As part of ASAP/15: Not A Luxury, a conference for the Association for the Study of Arts in the Present, I’ll be presenting alongside Aviva Avnisan, dana middleton, Molly Merryman, and Dan Paz on a panel called “Listening sessions: Queer Abolition, the Aesthetics of Unsame Solidarities, and Oral Histories of LGBTQ+ Incarceration”.

The submitted abstract for the panel is below, with more details to come!

This session allows for an open conversation between collaborators and attendees to discuss how queer working methods allow us to navigate the asymmetrical power dynamics inherent in the movement, study, and activism toward abolition. Initiated by a group of artists, scholars, and activists under the name Switchboard – a marker that gestures to the telephone as a primary form of communication for incarcerated people while also acknowledging the legacy of New York’s Gay Switchboard in the ’70s and ‘80s amidst the AIDS epidemic – this forum builds from their distinct yet overlapping commitments that texture their involvement towards the development of an AI-based open-source oral history tool highlighting experiences of LGBTQ+ incarcerated people. 

In artist and researcher alejandro t. acierto's work, he maps the influence of industrial carceral labor in the colonial Philippines to the mainland US, where the development of goods for sale drew tourists to the prisons which further justified the broader imperial project. Speaking on their book project Exposing the Hero, artist and scholar Dan Paz traces how photographic practices such as the mugshot shaped the affective registers of carceral surveillance that significantly shifted how policing happened and by whom. Artist and creative technologist Ava Aviva Avnisan addresses how emerging technologies can be deployed “against the grain” to center marginalized voices, where they focus on recent and ongoing creative projects. Animating Dr. Molly Merryman’s work is an attention to queer methods that transform research where she focuses on oral histories and museum work as vital components for repositioning the lives of marginalized and “discarded” folks. Highlighting the overlapping aesthetic tensions of volunteering within Department of Corrections facilities as a trans person committed to the disruption of prisons, dana middleton’s work considers the slippery edges of abolitionist work that they do inside the prisons, probing pertinent questions about the optics of that work and the extent to which it is effective. 

Adding depth to the conversation are reflections, notes, ideas, and questions by incarcerated people following workshops with current and recently incarcerated LGBTQ+ people conducted by Switchboard in Puget Sound earlier in the summer. By centering the voices of queer, trans, and gender-expansive individuals experiencing incarceration from the inside, this dialogue offers dedicated time to listen to how various practices, projects, and research touch each other as a way to luxuriate in the critical and creative potential that make queer abolition not only a reality but a necessity.

For the last week of September, I’ll be a Critic in Residence at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN to conduct studio visits and spend time writing alongside artist residents who will be closing out their time at the art center.

thingNY return to the Brick with a rotating series of programs made up of Joseph White's You Against Nature and Mouthful, a new collaboratively written piece for six performers.

​

You Against Nature by Joseph White

Mouthful by thingNY

​

performed by alejandro t. acierto, Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, and Dave Ruder

​

Find them: thingNY.com // more information on the show *here*

​

thingNY is a collective of composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006, thingNY performs experimental works created by the core ensemble – alejandro t. acierto, Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Dave Ruder, and Jeffrey Young – and by adventurous composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Robert Ashley, Rick Burkhardt, Pauline Oliveros, Joseph White, and Julius Eastman. Past works collectively created by thingNY include: subtracTTTTTTTTT, This Takes Place Close By, Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts (with Panoply Performance Lab), Dear Nancine, and ADDDDDDDDD. Recently thingNY released the album Passover on Innova Recordings.

