.
Mildred Beltré is Brooklyn based artist, mother and popular educator working in print and drawing to explore facets of social change. She is interested in examining relationships within social structures, social movements, and social interactions.
Beltré’s work has been exhibited nationally at The International Print Center New York; Load of Fun Gallery, Baltimore, MD; Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA; University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; Art in General, NY and internationally in group shows at Projecto Ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hollar Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; and Brun Leglise Gallery, Paris
France among others. Her work is included in the Special Collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN among others. She has been awarded residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop and the Vermont Studio Center. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts in Prints/Drawings and Artist Books, the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Citizen’s Committee for New York City.
Beltré is the co-founder of the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, an ongoing socially engaged collaborative art project in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that addresses gentrification and community building through art-making. She has worked as a teaching artist for various New York City institutions including El Museo del Barrio, Cooper Union, Henry Street Settlement, Harborview Art Center, NYCHA and the Manhattan Graphics Center and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Vermont.
ANA FABREGA, LORELEI RAMIREZ, Amy Zimmer and SEAN J PATRICK CARNEY
Sean J Patrick Carney is a writer, visual artist, and comedian living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He is a member of Bruce High Quality Foundation University, New York's freest art school. Since 2009, Carney has operated the independent publishing label Social Malpractice. His writing appears frequently in Art in America and VICE. He has performed and exhibited at venues including Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam; MOCA, Los Angeles; Marlborough Gallery, New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Worksound, Portland, OR; and Freddy, Baltimore.
Ana Fabrega is a comedian in Brooklyn, NY. She performs at comedy venues and art spaces around New York City, and produces and hosts a weekly comedy show called "Sundays with Ana." She writes and stars in the award-winning web series “Jana & Shasta,” and has appeared on Comedy Central’s “Alternatino”, Fusion’s "The Chris Gethard Show," IFC’s “Boy Band,” and MNN's "The Special Without Brett Davis." She was a finalist in the 2015 Andy Kaufman Awards, and her one-woman comedy variety show, “Go, Baby, Go!” was part of Ars Nova’s Showgasm Spotlight series. The New York Times describes Ana as “an inventive performer with a knack for off-kilter characters.”
Lorelei Ramirez is an artist, comedian, and writer originally hailing from the swampland of Miami, FL where she developed into a girl and/or woman with a fondness of wearing sweaters, makings drawings and moving her head strange. She is the host of the Do Something Variety Show, and also I'm Afraid Of Dying at Over the Eight. She has a day job. Please give her a job. Please give her back her son.
A.E. Zimmer is a New-York based writer and comic. Her work intersects within theater, performance, film and technology, and has been featured in MoMA PS1, The Creators Project, Fader, and at The Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater.
Shane Ferro and Jillian Steinhauer
Shane Ferro is a business and economics reporter at the Huffington Post who often writes about how trends in housing and income affect the economy. She previously covered similar topics at Business Insider and Reuters. She started her career at Artinfo, where she covered the art market. She recently moved to the South Bronx after being priced out of Brooklyn.
Jillian Steinhauer is the senior editor of Hyperallergic who writes about the myriad intersections of art and politics (and about cats). She is the winner of the 2014 Best Art Reporting award from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, and holds a master's degree in journalism from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU; for the latter, she went into five-figure debt. She was raised by frugal parents.
Seung-Min Lee
Seung (pronounced Sing) Min Lee (born South Korea, lives and works in Brooklyn) utilizes video, performance, painting, and collage in biting social commentaries that eclipse the ironic affect of self-deprecation and veer into uncomfortable self-exploitation. She has earned degrees from Harvard and the Hunter College MFA program in Manhattan. She has performed most recently at Luxembourg and Dayan, Artists Space and Books, Regina Rex, David Lewis Gallery, Interstate Projects and been a featured artist in dis magazine. She was a recipient of a 2014-15 Franklin Furnace Fund Award, to support emerging, avant-garde art,“ especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content."
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
(b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an Ed.M (2008) in Secondary Education from Stanford University as well as a BA (2006) in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College.
She has exhibited her work at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, BRIC Art Gallery, Weeksville Heritage Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Vox Populi Gallery, TOPAZ Arts, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Leroy Neiman Gallery, etc.
Her work has been reviewed and written about in The New York Times, Art 21, Wall Street Journal, ArtSlant, and Hyperallergic.
Rasheed has spoken on panels and symposiums at universities including School of Visual Arts, Parsons, The New School, New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Illinois; arts institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, Christie's, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, the Center for Book Arts, Residency Unlimited and Creative Time; and archival institutions including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Weeksville Heritage Center, and Interference Archive.
Her long form interviews and essays have been published in The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Guardian, Creative Time Reports and featured on the Creative Time Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn's radio station, Otabenga Jones & Associates (OJAK Radio).
Currently, she is the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry.
Felix Salmon
Felix Salmon is a senior editor at Fusion. He previously worked as the finance blogger for Reuters and for Conde Nast's Portfolio.com. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Wired, the New York Times, and New York magazine. A graduate of the University of Glasgow, he has worked in the United States since 1997.
GUY RICHARDS SMIT
For the last decade, Guy Richards Smit has been known for his paintings, video installations, musicals and performances exploring the themes of narcissism, desire, power and failure. Using pop cultural forms such as Stand Up comedy, Pop Music, Comic Books and paintings of newspaper front pages he’s conveyed a sharply observant cultural and political message with philosophical observations and humor.
Betty Yu
Betty Yu is a Chinese-American NYC based interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, media educator and longtime social justice activist. Her documentary “Resilience” about her garment worker mother fighting against sweatshop conditions, screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Ms. Yu’s interactive multi-media installation, “The Garment Worker” was part of a 5 week art exhibit in Chinatown in 2013, and featured at Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive 2014. Betty was a 2012 Public Artist-in-Resident with the Laundromat Project and is a 2015 Cultural Agent with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) a people-powered network. She recently organized “City of Justice: New Year, New Futures” an anti-displacement interactive social justice, arts & activism event that featured 10 art, culture and performance stations at Brooklyn Museum First Saturday. She recently co-created the "Monument to Anti-Displacement Organizing" which is part of the Agitprop! show at the Brooklyn Museum. Betty is the recipient of the 2016 SOAPBOX Award from the Laundromat Project.
Ms. Yu is currently on the Board of Directors of Working Films, Deep Dish TV and Third World Newsreel, three progressive media arts centers that distributes and exhibits social issue films. Ms. Yu's work has been exhibited, screened and featured at the International Center of Photography, The Directors Guild of America, Brooklyn Museum and The Eastman Kodak Museum. In addition, Betty has more than 15 years of community, media justice and labor organizing in NYC’s Chinatown. Ms. Yu's organizing recognitions include being the recipient of the Union Square Award for grassroots activism and a semi-finalist of the National Brick “Do Something” Award for community leadership in Chinatown.
Participants will be added as they are confirmed.