Carmen Papalia: Open Access
Friday, July 21, 2017
12 to 3pm
Carmen Papalia's For a New Accessibility workshop on July 23, 2016. [Image Description: Artist Carmen Papalia sits around a square shaped table with 14 other people. A woman with dark brown hair, who is wearing a vibrant, multi-colored top, reads from a packet of paper. Everyone stares into her direction and listens. The tabletops are silver and glasses, papers, pens, and coffee cups cover the tabletops. Behind the artist is an easel with flip chart paper and an image projected onto the wall. The projected image is a protest sign of some sort up against a red background.]
On July 21, Papalia conducted a follow-up to the series of engagements that he presented last summer at The 8th Floor, sharing developments from his last year traveling with the Open Access movement building campaign. The program established a space for considerations of agency and power in relation to the social, cultural, and political conditions that inform institutional access and publicness, culminating in an exercise in which participants realized new potentials for Open Access in their communities.
*This event was a repeat of Carmen Papalia's workshop on July 19.
Bio
Canadian artist Carmen Papalia makes participatory, socially engaged projects on the topic of access as it relates to public space, the art institution and visual culture. In early 2015, Papalia served as Artist-in-Residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, UK and at the Model Contemporary Art Centre, Sligo, Ireland, where he assumed the role of Access Coordinator, making site specific interventions in response to the long history of disabling practices at each institution. He recently finished a project in collaboration with Sara Hendran and students from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering to develop an acoustic mobility device. Papalia’s work has been featured as part of exhibitions and engagements at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, CUE Art Foundation in New York City, the Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton, the Portland Art Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among others.