To tongue-tie

Aug 15 - Aug 31

A multimedia gallery show

Works by Gelsey Bell+Erik Ruin, Mel Carter, Benedicto Figueroa, Raheleh Filsoofi, Jana Harper, Kameron Neal, and Paul Pinto+Erin Rogers

Curated by alejandro t. acierto with Paul Pinto

Brick Aux

268 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn NY

Brick Aux Gallery hours are 12-6PM on weekends, varied weekday hours, and by appointment

Opening Reception: Thu. Aug. 15, 2024 - 9:30pm-11:30pm

In conjunction with the performances of mouthful included as part of thingNY’s run of Natural Studies for the Exponential Festival, To tongue-tie is a curatorial exhibition project that shares video and object-based work at the edges of language. Highlighting work that speaks to layered forms of ancestry, (food) consumption, and the body, this exhibition brings together pieces and collaborations by Gelsey Bell+Erik Ruin, Mel Carter, Benedicto Figueroa, Raheleh Filsoofi, Jana Harper, Kameron Neal, and Paul Pinto+Erin Rogers. Working across media, artist’s projects explore how the shape and function of the mouth – as an opening, as a crevice, as a portal – can offer productive metaphors for the depths of heritage in the wake of imperialism, settler colonialism, and cultural erasure. 

Presenting new sound studies research around the recent series Uninvited Guests for the Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) “In the Field 2” conference. More details coming soon!

Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Liz Allen

Including work by alejandro t. acierto, Ari Agha, Julie Anand, Camila De Andrade Bianchi, Liz Cohen, Jennifer Datchuk, Andrea Benge, Sarah Marie Brazeal, Mikey Estes, Erika Lynne Hanson, Hilary Harp, Merideth Hoy, Adriene Jenik, Amanda Mollindo, Lindsey Rothrock, Greg Sale, Vivian Spiegelman, Liza Stout, Caitlyn Swift, Teri Terasaki, & Benjamin Timpson alongside works held in the Solari Foundation Collection at Arizona State University.

Recent and previous grantees of the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture Artists to Work Grants will be celebrated and featured in an evening ceremony and weeklong exhibition of work.

More info coming soon!

Presenting new and ongoing work for an installation at Estrella Mountain Community College. More information coming soon!

Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to announce our first Alumni Showcase exhibition of 2024.

The show features work by alejandro t. acierto (HATCH 2014-15), Frey (BOLT 2016-17), Colleen Keihm (HATCH 2017-18), Nicole Mauser (HATCH 2016-17), and Joshi Radin (HATCH 2019-20).

The opening reception will be on January 19 from 5-8pm.

Coalitional and Communitarian Aesthetics

Coalition building for minoritarian communities remains a challenge. If some of the main obstacles to form alliances between these communities are asymmetries of power and conflicting experiences of oppression, aesthetic expressions from these communities have the potential to transcend these tensions, when mobilized critically. Our panel discusses communicational tactics that strive to garner solidarity for different causes: Rizzo examines how in 2012, a collective of mothers of the disappeared in Mexico use embroidery to advocate for their missing children by emphasizing their humanity and showing how they too “deserve” to be found. Yeboah’s play “20/20” seeks to activate community dialogue on the legacy of Seattle’s summer-long occupation and protest of George Floyd’s murder. In the process, Yeboah learns valuable lessons about the ethical complexities of representation and solidarity building in a fractured community. acierto’s archival work choreographs the process of looking at the history of the United States’s occupation of the Phillipines and allows viewers the capacity to understand its legacies with an emphasis on care towards those implicated and inheriting the histories the archive hosts. Lastly, Kulkarni advances a Black feminist revision of the practices of love, solidarity, and art making at the Sunday Tea Party, a weekly happening in Fort Greene, Brooklyn during the late 1990’s. All of these reflections present art-making as a platform for coalition building, one that challenges the past and present to reimagines minoritarian futures.

Exact time/day of panel presentation TBD. More soon!

Sharing the space/time at NACL will be thingNY, a collective of New York composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song, and installation. Founded in 2006, thingNY performs experimental sound works created collaboratively by the core ensemble - Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, and Andrew Livingston - and by adventurous composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Robert Ashley, Rick Burkhardt, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, Jessie Marino, and Andrea La Rose.

thingNY will be collectively creating a new piece to be premiered in January 2024 at The Brick as part of the Exponential Festival. The piece deals with ancestral language, digestion as a metaphor for lineage and ancestry, displacement through time and space, and similar themes.

