Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a lecture by the artist, curator, and educator Kris Grey entitled “Tension & Tethers.” Grey joined the MFA Fine Arts faculty in 2024.

On Tension & Tethers: “Trans bodies are impacted by overlapping systems of power and control, fastening contemporary lived experience to a history of scrutiny and surveillance. These negative effects are experienced by many other bodies at different intersections of physical configuration. Through individual and collaborative performances that display extreme vulnerability, Grey uses transness as a radical laboratory for building communities of affinity across identity and embodiment to interrogate the effects those systems have on access to life chances. For Grey, the tethers of tension connecting folks across individual differences serve as the queer worldmaking network to build foundations for feminist, anti-racist, and decolonized futures for all. Code switching between professional roles as an artist, educator, and activist, Grey’s social practice takes many forms. This lecture traces their unique, process-based approach to interrupting inherited systemic violence through different avenues of cultural and social engagement.”

Kris Grey is a transgender artist who uses their body as raw material, often presenting themself in states of extreme vulnerability as an invitation to experience transcendence or discover hidden queer histories. Their cultural work combines strategies of communication, activism, community building, education, lecture, and studio production in mediums two dimensional, three dimensional, and time based. An ardent collaborator, Grey co-founded and ran Gender/Power with Maya Ciarrocchi from 2013 - 2023. Gender/Power uses storytelling and movement to question or reveal how participants experience authority based on the perceptions of their bodies. Grey has been a resident artist at the Bronx Museum, Fire Island Artist Residency, ANTI Festival for Contemporary Art, International Centre for Training in the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson. Grey has filled a variety of professional roles in arts nonprofits, universities, and the museum industry; often in service of nurturing artists who experience marginalization within contemporary art.

Talks is a series of lectures by artists, writers and critics presented by MFA Fine Arts. Talks are held on Tuesdays at 3:00pm at 133 West 21st Street in Room 101C and on Zoom. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.

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