April 3-7, 2017
Celebrating the Gallatin Arts Festival’s 25th Anniversary
Download the Gallatin Arts Festival 2017 catalog here.
Curators’ and Producers’ Statements:
“Welcome to the Gallatin Arts Festival 2017! While developing this year’s diverse program, we were struck by how performance can be used as a conduit through which we can deepen our understanding of others and ourselves. Smart, creative, and interdisciplinary, these performances are a testament to Gallatin’s thriving artistic community. Our Festival allows performance to provide a voice and platform for underrepresented persons. Exploring diverse perspectives improves our ability to understand the complex social issues that exist within our society; more importantly, these performances give us opportunities to collaborate, to unify, and to pursue justice. While it can be all too easy to dismiss matters that do not directly impact our own experiences, GAF 2017 hopes to bridge the divisions that seem to stand between us.
These performances seek to remember the past and simultaneously to allow the construction of new narratives—remembering that the power to control one’s own narrative has not always been the status quo. In acknowledging this, these works interrogate our present socio-political state and postulate how education and awareness can dramatically transform comprehension, compassion, and cultural change.
Whether it be direct or indirect, these performances serve as an attempt at political reconciliation. By including a vast number of talk backs, we seek to honor and respond how performances can start conversations, and thereby spearhead radical inclusivity. We hope that the dialogues started here, between performer and audience, will expand outside of our theater and beyond the Festival!”
– Mary Catherine Harvey (’17), Leah Lavigne (’18), Trevor Joseph Newton (’17), and Jessica Salomon (’17), Producers
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“Art is a social process. The artistic potential of an object is only fully realized when it creates a dialogue between the audience, its creator, and other artworks. In the current political climate, conversation has become as difficult as it is urgent. We believe that art has the potential to create bridges between people and to initiate positive interactions in even the most challenging of circumstances.
Many of the works selected for the 25th Annual Gallatin Arts Festival engage with the present political situation by reflecting on an array of issues, such as marginalization and migration; identity, gender, and sexuality; race and ethnicity; and religion and spirituality. Others take on more perennial themes related to art: memory and preservation, representation, design and utility, storytelling and portraiture.
This Festival is as individualized as the School in which it is set, therefore it has no overarching theme and does not strive to fit the featured artists into specific categories. These artists work in a range of media—from abstract to representational paintings; from narrative films to experimental video; from interactive installations and performance art to conceptual objects; from photojournalism to visual ethnography.
Above all else, the Festival celebrates a plurality of approaches to artistic expression and art’s potential to start a dialogue that opens up spaces for hope, possibility, and new ways of thinking about the world.
As you enter the exhibition space, we invite you to witness these projects coming to life as you engage with them and to feel part of a process that was initiated in each artist’s creative impulse to affect the world which we all share. We hope that this show will spark conversations that address justice and the acceptance of difference, as well as conversations that emphasize the role art plays in inspiring political transformation and social change.”
– Honor Bishop (’18), Flavia Grilli (’19), Taylor Haley (’18), Firozah Najmi (’18), Curators
Artists:
Saanya Hassan Ali, Matías Alvial, Joseph Anderson, Samantha Asher, Sharon Attia, Hannah Baek, Harrison Baker, Emma Bigelow, Allison Blakeney, Alee Bloom, Alex Bollington, David Bologna, Sophia Cannata-Bowman, Felix Ho Yuen Chan, Grace Chan, Christina Cordano, Natalie Cook, Isabel Damberg, Lilli Dekker, Andrea De Varona, Sarah Doody, Salome Elgas, Olivia Ellis, Ebru Eltemur, Desiree Fernandes, Melanie Flanaga, Rogue Fong, Emma Forstenhausler, Michael Frazier, Fiona Gorry-Hines, Georgina Hahn, Jalen Jackson, Daniel Jacob, Quanda Johnson, Jonaya Kemper, Courtney Kezlarian, Tavius Koktavy, Alice Lambert, Leah Lavigne, Nisa Neza, Kelsey Leonard, Abe Libman, LIKE FINE SILK, Alex Ling, Bridger Linsenmeyer, Graham Litten, Daniel McElroy, Kylie McManus, Daniel Mekss, Matthew Moen, Middagoose, Eirdis Regnarsdottir, Radhika Rajkumar, Amber Salik, Jessica Salomon, Ben Searles, Ankita Sethi, Chloe Grey Smith, Luke Smithers, Mollie Charlotte Suss, Celine Sutter, Sofia Szamozi, Max Thoeny, Chloe Troast, Alicia Waller, Xinxin Zhang, Peter Winne, and Luqi Howard Zheng.
Student Leadership Team, Faculty, and Staff:
Honor Bishop, Flavia Grilli, Taylor Haley, Mary-Catherine Harvey, Kristin Horton, Sonya Kozlova, Leah Lavigne, Keith Miller, Firozah Najmi, Trevor Joseph Newton, Grace Rogers, Jessica Saloman, Nyelah Sawyer, Ben Searles, Mariana Suchadolski, Carly Valentine, and Peter Winne.
Photographers:
Jalen Jackson, Alexandra Mawe, Nahal Mottaghian, Tristan Oliveira, Mariana Suchodolski, and Em Watson.
About the Gallatin Arts Festival (25th Anniversary Edition):
RETROSPECTIVE
In 1992, Barry Spanier created the Gallatin Arts Festival as his master’s thesis project. At the time, Gallatin was the “school without walls”–a program that was housed on one floor and lacked a collective space to exhibit interdisciplinary art. Gallatin has since then grown into an entire building where students can express their passion for the arts informed by their interdisciplinary studies. As Gallatin has evolved, GAF has grown with it to become a staple of the Gallatin community. Each year, a new set of student leaders and artists face a new set of social and political challenges, all of which contribute to the rich history of the Festival.
To honor the students and faculty members who shaped this Festival for the past 25 years, we learned its history. We visited the University Archives, where we read newspaper articles covering the Festival’s first opening night in 1992. It is clear that Gallatin students’s passion for interdisciplinary arts has been alive since the beginning and we are honored to recognize the Festival’s important role in encouraging an evolving growth within the arts. We hope the Gallatin Arts Festival continues to unify the Gallatin community while maintaining its “without walls” philosophy. We are excited to have the chance to shape this year’s dynamic program and, moving forward, we believe the Gallatin Arts Festival will remain receptive to the world around it.
MISSION
The Gallatin Arts Festival is a week-long, community-wide celebration of the unique artistry and interdisciplinary scholarship of students at NYU’s Gallatin School. The festival features student work in the visual and performing arts and serves as a galvanizing force and springboard for action and discussion through the creation and presentation of artistic work.
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