Owlian Encounters: Species Concern Across Disciplines

Speakers: alejandro t. acierto, Heather Bateman, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, & Marcel O’Gorman

The Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) is a small, light brown, long-legged bird that lives underground in self-made burrows or occupies the burrows of other creatures such as prairie dogs, ground squirrels, and tortoises. The unique below-earth habitat of this yellow-eyed raptor makes it an alien of sorts among its Strigiforme peers such as the more common Barn Owl and Great Horned Owl. But its earthy habitat also makes the Burrowing Owl uniquely susceptible to displacement by human infrastructure, which explains why it is a species of concern in the ever-sprawling state of Arizona.

This panel looks to the Burrowing Owl and its cthontic lair as a site of both conservation action and reflection about interspecies relations. Through a discursive assembly of ornithology, rhetorical studies, art, and design, the panelists will demonstrate how “concern” takes shape across disciplines and between species. We will explore how human growth marginalizes Athene cunicularia, discuss the institutional and infrastructural politics of owl “rehoming,” and unearth the ad hoc “artificial burrows” designed to persuade this alienated species to stay.

Exact day/time of panel is TBD

Curated by Luke Kautz & DB Bauer

What if we search for the stardust of which we all—animal, vegetal, mineral—are made? This multimedia, transdisciplinary exhibition showcases the works of SLSA members who engage notions of the alien via trans-species worlds and beings, including animals, rocks, and plants. The exhibition opens an array of channels to non-human stories and attends to the many complex relations among the human and the non-human—neither of which are alien, after all.

Contributors: Pierre Jardin (Paul Harris); alejandro t. acierto, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Marcel O’Gorman; Jillian McDonald.

Beneath the surface of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona (USA) lies a vast network of burrows, tunnels, and rocky hideouts that establish a subterranean commons filled with nonhuman species. A flourishing microbiome, these (under)commons illuminate the complex entanglements desert ecologies have that can support life in what has otherwise been described as desolate, empty, or even vapid.  As urban sprawl migrates outwards in parasitic fashion, these unseen (under)commons continue to experience their own kind of metropolitan degradation, impacting not only the animals that flourish, but the expansive microbiome that is further struggling due to the persistent climate crisis.

Evoking adrienne marie brown’s idea of being in “right relationship” with the planet, a notion that enables how we feel and navigate pleasure as we experience life on Earth, this project shares new and ongoing sculptures, time-based works, and work on paper that consider the underground as a productive site for shifts that impact the surface. Through this work, pieces in this exhibition ask: In what ways do subterranean infrastructures, whether natural or industrial, impact what happens above ground? How might we imagine the invisible, the hidden, the unseen as conceptual, material, or critical frameworks to understand this important moment in building new relationships to the land?

Risk Work: Thinking Through Artists’ “Punitive Literacy”

Art interventions labeled “guerrilla” are commonly understood as ephemeral fugitive actions that temporarily disrupt spatial and social order. While these actions have become a key site for studying how artists deploy agency and resist power, the racial politics of mobility, vulnerability to premature death, and policing central to each work has yet to be conceptualized as an integral part of guerrilla art’s forms, reception, and legacy. In Faye Gleisser’s new book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (University of Chicago Press), she analyzes the complex relationship between guerrilla tactics in art, state power, risk management, and policing that deepened during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States.

Drawing on art history, performance studies, geography, legal studies, and Black feminist theories of mobility and illegibility, the book tracks how artists in the US negotiated and often altered a burgeoning security apparatus amidst the expansion of policing and prisons commonly known as America’s “punitive turn.” Through close readings of artists’ decisions to solicit, evade, or manipulate encounters with the carceral apparatus, Gleisser contends that artists' calculation of punitive encounter not only reveals the deepening (and overlooked) relationship of policing and experimental art, but also exposes the gendered and sexualized racial politics of risk-taking that have remained overlooked in white-centering narrations of American Art. By focusing on the asymmetrical relations of artists to state sanctioned violence as a central form within the making of guerrilla art, the book animates artists' punitive literacy— cumulative knowledge that allows for self-protective mobility in a colonialist, anti-Black penal society. 

