OFRI CNAANI, "HELP DESK: EQUITY EXCHANGE MARATHON"
Performance, Saturday, January 16, 2016, 12-4pm
Part of File Under: ?
Equity Gallery, 245 Broome Street, New York, New York 10002
Free. RSVPs: info@nyartistsequity.org
New York, New York, January 8, 2016 – Equity Gallery is pleased to announce “Help Desk: Equity Exchange Marathon,” a participatory performance to be held on Saturday, January 16, 2016 from 12pm to 4pm. The performance is part of File Under: ?, a solo exhibition by Ofri Cnaani on view through January 30, 2016.
For the exhibition, Cnaani invited artists to submit their most pressing questions – those questions that each individual artist wants answered to help him/her in their lives as artists. Hundreds of questions from around the world were submitted and the topics raised range from professional to personal to theoretical. These questions are displayed at Equity Gallery and shared on its online platforms. For the performance, Cnaani has asked experts from a variety of fields to attempt to answer these questions and the roster was determined by the frequency of the topics.
Experts include:
Britt Barney, financial planner, LearnVest (Debt and Money)
Leila Bozorg, Chief of Staff, NYC Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development (Housing)
Christine Cha, designer, developer, digital marketer and entrepreneur (Marketing)
Joey Lico, curator and director of programming at The Cultivist (Art Currencies)
Gean Moreno, artist and writer, artistic director of Cannonball, Miami (Art and the Future)
Tracy D. Morgan, psychoanalyst (Emotional Health)
Keren Moscovitch, artist and personal coach (Work/Life Balance)
Shavit Yarden, attorney, specializing in immigration (Visas)
Artists Equity was founded in 1947 when over 160 leading artists banded together to establish and protect artists' rights. To define the organization’s mission, the founders asked questions of themselves, their friends and advisors, focusing on what could be achieved when artists come together. Cnaani was inspired by this history of collaboration and advocacy to create this exhibition and performance. The answers to the artists’ questions will be transcribed, processed and made available through Artists Equity’s website as a service for the art community. Furthermore, these concerns will be analyzed in order to shape the organization’s future programming.
File Under: ? not only aims to challenge artists to focus on the essential needs of their practices, but looks to raise awareness of artists’ concerns when they are free to ask absolutely anything.
Performance in collaboration with the School of Visual Art’s summer residency program. For more information, please visit www.sva.edu.
BIOGRAPHIES
Britt Barney, financial planner, LearnVest -- Debt and Money
Britt Barney is a LearnVest Planner and Client Services Manager who spends her days empowering people by helping them get a clear understanding of their finances. Britt has had an interest in personal finance since earning her first paycheck at age 14 and now, working at LearnVest, she's able to share her passion and knowledge with others every day. She has a B.S. in Business Administration and a B.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Rhode Island and holds her Series 65 FINRA license. Although she's lived in Brooklyn for almost a decade, she's still a New Englander at heart and spends a considerable amount of time in traffic on Route 95.
Leila Bozorg, Chief of Staff, NYC Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development -- Housing
Leila Bozorg is the Chief of Staff at the NYC Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development. She works with the Commissioner to identify, develop, and communicate agency priority initiatives and policies, and ensures that they are successfully implemented in close partnership with the senior team and their respective divisions. She also serves as a critical liaison between the agency and City Hall on priority matters, including meeting the ambitious goals of the Mayor’s Housing New York plan. Prior to joining HPD Leila served as a Presidential Management Fellow in the Office of the Secretary, and later, a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Affordable Housing Preservation at the U.S. Department of Housing Preservation and Development. She also worked on housing and community development initiatives in Ahmedabad, India as a William J. Clinton Fellow through the American India Foundation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University, and a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Christine Cha, designer, developer, digital marketer and entrepreneur -- Marketing
Christine Cha is a designer, developer, digital marketer and entrepreneur. She previously built and led huge communities and user engagement programming (tens of thousands directly impacted) through Wix.com and the local Chamber of Commerce in Chelsea. She now currently freelances as a designer and web developer while building a revolutionary new arts education platform called Dibbl. Find her on Twitter/Instagram at @christinechanyc.
