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 punk, graffiti, and ballroom culture was blooming in the decay of a bankrupt New York City. 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, Rodriguez and Dickson will talk about how we might learn from what was accomplished by artists during this period, what spaces they were able to create, what the failures were and how neoliberal changes unfolded through the 1980s. Together, they will attempt to trace the lessons and possibilities from that past to inform how we might exist today in the crevices of a decaying empire. What kind of new formations, new spaces and new ways of being, making and living are possible at this moment?

Artist Jane Dickson was part of the art collective Colab, and staged the group's legendary Real Estate and Times Square shows. She was also part of Fashion Moda in the Bronx, and witnessed firsthand the melting pot that was hip hop, punk, uptown and downtown as it was being born. She frequently works with unusual surfaces such as Astroturf, sandpaper, vinyl or carpet to exploit the implicit references and the textural possibilities these materials offer. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, Creative Time, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work is held by a range of major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Karamay Museum in Xin Jiang, China and the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian. Dickinson additionally designed a mosaic for the MTA at the 42nd Street station in 2008. Her work is also represented in corporate collections such as Microsoft Corporation, The 3M Corporate Collection and The Paine Weber Collection. Her images have appeared extensively in books and periodicals.

Sarah Schulman was born in New York City in 1958 and attended (High College) Hunter High School. She is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, AIDS historian, journalist and active participant citizen. 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. Her most recent book Let the Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York (ACT UP, New York 1987–1993) was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021, and has been highly acclaimed as the definitive history of the group.

Visual artist and SVA faculty member Shellyne Rodriguez (BFA 2011 Visual & Critical Studies) works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against subjugation.