In conjunction with Risk Work’s 2023 publication, this roundtable brings together artists, scholars, and curators who examine artists’ engagement with policing, coloniality, and abolitionist landscapes of world-making and resistance. In conversation with art historian and curator, Faye Gleisser, artists Dan Paz and alejandro t. acierto will respond to “Risk Work” and gauge the possibilities of discussing artists’ tactical negotiation of near or potential carceral relations—their punitive literacy—as a form of structural knowledge. Moderated by Jasmine Mahmoud, a scholar and curator of art, public policy, and geography, the panelists will also draw out examples in their research and practice, to further consider how the work of survival made materially manifest in guerrilla art, might provide alternative methods for assessing the work of risk, as well as the range of unsafety that risk management policy regulates among people with differently complex relations to the state.

Exact time/day of round table is TBD. More soon!

curated by Jodi McCoy.

Enmeshed Worlds                                                                                                
the unavoidable entanglement of technology and our social order  

                                                           
August 30 – September 22 | FFAW September 1, 6-9 pm

Featuring work from Britt Ransom, Alejandro T Acierto, Jon Chambers, and Tiffany Funk, Enmeshed Worlds is a critical examination of how technology affects our social structures and relationships.    

this exists inside this frame but it also exists inside this other frame is an exhibition of works by seven artists across media that mediate on the entanglements of power, beauty, memory, and grief. Conceived as a series of conversations prompted by posts across the late artist Mark Aguhar’s Tumblr pages, these projects engage the slippages of content as images and texts are reconstructed, reimagined, and reinvented. Throughout these works, statements veer towards questions, texts turn into images, while objects become provocations. Nothing is settled and instead we are left with the materials of thought and to assemble meaning between gestures. Responding to the complexities of experience, namely those impacted by legacies of violence, dispossession, and loss, these works are conditioned by the impact of media that travels, of images and content that attempt to capture and constrain. Ultimately, these projects question the politics of looking and reveal the burdens of gazing. They reframe the ways we understand what is – and can be – seen while troubling the fixity with which images are conditioned.

This exhibition features work by Mark Aguhar, Abraham Avinsan, Cameron A. Grainger, Katie Hargrave, Meredith Laura Lynn, Ronka McClain, and Dan Paz and is organized by alejandro t. acierto.

MAY 6 - JULY 16, 2022
OPENING: MAY 6, 6 - 9 PM

Organized as part of the fourth PARSE Biennial Research Conference, I’ll be delivering a lecture performance The violence of possession for the panel “Aesthetic Justice: Investigations” along with Christina Varvia and emilia izquierdo, organized by Sandra Noeth, Cecilia Lagerström, Jyoti Mistry and Nathalie S. Fari.

Our ability to conceive of ourselves surviving and thriving in the future is crucial to manifesting prosperity as a lived reality. What we consume today—the stories we read, the films we watch, and the World we experience—all directly impact our capacity to imagine what's possible for us tomorrow. Unfortunately, for Queer, Trans, and BIPOC people, self-actualization possibilities are difficult to envision in a world where they're forced to define themselves against the backdrop of a dominant culture that stereotypes, excludes, and often harms them.  

Other World seeks to reframe what's possible for those who are too often pushed to the fringe by re-centering those margins through stories of alternate futures and worlds created on their own terms. This exhibition lifts the voices that draw upon their own history, communities, and movements to ask: Who are we? Where have we come from? What do we believe in? What fills us with hope? 

FEATURED ARTISTS: 

Alejandro Acierto – Nashville, TN 
Isaac Aoki – Grand Rapids, MI 
Rachel Britton – Grand Rapids, MI 
Antonius-Tin Bui – New Haven, CT 
Gabriel Garcia Roman New York, NY 
Gabriella Grimes Philadelphia, PA 
Emily Oliveira – Brooklyn, NY 
Lydia Ramos – Grand Rapids, MI 
Zachary Trebellas – Grand Rapids, MI 
Sin Wai Kin – London, United Kingdom 
Kali Spitzer and Bubzee – Vancouver, British Columbia  
Carolina Vélez Muñiz – Mexico City, Mexico 
Daniel Walker – Grand Rapids, MI