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Overview

How do people make sense of daily life after catastrophe?  How have artists provoked or been provoked by the city? Through a discussion of public curatorial projects undertaken in New York City, the talk offers a series of light-hearted frameworks for serious urban issues or perhaps it’s the other way around? Serious ways to find resilience and buoyancy in urban life.

Radhika Subramaniam is a curator and writer interested in urban crises and surprises, particularly crowds, cultures of catastrophe and human-animal relationships.  She is Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) at Parsons School of Design/The New School where she teaches in the School of Art and Design History and Theory. Her curatorial practice is cross-disciplinary and dialogic, committed to public pedagogy, critical urbanism and political and social justice. Curatorial projects include Art in Odd Places: Number, 2013; and Sign, 2009 (with Erin Donnelly); Abecedarium for Our Times, Apexart, 2008; and Cities, Art and Recovery, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), 2005 – 2006, a major two-year international initiative focused on art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. At the SJDC, she has developed dialogic curatorial platforms such as Living Concrete/Carrot City, 2010 (with Nevin Cohen); #searchunderoccupy, 2012; Art Environment Action!, 2012; Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story, 2013 (with Margot Bouman); and Offense and Dissent: Image, Conflict, Belonging, 2014 (with Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore).

Previously Director of Cultural Programs for LMCC, she was founding executive editor of interdisciplinary journal, Connect: Art. Politics. Theory. Practice. She was a SEED Foundation Teaching Fellow in urban studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre, Canada. She holds a Masters in Anthropology and a PhD. in Performance Studies.  Recent writing includes Not as the Crow Flies, La.lit, Vol. 7, The Green Issue, Kathmandu, 2016; Small Acts, Forlorn Practices, in Activating Democracy, edited by Sheryl Oring, Intellect, 2016; In Search of the Indian Cow, in History According to Cattle, edited by Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja, Punctum Books, 2015; and Living Concrete/Carrot City: An exhibition platform as a growing medium, with Nevin Cohen, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development, 2012.