Wendy's Subway / Residency / unbag

PUBLISHER-IN-RESIDENCE: unbag
March-April 2019

Wendy's Subway is pleased to announce unbag as Publisher-in-Residence in March and April 2019. Join unbag and Wendy’s Subway for a series of workshops, seminars, and walking tours centered around discussions of politics, place, and entropy. Featuring contributions from Thom Donovan, Xavier Acarín, and Zahra Patterson, the programs are part of unbag’s forthcoming issue, set for release in Summer 2019.

Books selected by unbag contributors will be on view at Wendy's Subway through April.

About unbag
unbag is a New York City-based community arts organization that produces a digital and print publication promoting critical engagement with contemporary art and politics.
Visit the unbag website here.

Entropy and the City
Workshop led by Zahra Patterson
Sunday, May 5, 1-3:30pm

For teens aged 15-19
To reserve a spot, or register for a group, please contact Rachel Valinsky at rachel@wendyssubway.com

If you look at the roots of the word entropy, it means “inside transformation.” In its modern usage, we use entropy if we are speaking about chaos, disorder, and decay. How can we think of the city, specifically New York City with all its glittering development, as a place that’s in a state of decline? Can we think of progress as a form of destruction?

In this workshop, we will discuss entropy in terms of our neighborhoods and schools. We’ll examine texts that explore the themes of displacement, surveillance, and land justice. We’ll write stories and poems and publish zines in real time on a risograph printer. All materials will be provided.

Zahra Patterson is a writer and educator. She created Raw Fiction, a literary arts project for teen writers, and her first book, Chronology (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018), is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Open Research: RIOTS
Saturday, May 4 , 2-4:30pm
Free RSVP

The public is a slow-moving riot.
- Nina Power

Riots have become ubiquitous as an expression of social unrest worldwide. As automation and dispossession implements a shift in economic models initiated by the financial crisis of 2008, large masses of people are pushed into new infra-living conditions. Precarity fuels the subject with distress and anxiety. The streets become a site of confrontation, perhaps of tactical appropriation, while the flow of material and vital connections take on unprecedented forms.

Join us for Open Research: RIOTS, a discussion with Xavier Acarín, Sebastian Grant, Alan Ruiz and about the unsettling present of rioting, and its possible artistic implications.

Free and open to the public.

*

Xavier Acarín is a curator interested in performativity as a mode of understanding social life and artistic practices. His exhibitions and projects have been presented at The New School, Elastic City, Chez Bushwick, The Hessel Museum, Peekskill Project 6, the Abrons Arts Center, and Knockdown Center in New York, CheLA in Buenos Aires, and MUU-Kaapeli in Helsinki. In 2018 he was co-curator of the LOOP Festival in Barcelona. One of the exhibitions of his program, was a selection of Merce Cunningham's video works presented at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. He received an MA in Curatorial Studies from CCS-Bard College and is currently Part Time Faculty at Parsons School of Design. He has written texts for exhibitions at Galería Rosa Santos, Galería ADN, and Participant Inc. His articles, essays, and interviews have been published at A-Desk, Culturas-La Vanguardia, Esnorquel, and Terremoto. He has participated as author of the books Designing Experience (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Dear Helen (CCS Bard, 2014).

Sebastian Grant is a curator, art historian, and teacher at Parsons School of Design in New York City. He currently teaches in the First-Year Program, educating students in art history and research writing. He graduated in 2017 from the Parsons History of Design and Curatorial Studies Masters Program, and he continues to pursue art and design history in teaching and curating. During his Masters program, he was a Cooper Hewitt Fellow in the Publications department of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and had also completed the program's first Curatorial Capstone Project, helping to curate the Cooper Hewitt Triennial Beauty, and the Cooper Hewitt's exhibition Jewelry of Ideas: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection. In 2017, he co-curated the art and fashion show Atman: The Caribbean Lion in Miami, to correspond the Art Basel season, and is currently curating the Susan Grant Lewin Art Jewelry Collection for an upcoming show. He has also recently curated a lost and found exhibition at the Materials for the Arts in Long Island City, in celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the company.

Alan Ruiz is an artist whose work explores the way space is produced as both material and ideology. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Queens Museum, The Storefront for Art & Architecture, Callicoon Fine Arts, TG, Nottingham, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. His writing has been published in Millenium Film Journal, ED, TDR, BOMB Magazine, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Ruiz has participated in residencies with Abrons Arts Center, the Whitey Museum's Youth Insights Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and was a Spring 2018 Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University. He received an MFA from Yale University and was a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Ruiz currently teaches at The New School, and in the Parsons School of Constructed Environments, and is a recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award.

OVERWRITTEN: Writing the failure, impossibility, and resurrection of the book
Seminar led by Thom Donovan
Saturday, April 6, 2-5pm
Capacity: 12 participants
Cost: $20-50 (sliding scale)
Register here.

This seminar will look at four seminal ante-generic texts, all of which address the book as an objectification of failure, impasse, impossibility, crisis, and/or withdrawal: Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, Renee Gladman’s To After That (TOAF), Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu, and Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University. Pressing for our discussion will be questions and problems these books raise regarding genre, and particularly the impossibility for certain subjects to write in certain genres (e.g., memoir and the novel), as well as the necessity of the invention of new genres for impassed subjects. I also hope to discuss a question that is both practical and ontological: What happens when we return to, rewrite, and revise previous works, particularly works that, for any number of reasons, never found publication/objectification in print/as a book? Of what does this encounter consist, and what possibilities does it open up for the writer? In the case that the work’s publication was avoided, abandoned, or withdrawn, how might the work be “resurrected” (overwritten, rewritten, written-into, extended, re-contextualized, and supplemented in/for the present)?

It is recommended that participants read all four books in full in advance of the seminar. Digital copies can be provided upon request.

Thom Donovan is the author of numerous books, including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015); To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses of Fire. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. His current projects include a book of poems and other writings based upon the compositions of Julius Eastman, a book of critical essays regarding poetics, political practice, and the occult, and an ongoing "ante-memoir" entitled Left Melancholy.

The Wendy’s Subway Residency Program is made possible through a Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation Art and Social Justice Grant, and through public funds from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by Brooklyn Arts Council.