Joey Lico, curator and director of programming at The Cultivist -- Art Currencies
Joey Lico is an independent curator and Director of Programming at The Cultivist, currently living and working in New York and Berlin. Lico began her career at Phaidon Press as an Assistant Editor of the acclaimed Contemporary Artists Series and later served as the Director of Strategic Planning for Independent Curators International (ICI), and as the Director of External Affairs with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), where she managed and expanded curatorial, development and marketing projects with both emerging and established artists across all disciplines of art. Lico's experience working with artists to independently promote their work and develop their practice has brought her all over the world including universities, museums, galleries and art spaces in: Amsterdam; Berlin; Bogota; Cambodia; Frankfurt; Jerusalem; London; Los Angeles; Paris; New York; and Tel Aviv.
Lico graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University with a BA in Contemporary Philosophy; received her MA from NYU’s Gallatin School in the Culture of Visual Contemporary Art; and her PhD in art history from The University of Amsterdam.
She is on the Executive Committee for the Whitney Museum’s Contemporaries and an Advisory Committee member for NYFA. In addition to her museum affiliations, she is working with The White House as an advisor on their ACT/ART Committee, bringing contemporary art back into the forefront of public policy.
Gean Moreno, artist and writer, artistic director of Cannonball, Miami -- Art and the Future
Gean is an artist and writer based in Miami. His work has been exhibited at the North Miami MoCA, Kunsthaus Palais Thum and Taxis in Bregenz, Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee, Haifa Museum in Israel, Arndt & Partner in Zürich, and Invisible-Exports in New York. He has contributed texts to various magazines and catalogues. In 2008, he founded [NAME] Publications. He is currently Artistic Director at Cannonball, an arts organization based in downtown Miami.
Tracy D. Morgan, psychoanalyst -- Emotional Health
Tracy Morgan is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC. She is host, editor and creator of the award-winning webcast New Books in Psychoanalysis where, for over five years she has had the pleasure of speaking to a diverse array of writers about their work. Prior to delving into the world of psychoanalysis she studied American Cultural History in the doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center from which she holds an M.Phil. She currently co-chairs a Friday night lecture series at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies.
When very young, she was an associate producer of Paris is Burning, the award-winning documentary about drag ball culture in Harlem. Older now, she weighs in as she deems fit on the blog, Walking Through Life Holding Freud’s Hand, responding to media portrayals of “the impossible profession”. Here and there, as time has passed, she writes book reviews. Sometimes she also publishes as an historian on race, medicine and/or sexuality, while at other times, as a psychoanalyst, she writes on psychosis. Sans a professional affiliation, she is currently at work on a set of essays responding to Ta-Nahesi Coates.
She helped to found FreudOutLoud, a group that last January produced a marathon avant-garde reading of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents at Judson Memorial Church. A once devout member of ACT UP-NY, she considers her work with that cadre of risk-taking geniuses who demanded an end to governmental neglect of those it considered to be worthless pariahs as her crowning achievement this time around.
Keren Moscovitch, artist and personal coach -- Work/Life Balance
Keren Moscovitch is a lens-based multi-media artist who explores intimacy, structures of desire and the ways in which the sexual and the spiritual intersect. She regularly collaborates with other artists to dissect the ways in which relationships are built, and identity is formed. Keren lives and works in New York City where she teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is a frequent contributing writer at ArtPulse Magazine. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BA from Georgetown University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy, art theory and aesthetics from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, where she is producing a hybrid body of work incorporating both scholarly and artistic research. In addition to her own studio practice, Keren works with other artists as a personal coach, providing support and strategy as they develop ideas and build their careers.
Shavit Yarden, attorney, specializing in immigration -- Visas
Shavit Yarden is the founding member of Yarden Law Group. He has been a practicing attorney since 1999 and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He previously practiced overseas and in New York with large and medium size firms with a multi-national focus. In addition to immigration law, Shavit has a strong background in corporate law, business law and cross-border transactions. He has experience representing individuals of diverse backgrounds and companies, local and foreign, in planning, devising and executing complex international transactions involving transfers of personnel.
Using a strategic approach, Shavit assists his clients to meet their short and long term immigration goals. His experience and continued interest in human resources and personnel matters help his corporate and individual clients attain their professional and personal goals and maintain top talent.
Shavit is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the leading organization of immigration practitioners and scholars and serves on the corporate practice committee of its New York City chapter. He is also a member of the New York State Bar Association. Shavit is the Program Director of the City University of New York's immigration law studies at the School of Professional Studies in New York City. He is a frequent speaker on immigration law at various venues.
