Creating a Living Legacy (CALL)
& Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA) Talk: Christy Rupp
Thursday, November 10, 2018
4 to 6pm
Christy Rupp, Life-size Dodo bird from the series: Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans, 2008. Constructed from Fast Food Chicken Bones & Mixed Media, 33x16x29”, Collection of Josh Recknitz. [Image Description: With a black, drapey backdrop, a constructed skeleton of a Dodo bird (made of fast food chicken bones) is propped up by a metal rod that is fastened into a brown, circular base.]
This program featured a discussion between VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) Program Committee member Jonathan Allen and ecological artist Christy Rupp as they reflected on her life, work, and artistic career. This discussion was part of the fourth season of the CALL/VoCA Talks series, hosted in partnership with the Joan Mitchell Foundation's Creating A Living Legacy (CALL) Program.
Bios
Jonathan Allen is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, collage, video, and performance. He often collaborates with poets and choreographers and regularly curates art exhibitions at a community center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He is also a member of the VoCA Program Committee. Allen has exhibited extensively in New York, in both private galleries and non-profit art spaces, and has been awarded residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, Cill Rialaig, BRIC, Blue Mountain Center, and LMCC. In 2019, he will perform in the US tour of Joanna Kotze's What will we be like when we get there. In June 2017, he began INTERRUPTIONS, a series of ad interventions in New York City subway stations that seek to interrupt the language of advertising with imagery from our current political predicament. The project is ongoing and currently viewable on Instagram @JonathanAllenStudio. Learn more at www.jonathanallen.org.
Christy Rupp is an ecoartist whose studies in animal behavior in the 70s led her to become an environmental activist. She was born in upstate New York, too young for Elvis and too old for Barbie. Since the 70s she has been studying the impact of economics on the environment, exploring topics like genetically engineered foods, clean water, the commodification of natural resources, climate chaos, plastic pollution, changes which occur over time, or otherwise invisible feedback from the planet. A veteran of the East Village art scene of the late 70s, Rupp was a participant/organizer of shows including the Times Square Show (1980) and the Real Estate Show (1979), which gave birth to the enduring artists space ABC NoRio. She has received grants from Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, NY State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters Inc., and recently a CALL Artists Living Legacy Award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work has been visible recently in Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986; Cranbrook Art Museum; Bloomfield Hills, MI; Howl! Happening Space in NYC; the Hirshhorn Museum; The Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, WA; the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, VA; The Wild Bird Fund, NYC; and upcoming at the Schunck Museum, Heerlen, Netherlands. See more at christyrupp.com