Dry Run- A Night of Student Performance Art

James Hannaham (born 1968) is a writer, performer, and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods (2015), which deals with human trafficking, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was named one of Publishers Weekly’s top ten books of the year. The New York Times called it an “ambitious, sweeping novel of American captivity and exploitation.”

He studied art at Yale University and in 1992 began working in the art department of The Village Voice as well as writing for the paper. Later he studied creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His debut novel, God Says No (2009), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He has published fiction in One Story, Fence, StoryQuarterly, and BOMB. He reviews theater and art for 4Columns.

He cofounded the New York City–based performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them 1992–2002. His text-based artworks often satirize the theoretical jargon that is used to describe visual art; his 2014 gallery show “Card Tricks” consisted of descriptive placards for fictive artworks, with titles such as “Planet” and “Nothing.”

In 2020 his work Everything Is Normal, Everything Is Normal, Everything Is Fine, Everything Is Fine was judged Best in Show at a national juried exhibition of artist books and text-based visual works, Biblio Spectaculum.

Hannaham is a professor in the writing program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.His most recent published work is the 2022 novel Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta.

Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through acts of self-representation. As a historian of untold narratives, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. Motta is tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department.

Harley Spiller is an artist, museum professional and educator now serving as the Ken Dewey Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, where he has worked since 1986. He has exhibited internationally, at The Smithsonian Institution, El Museo de Bellas Artes Caracas, and Hauser & Wirth, and been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.”  Named by Art & Antiques magazine as one of the nation’s “Top 100 Collectors,” Spiller’s book Keep the Change: A Collector’s Tales of Lucky Pennies, COunterfeit C-Notes and Other Curious Currency (Princeton Architectural Press), was deemed “beautifully written and designed” by Roberta Smith and named one of the top ten art books of 2015 by The New York Times.

Asia Stewart (b. 1996, New York) seeks ways to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality. Stewart has received various honors and support for her works in performance from organizations that include The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Stewart routinely questions how she can best document her performances and represent movement and physicality across mediums. Her works in video and installation have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also now held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.  

Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past five decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances as political personae. In 1976 she founded, and as Founding Director Emerita, continues to help direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, online and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.