Talks
Looking Out, In, and Back: Artists on Citizenship
- 7:30PM
Co-Presented by BAM and The Bellwether
With NIC Kay, Lisa Ko, Philip Montgomery and Yara Travieso
Moderated by Alejandro Rodriguez
What makes a citizen? How do the complex, elusive, and multifarious definitions of what it means to be an American exert their presence in art? And as the veil between artistic expression and political expression grows thin, how can contemporary artists shape and imagine new ways of being American? In this free-form, one-night-only conversation, four artists meet for the first time on stage to share their work and engage in a discussion about the intersection of art and American identity.
This interdisciplinary evening of performance and discussion brings together performance artist NIC Kay, author Lisa Ko, photographer Philip Montgomery, and stage and film director Yara Travieso, joined by Alejandro Rodriguez, artistic director of ASTEP’s Artist as Citizen Conference.
NIC Kay is a transdisciplinary artist currently in residence at Pioneer Works. Kay was previously in residence at the Museum of Arts and Design for the exhibition Sonic Arcade and was the recipient of a Chances Dances Mark Aguhar Memorial Grant in 2015 and named a Movement Research Van Lier Fellow in 2017. They have shown work in Europe and the US and their work lil BLK was showcased as part of American Realness 2018.
Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, a novel which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, O. Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.
Yara Travieso is a Brooklyn-based creator and director. Her work is a hybrid of performance and film and has been presented at Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, BRIC Arts, and Performance Space New York, among others. Her most recent production, La Medea, received a Creative Capital Award, premiered at Coil in 2017, and was featured at SXSW and Miami Film Festival. Travieso was the recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures grant from the Ford Foundation. She also co-founded the Borscht Film Festival in her hometown Miami and has a BFA in dance from the Juilliard School.
Philip Montgomery is a Brooklyn-based photographer. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times Magazine. His work has been exhibited at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, the City Museum of New York, Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Germany, Festival of Ethical Photography in Italy, and the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2018, he received the ASME National Magazine Award for his work chronicling the opioid epidemic.