A Sourcebook of Performance Labor:
Book Launch with Author Joey Orr and Discussion with Dread Scott, Rudy Gerson, and Kyle Carrero Lopez
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
6-8pm
The 8th Floor
17 W 17th Street, NYC
Images courtesy of (left to right) Joey Orr, Kyle Carrero Lopez, Rudy Gerson, Dread Scott.
This public discussion centers on the recent publication of A Sourcebook of Performance Labor (Routledge 2023) by curator Joey Orr, which reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. Emerging from perspectives on maintenance, care, and affective labor, Sourcebook is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists including Francis Alÿs, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. This research aims to add perspectives to the ways we understand these works and their contexts, exploring the category of performance labor through the experiences of participants who helped craft this body of work. In a discussion on the ethics of participation at The 8th Floor, Joey Orr will be joined by Dread Scott, Rudy Gerson, and Kyle Carrero Lopez.
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Joey Orr is the Mellon Curator for Research at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, where he directs Arts Research Integration and is affiliate faculty in Museum Studies and Visual Art. Previously, he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where his major project aligned three exhibitions around artistic research. Recent writing on social practice has been published in Art & the Public Sphere (Intellect); Journal of American Studies (Cambridge), PARSE Journal (University of Gothenburg), the chapter “Collecting Social Things” in Rhetoric, Social Value, and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan), and now his first book, A Sourcebook of Performance Labor (Routledge). He holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, and currently serves as a contributing editor for Art Papers magazine.
Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. His in-progress, debut full-length poetry collection centers social life and US-Cuba relations through familial and geopolitical lenses. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Tin House Workshops and the NYU Creative Writing MFA program. His poetry has been featured in The Nation, POETRY, The Offing, The Atlantic, and both The Slowdown and Poetry Unbound podcasts. In 2020, Kyle co-founded LEGACY, a production collective by and for Black queer artists. LEGACY was awarded a 2022 Vision Residency at Ars Nova, and their works have been incorporated into arts programming for downtown Manhattan’s Dixon Place, BOFFO on Fire Island, and elsewhere.
Rudy Gerson is an artist working in a variety of media. They are committed to endowing the past with future potential. Whether through print, installation, or text, they create work to build ceremony for the gaps and fissures of recorded history. Their interest is in communal choreographies and the ways groups and crowds exceed national and identitarian markers. By complicating expectations of historical inquiry and testimony, their work emphasizes the speculative possibilities of the scrap — both its fragmentary and unachieved quality and as a method of dislodging information from its intended use. Rudy recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s MFA program in Studio Art.
Dread Scott is a visual artist whose works is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this. His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant. In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community-engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.
Image description: Four headshots, left to right: a white person with short brown hair and glasses softly smiling at the camera, a Cuban-American person with short curly hair and a mustache looking off to the right, a scanned MoMA ID card with “Rudy Gerson / Media Perfomer” and a blurred headshot, an African-American person with a black/gray mohawk, goatee, and glasses.