New Museum Dedicates Fall Public Programs to DEMOCRACY

Since its founding in 1977, the New Museum has been dedicated to championing art as a vital social force. This fall, the New Museum's DEMOCRACY-themed R&D Season presents a series of public programs and conversations around matters of representation, suppression, constitutional protection, political identity, and activism.

A residency and exhibition with My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) anchors the season. Working at the intersection of theater, visual arts, and critical practice, the collective uses legacies of revolutionary theater to theatricalize social problems and imagine ways of being together. "The Audience is Always Right" includes a series of workshops, performances, and public programs that will culminate the eight-year international tour of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT), developed during their first residency at the Museum in 2008, which also took place amid a contentious presidential election. The title of the exhibition and related residency takes on a critical and ironic undertone in this moment when politics are more hyperbolic and spectacle-driven than ever before.

Notable upcoming My Barbarian programming includes the Post-Party Dream State Caucus onThursday, November 3: days before the election, My Barbarian and special guests invite members of the public to become delegates in an unconventional political convention. Prompted by speeches, anthems, and games, the audience will explore group identities and cast votes in a hyperbolically absurd caucus format. Caucus superdelegates include Zoe Leonard, Christine Sun Kim, Tavia Nyong'o, and Kali Wilder. The caucus's Spin Room, on the Fifth Floor within My Barbarian's exhibition "The Audience is Always Right," will be hosted by Ryan McNamara and A.L. Steiner, who will provide commentary on a livestream of the event. The public can view the livestream off-site during the event (and add personal commentary) at livestream.com/newmuseum/MyBarbarianCaucus. Visitnewmuseum.org for more information on the final performance of My Barbarian's residency, PoLAAT Outro: Pre-Apocalypse, taking place on December 15 and 16.

The New Museum is pleased to announce a feminist youth summit organized by an emerging generation of artists, writers, and activists, including By Us For Us (BUFU), Brujas, Discwoman, andmembers of House of LaDosha. "Scamming the Patriarchy: A Youth Summit," taking place onNovember 13, will include public workshops throughout the Museum organized around five guiding principles: healing, self-love, skill building, political education, and empowerment. Programs will look to the future of gender politics, focusing on methods for forging the worlds youth want to inhabit, while grounding this work in legacies of the past. RSVP is limited and required to attend this event. RSVP:http://bit.ly/2fnRj3l

Underscoring the importance of scholarly exchanges as political and ideological acts, the New Museum also announces the release of Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good this November. The second volume in the Museum's Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture series, it examines recent histories and debates around how art practices might operate as public service. Published in partnership with MIT Press and edited by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director of Education and Public Engagement, with Shannon Jackson and Dominic Willsdon, the anthology includes contributions by Simone Leigh, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Wendy Brown, Rosalyn Deutsche, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, among many others.

Additional Notable Public Programming this Fall
On November 16, the Museum will host an evening of interpretive readings of author Dennis Cooper's GIF novels, organized as a response to Google's recent deletion of Cooper's blog (for violations of Terms of Service, without further explanation), and as a celebration of the innovations in writing represented by a series of GIF novels he drafted there. The event features artists working across a spectrum of practices and includes poets, musicians, choreographers, and dancers, all of whom have been invited to freely interpret Cooper's GIF-based fictions into a live format. Among those reading areM. Lamar, Dorothea Lasky, Yvonne Meier, Aki Onda, Richard Hell, and Chris Cochrane with Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Niall Jones.

For a full schedule of New Museum programming, please visit newmuseum.org.

About Fall 2016 R&D Season: DEMOCRACY
Organized by the New Museum's Department of Education and Public Engagement, R&D (Research and Development) Seasons connect projects across multiple platforms around a new organizing theme each fall, spring, and summer. Seasonal themes are generated by artists-in-residence, and the department's collaborations with artists lead to exhibitions, performances, conferences, screenings, publications, after school programs for teens, Family Day activities, and archival research. Anchoring the Museum's dedication to expanded forms of knowledge and cultural production, each theme is wide-ranging and limber, rather than illustrative; participating artists, scholars, and curators raise topical questions and often test thematic limits.

"My Barbarian: The Audience is Always Right" is organized by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Travis Chamberlain, Associate Curator of Performance and Manager of Public Programs; and Sara O'Keeffe, Assistant Curator. "PoLAAT Recommends" is organized by Chamberlain and Alicia Ritson, Research Fellow. "Scamming the Patriarchy" is co-organized by the Department of Education and Public Engagement with artists, writers, and activists including BUFU, Brujas, Discwoman, and members of House of LaDosha. "Violations" is organized by Chamberlain. The Experimental Study Program is organized by Shaun Leonardo, School, Youth & Community Programs Manager, and Emily Mello, Associate Director of Education. Vanessa Cuervo is the New Museum's Fall 2016 Season Fellow.

About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.