Open Sessions is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Tom Slaughter Open Sessions Fund, Faber-Castell, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
What the Body Can Do: Open Sessions 11, the final exhibition of the program’s 2016–17 cycle, captures the movement and potential of individual bodies in collective action. The artists in this exhibition dissect spectacles of war, memorialize immigrant and refugee narratives, and savor protest cinema and images produced by the paparazzi. The exhibition features artists Danielle Dean, Olalekan Jeyifous, Jennifer May Reiland, Slinko, and Hồng-An Trương. Dean’s animations unravel speech; Jeyifous’ images collapse surrealist aesthetics and the design trope of architectural folly; telephone screens, mirrors, and the camera’s eye are a window into Reiland’s versions of biblical and mythological tales; bread figures embody uprising and rebellion in Slinko’s large storyboard drawings; and Trương’s photos compose an archive of fragmented views of the Asian American activist movement in the United States.
Open Sessions is a hybrid exhibition/residency program created by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway, Open Sessions Curators. It provides unique opportunities for selected artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work through exhibitions, public programs, workshops, and working dinners. The artists selected for Open Sessions may or may not draw as their primary means of art-making. The two-year program engages musicians, architects, dancers, poets—anyone who is interested in expanding the boundaries of drawing. Open Sessions artists work together to create a dynamic, continuous conversation, viewing drawing as an activity rather than a product.
Image: Slinko, Economy of Means, (detail), 2017, archival print, 44 ✕ 68 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Open Sessions is organized by Nova Benway and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators
