Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s)

9/10 attendees participating with Philippe Cheng (paired with LA artist David Horvitz). Photo: Rossa Cole
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SWEPT AWAY: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s)
by Warren Neidich

Join us at Main Beach for the finale in this series of unmissable happenings!

Aerial photo of Swept Away on Saturday, September 17. Photo: Sutton Lynch

10/30 Presenters:
Monica Banks in collaboration with Jamie Ross 
Dianne Blell in collaboration with Lisa Anne Auerbach 
Andrea Cote in collaboration with Nina Waisman
Ivana Dama in collaboration with Rodrigo Arruda
Jeremy Dennis + Beau Bree Rhee in collaboration with Debra Disman

Eva Faye in collaboration with Patty Chang and David Kelley    
Saskia Friedrich in collaboration with Fran Siegel 
Kimberly Goff in collaboration with Cheri Gaulke and Xochi Maberry-Gaulke 
Veronica Gonzalez Peña in collaboration with Cassandra Marketos 
Jeremy Grosvenor in collaboration with Vincent Johnson 
Jerelyn Hanrahan with Laura Ross White in collaboration with Andrew Berardini
Virva Hinnemo in collaboration with Sam Shoemaker  
Josephine Meckseper in collaboration with Jiayun Chen 
Michelle Murphy in collaboration with Sarah Beadle
Jill Musnicki in collaboration with Victoria Vesna 
Lois Nesbitt in collaboration with Lucia Santini Ribisi
Jaanika Peerna in collaboration with Marcus Kuiland Nazario
David Rothenberg in collaboration with May Sun
Barry Schwabsky in collaboration with David Schafer
Janice Stanton in collaboration with Kearra Gopee 
Carol Szymanski with David Adewomi in collaboration with Xiouping (Whitworth)

This event does not have chairs provided, please bring your own chairs.


Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s) will take place at the water’s edge in front of the Pavilion at Main Beach in East Hampton. Attendees can watch or be an active participant and enjoy the evening’s festivities. 

Warren Neidich notes “Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate is a community oriented artistic project that aims to create a transcontinental heartbeat across America. It is hoped that through its combined gestures and performances, a sense of solidarity, so desperately missing today, will emerge with which to confront the ecological catastrophe at our doorstep.”

The syncopated sound of the surf will provide the background acousmatic. This poetic project in some ways harkens back to the Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow in 1966 all through the South Fork: https://alastairgordonwalltowall.com/2018/02/07/gas-i-am-a-happener-1966-east-hampton/

Swept Away is the brainchild of Artist Warren Neidich who created the successful Drive by Art event in 2020. The project is co-curated and co-coordinated by Christina Strassfield, Museum Director/Chief Curator of Guild Hall, Anuradha Vikram, Los Angeles based independent curator, and Los Angeles based conceptual artist Renee Petropoulos, plus administrative coordination by Julie McKim. 65 artists living in on the East End and 65 west coast artists are participating in this community and family-based Art Happening. In the spring the reverse will occur; with East End artists writing love letters to LA artists to be executed at Will Rogers State Beach, Santa Monica in conjunction with the 18th Street Arts Center.

At Main Beach, artists will create ephemeral performative gestures of immateriality or time-based works on the beach. This could be making a sandcastle, singing a song, reciting poetry, dancing, make a sculpture that interacts with the tide, collecting shells, doing a light projection on Main Beach pavilion, picking up garbage on the beach, etc.  The works could be political and deal with global warming and its effects on the water level or could be apolitical and talk about the natural beauty of the real in opposition to the digital and virtual.

The importance of biodegradable, non-toxic materials will be essential as well as leaving the beach pristine after the work. Each artist has been linked up to a west coast artist who will email instructions – a love letter – for a work of art that the local artist will incorporate into their performative piece, acting as a surrogate.

The list of East End and West Coast artist pairings is as follows:

EAST END ARTISTS  >>  LOS ANGELES ARTISTS

Suzanne Anker > > Margarethe Drexel
Elena Bajo > > Jasmine Orpilla
Lillian Ball > > Dana Berman Duff
Monica Banks > > Jamie Ross
Dianne Blell > > Lisa Anne Auerbach
Scott Bluedorn > > Robby Herbst
Megan Chaskey > > Lionel Popkin
Scott Chaskey > > Kathryn Andrews
Philippe Cheng > > David Horvitz
Andrea Cote > > Nina Waisman
Ivana Dama > > Rodrigo Arruda
Peter Dayton > > Anita Pace
Katrina Del Mar + Chris Jones > > Taisha Paggett + Meital Yaniv
Jeremy Dennis + Beau Bree Rhee > > Debra Disman
Sabra Moon Elliot > > Rochelle Fabb
Carol Edwards > > Pamela Hudson
Eva Faye > > Patty Chang + David Kelley
Saskia Friedrich > > Fran Siegel
Margaret Garrett > > Susan Kleinberg
Veronica Gonzalez Peña > > Cassandra Marketo
Kimberly Goff > > Cheri Gaulke + Xochi Maberry-Gaulke
Jeremy Grosvenor > > Vincent Johnson
Jerelyn Hanrahan + Laura Ross White > > Andrew Berardini
Candace Hill Montgomery > > Anna Joy Springer
Virva Hinnemo > > Sam Shoemaker
Alice Hope > > Krysten Cunningham
Erica-Lynn Huberty > > Sandeep Mukherjee
Terri Hyland > > Joseph Mosconi
Ruby Jackson > > Alice Könit
No Partner > > Carolyn Castano
Nishan Kazazian > > Beatriz Cortez
Carlos Lama >> No Partner
No Partner > > Badly Licked Bear
Christine Lidrbauch > > Sterling Wells
Donald Lipski > > Raul Baltazar
Sutton Lynch > > Yrneh Gabon Brown
No Partner > > Jiayun Chen
Tanya Minhas > > Allison Wyper
Richard Mothes > > Kristin Calabrese
Michelle Murphy > > Sarah Beadle
Jill Musnicki > > Victoria Vesna
Lois Nesbitt > > Lucia Santini Ribisi
Eileen O’Kane Kornreich > > Iman Person
Jaanika Peerna > > Marcus Kuiland Nazario
Dalton Portella > > Ryat Yezbick
Toni Ross > > Sharon Barnes
David Rothenberg > > May Sun
Will Ryan > > Jody Zellen
Sara Salaway > > Melinda Altshuler
Matthew Satz > > Katie Grinnan
Bastienne Schmidt > > Jisoo Chung
Barry Schwabsky > > David Schafer
Christine Sciulli > > Karen Lofgren
Arlene Slavin > > Jenny Yurshansky
Janice Stanton > > Kearra Gopee
Christina Sun > > Catherine Scott
Carol Szymanski with David Adewomi  > > Xiouping (Whitworth)
Sara VanDerBeek > > Alicia Serling
Ryan Wallace > > Joshua Aster
Ross Watts > > Justine Harari
Allan Wexler > > Dan Kwong
Nina Yankowitz > > Francesca Gabbiani
Darius Yektai > > Barbara McCarren + Jud Fine
Almond Zigmund > > Marissa Mandler

  • Warren Neidich

    Warren Neidich uses written texts and neon-light sculptures to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, science, and social justice. His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennale 2019, analyzed, through a large hanging neon light sculpture, fake news and the post-truth society. Selected exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 MOMA, White Columns, Walker Art Center MIT List Visual Art Center, (Cambridge), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art (Washington D.C., US), Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), Zentrum für Kunst and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), ICA London, Palais Tokyo (Paris, France), Villa Arson (Nice, France) and Kunsthaus Zürich. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles, the Sorbonne in Paris, France; and the University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Kunstforum International, The Art Newspaper, Smithsonian Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic, Artnet, GQ, Forbes, Vogue IT, Monopol, Performance Art Journal, , Time Out, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and Frieze.

    To learn more visit https://www.warrenneidich.com/

  • Christina Mossaides Strassfield

    Christina Mossaides Strassfield is the Museum Director/Chief Curator of Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York. This title was given to her in January 2009.  She had been the Curator at Guild Hall Museum from 1990-1996 and returned in 2002.  One of her standout achievements while overseeing the artistic leadership and overall management of the Museum has been the exemplary Museum Exhibition schedule which she has either curated herself or directly oversaw as program manager. During her tenure she has transformed what was once a small sleepy museum into a vital Mecca for the visual arts which has been recognized by reviews in The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, New York Magazine, The New York Sun, Newsday and many other publications. The mission statement of the museum is to showcase the artists who have an affiliation with Eastern Suffolk County. Close proximity to NYC has made the Hampton’s the summer home for most of the New York Art world. This has allowed Strassfield to forge close relationships with the artist’s, dealers and collectors who shape the New York Art World.  She has been instrumental in coordinating exhibitions which have received acclaim from art critics as well as the general public. At Guild Hall she is charge of curating the collection of over 2500 objects, works of art by artists associated with the Eastern Long Island including acquisitions and collections care. Strassfield launched the Guild Hall Collector’s Circle and has cultivated many gifts for the collection, oversees the acquisitions and loan process, and guides the Museum Committee on collections in addition to organizing the traveling exhibition of works from the collection which has traveled cross-country since 2007 and continues to be booked.  In 2009 she Co-Chaired a Symposium at Hofstra University on the artist Perle Fine. In 2010 she was appointed Professor at Dowling College where in 2011 the Museum Studies Minor was launched under her leadership.  She currently teaches as an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York, Suffolk Community College, Eastern Campus.

    She is in charge of all aspects of administrating Guild Hall Museum and all exhibition related work. Management responsibilities for the museum include budgeting, fundraising, grant writing, major gift cultivation, marketing, publicity, research, conservation, education, exhibition design, AAM Museum accreditation as well as disaster, long range and strategic planning.  She has been published in catalogues, articles and has participated in symposiums, scholarly talks and on numerous panels.  She has appeared on News 12, NPR on WLIW, Plum TV, Cablevision, and LTV and on the radio.  She continues to be involved in the arts and has served on the art board of the LongHouse Foundation and has been on the executive board of the Long Island Museum Association and is a member of the prestigious ARTTable which recognizes leadership roles by women in the Arts.  

    Her community involvement includes being elected to two 5 years terms on the Southampton School Board where she co-chaired the Budget Committee that oversaw the school districts then 62 million dollar budget.  She also served on the Finance and Audit, Academic Advisory and Academic Enrichment Committees.  Since 2019 she has served on NYFA’s Nominating Committee.

    She has also served on her church’s Parish council and was the President of their Philanthropic Society.

  • Anuradha Vikram

    Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and educator. Vikram is co-curator (with UCLA Art Sci Center director Victoria Vesna) of the upcoming Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (opening 2024), and recently curated  the mid-career survey exhibition Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary (open January 30–May 8, 2022). Her book Decolonizing Culture is a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017). Vikram is faculty in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

    Photo courtesy of A. Vikram.

Sponsors

Swept Away is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Hayden Family Foundation.
Guild Hall’s museum programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, an anonymous donor, Crozier Fine Arts, and funding from The Michael Lynne Museum Endowment, and The Melville Straus Family Endowment.

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