Thursday night! BUREAU Artist in Residence Danielle Abrams curates a night of performance at New Orleans’ threepalms after a tip that it’s the hottest place to be plus there’s a tiki bar!
In her own words: “I’ll be performing my new piece ‘Shades of Gras.’ Think Elia Kazan’s Pinky meets Brad Pitt for a plaçage arrangement on a 300 year-old float, but only after getting some red beans and rice and a blessing from Tremé‘s eponymous Uncle Lionel Batiste! I’m so proud to be on deck with a crew of immensely talented Bostonites—artists Angela M. Counts, Ryan Leitner and Robert Fieseler, author of the newly released book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. It’s free, it’s outside, it’s the most adorable patio you could imagine, great food, good drink, people who smile at you, excellent vibes!”
BUREAU’s Scott Sullivan presented in the “live arts magazine,” Antenna::Signals, Issue 007, at Paper Machine in New Orleans on January 24, 2018.
Ulay Deux (Scott Sullivan) in Antenna::Signals at Paper Machine
In celebration of the opening of Antenna’s Paper Machine print center, Signals presentations and performances examine the theme Papers. Papers explored the myriad uses of paper – a medium at once literal and symbolic, malleable and dogmatic, portable and burdensome – to translate and regulate life. The event will explore the connotations of the theme from a number of specific angles, including immigration papers, the Green book (guide to safe road tripping for African Americans in Jim Crow America), Storyville blue books (catalogues for New Orleans’ famed red light district), and rolling and hemp papers.
BUREAU’s Scott Sullivan, an international law and foreign affairs professor at LSU and occasional artist under the pseudonym Ulay Deux, presented on several document-performance works, including the CIA’s experiment in training cats and Osama bin Laden’s English language bookshelf confiscated by the U.S. government at the time of his killing.
The CIA’s “Views on Trained Cats” from Ulay Deux (Scott Sullivan)’s document-performance in the Micro Internet Yami Ichi New Orleans, 2015.
Presenters and performances included:
Katrina Andry
Pamela D. Arceneaux
Vanessa Centeno
Ulay Deux (Scott Sullivan)
Rick Kasini Kadour
John Lawrence
Lydia Y. Nichols
Bob Snead
Dave Sobel
Rodrigo Toscano
ABOUT ANTENNA::SIGNALS
Conceived as a “live arts magazine,” Antenna::Signals is a variety show-styled event from the artists and writers of Antenna. Each “issue” of Antenna::Signals features a spread of 6-8 local artists, writers, musicians, scientists, activists and scholars whose practices relate thematically. The live magazine drops 4 times each year, accompanied by the release of a two-dimensional print publication.
ABOUT BUREAU of CHANGE
BUREAU of CHANGE is an education-centric lab for real art practice in New Orleans. We create, curate and exhibit socially and politically engaged work. Our process commissions artists and non-artists to collaborate on creative works aimed at inciting institutional change while studying social technology, digital media theory, interdisciplinary research and artistic production. We present our work at art institutions and community-accessible physical and digital spaces, as well as US|IS, our public art space at Gravier & Magazine Streets in downtown New Orleans.
ABOUT ANTENNA
Antenna is a New Orleans-based Non-profit organization committed to being a vital participant in the life of the city by creating and supporting artist- and writer-driven programs.
BUREAU of CHANGE is proud to present Reverberations, a series of lectures, workshops and performances on local acts and global impacts. Organized by BUREAU founder Margot Herster, in collaboration with the LSU Law Center and Ogden Honors College, the series brings together socially engaged practitioners in law, journalism and art to present recent work.
Reverberations is a a three-part series, taking place at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge on March 29, April 3 and April 7, 2017.
Past Due: Costs and Consequences of Charging for Justice
Mathilde Laisne (Vera Institute) & Jennifer Hull (Orleans Public Defenders)
Wednesday, March 29, 2017; 3:30 PM
LSU Law Center, Room 106
Every year, government agencies in New Orleans collect millions of dollars in the form of bail, fines and fees from people involved in the criminal justice system and, by extension, from their families. Millions more are transferred from the pockets and bank accounts of residents to for-profit bail bond agents. Some view these costs as a necessary way to offset the expense of operating the criminal justice system. But because many “users” of the system have very low incomes or none at all, there is growing concern that charging for justice amounts to a criminalization of poverty.
Join us for a conversation on the cost and function of criminal justice in Louisiana featuring Jennifer Hull, a felony trial attorney at the Orleans Public Defender’s Office and Mathilde Laisne, a senior program associate at the Vera Institute for Justice.
Mathilde Laisne is a senior program associate with the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office where she works with local partners to develop initiatives that improve fairness and efficiency in the city’s criminal justice system. In 2017, she co-authored a report that looks at the use of bail, fines and fees in New Orleans and the resulting incarceration and costs. Mathilde holds a masters in international security from the Paris School of International Affairs with a concentration in human rights law. Prior to that, she studied political science at the University of Sciences Po in Paris and sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. While in school, Mathilde interned with the Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague, Netherlands.
