Talk

As artists living and working through the 1970s to the present in New York City, Sarah Schulman and Jane Dickson have lived through one of the most fruitful periods of artistic production in the city—a time where resources were at their most scarce, New York was bankrupt and there was fearmongering about mysterious new graffiti trains as well as a call for no cops on the subway and free transit. This is also the period where the neoliberal experiment was unleashed on New York City and began to shift the way artists and people could live, make and be.

Together, Schulman and Dickson will talk about not just the the role of the artists in gentrification but, more importantly, how we might learn from what was accomplished by artists, what spaces they were able to create, what the failures were and how neoliberal changes unfolded through the 1980s. They will attempt to trace the neoliberal footprints that have led us to where we are now in order to think through new formations, new spaces and new ways of being, making and living.

Schulman and Dickson will be in conversation with Shellyne Rodriguez (BFA 2011 Visual & Critical Studies), a well-known artist from the Bronx who lived through the height of policies brought on by neoliberalism, AIDS and the crack epidemic, all while she was witnessing excitement and cultural flourishing of hip hop culture. Rodriguez straddles both the contemporary art world and community organizing to fight gentrification from swallowing up all of New York.

Presented by BFA Visual & Critical Studies and the SVA Honors Program.

Artist Jane Dickson was part of the art collective Colab and staged the group's legendary Real Estate show and the Times Square show. She was also part of Fashion Moda in the Bronx and saw firsthand the melting pot that was hip hop, punk, uptown and downtown as it was being born. 

Sarah Schulman is a writer and playwright born and raised in the Lower East Side. Her book Gentrification of the Mind chronicles the artistic life of the LES she grew up in and its demise with the plague of HIV/Aids and gentrification. 

Shellyne Rodriguez is a visual artist who works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against subjugation. She teaches at SVA.