WHAT: "Making Good: Big Questions in Art and Design" with Coco Fusco and Kirsten Leenaars as part of MICA Mixed Media Speaker Series
WHEN: Thursday, March 7 at 7 p.m.
WHERE: Falvey Hall in the Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount Royal Ave.
BALTIMORE — The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) will host artists with Coco Fusco and Kirsten Leenaars for “Making Good: Big Questions in Art and Design,” and event part of the college’s Mixed Media Speaker Series, which spans from January through April. This event is free and open to the public. For more information or to make group reservations, please contact events@mica.edu.
Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist and writer, is the Andrew Banks Endowed Professor of Art at the University of Florida. Fusco is a recipient of a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Her performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, The London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil and Performa05. Her works have also been shown at the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.
An interdisciplinary artist and experimental documentary maker based in Chicago, Leenaars’ various forms of performance, theater and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. She engages with individuals and communities to create participatory video and performance work, and her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through staging, improvisation and iteration. She examines the nature of our constructed realities — the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we identify with — and explores the way we relate to others. In her work, she aims to bring to light a shared humanity, often through humor and play.
Recent projects include (Re)Housing the American Dream (2015-ongoing), a multi-year performative documentary project with American born and refugee youth commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee and Notes on Empty Chairs, a series of three performances about loss, community and empathy, produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in response to the work of Doris Salcedo. Leenaars’ work has been shown nationally and internationally. She has been nominated for the 3Arts Award multiple times, and most recently was nominated for the USA Fellowship. She currently is an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.