Jennifer Hull is an attorney in the trials division of the Orleans Public Defender’s Office (OPD), where she represents indigent clients who are charged with felony crimes. Prior to working for OPD, Jennifer worked for Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, a 503(c) non-profit, providing legal representation to indigent clients in civil matters. There, she worked predominately in the domestic unit, litigating family law, child in need of care and domestic violence matters. Jennifer graduated from LSU Law in 2011. While at the law center, she worked as a student practitioner in the Immigration and Juvenile Criminal Defense Clinics, served as the Pro Bono Chair of the Public Interest Law Society and was the recipient of the Ginger Berrigan Award.
Anguish, Rage and Mercy
Kevin Sack, New York Times
Monday, April 3, 2017; 3:30 PM
LSU Law Center Auditorium
“In an extraordinary culmination to the federal death penalty trial of Dylann S. Roof, 35 family members and friends of his nine African-American victims confronted him directly at a sentencing hearing on Wednesday. Some forgave him with Christian grace. Others damned him to hell. But almost all proclaimed defiantly that his murderous church rampage had failed in its mission to sow division and racist hate.” -Kevin Sack, “Anguish, Rage and Mercy as Dylann Roof Is Sentenced to Death,” New York Times, January 11, 2017.
Join us for a lecture and conversation with Kevin Sack, who covered the trial of Dylann Roof for the New York Times, about the interaction of community and legal process in the aftermath of racist violence at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Kevin Sack is a senior writer, based in Atlanta, who produces long-form narrative projects for the investigations team. He has written broadly about national affairs for more than three decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes.
During more than 20 years with the Times, he has served as bureau chief in Atlanta and Albany, covered health care for the national desk, and reported extensively on race, the South and domestic politics. His interests over the years have ranged widely, from kidney transplantation to the assimilation of refugees to the intersection of race and faith. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, he is an honors history graduate of Duke University.
It’s amazing we don’t have more fights
Chloë Bass, Artist and Public Practitioner
Friday, April 7, 2017, 11:00 AM
Ogden Honors College, French House Grand Salon
NOTE: EVENT CANCELLED DUE THE ARTIST’S FLIGHT CANCELLATION FROM INCLEMENT WEATHER IN NEW YORK.
This workshop investigates appropriate social distances within the context of institutional behavior. Schools and courtrooms are sites of both formality and great intimacy between people and their colleagues. As we navigate our personal, pedagogical or professional desires, we are often swept up in crowd management, or guided through procedures by structured choreographies. Inspired by the sociological field of proxemics (the spatial requirements of human beings and the effects of these requirements on society), Chloë Bass will bring participants together to turn distance into story, and teach new ways to read a room. Expect some engagements of intimacy, some instances of performance, and some participatory writing. Measuring devices and other materials will be provided; the systems we design to use them will be all yours.
The workshop is part of the fourth chapter of The Book of Everyday Instruction, Bass’ ongoing project about one-on-one social interaction. Chapter Four is focused on the accidental and incidental choreographies created by engaging with other bodies in space. The chapter’s title (“It’s amazing we don’t have more fights”) is a paraphrase of a quote from the artist’s mother about successful social behavior on New York’s subways and buses.
Chloë Bass is a conceptual artist working in performance, situation, publication, and installation. Her work addresses scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand, and daily life as a site of deep research. Her current project, The Book of Everyday Instruction, is an eight-chapter investigation into one-on-one social interaction. Chloë is a 2017 – 2018 Workspace resident at the Center for Book Arts, and a 2017 studio resident at Triangle Arts Association. Her projects have appeared in recent exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book will be published by the Operating System in December 2017; her writing is most often found on Hyperallergic. She is an Assistant Professor in Art and Social Practice at Queens College, CUNY.
BUREAU of CHANGE brought an participatory intervention to New York in coordination with the Creative Time Summit NYC: The Curriculum at the Boys and Girls High School campus in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on November 14 and 15, 2015.
Continuing the dialogue started at the Summit held at the Venice Biennale in August, the New York Summit was dedicated to education and other ways knowledge is disseminated and obtained. The Curriculum NYC focused on the effects of specific education policies in the United States. Creative Time programming explored the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, pedagogical art practices, omissions in contemporary curricula, and political issues such as the re-segregation of public schools and student debt.
Throughout the weekend, covert BUREAU of CHANGE agents handed out Cheat Sheet in hallways, under desktops and via trades for their notes to lucky Summit attendees at Boys and Girls High School who could also count on us for freshly sharpened pencils. In designing Cheat Sheet, BUREAU crowdsourced personal stories of education blunders and disasters documented on YouTube, which we presented alongside quotes from academic research and journalism indicative of systemic dysfunction in global education and need for radical reform. In return, we received copies of notes on the The Curriculum complete with personal commentary, doodles and diagrams jotted by attendees.
Each year, the Creative Time Summit explores the many ways in which artists are tackling the world’s most challenging social and political issues. Innovative artists, activists, writers, and curators take the Summit stage to present bold new strategies for social change to a global audience. Since its inception six years ago, the Summit has seen hundreds of luminaries–from famed philosopher Slavoj Žižek, to legendary art critic Lucy Lippard, artist Rick Lowe, and Academy Award nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras, to name only a few–present their unflinching visions to thousands live in the theatre and online.
