Video documentation of the Franklin Furnace LOFT event Performance Artists: Web3, NFTs & Digital Communities presented on August 30, 2022 at 3:00PM – 4:30PM ET on Zoom.
As part of its mission to support “unforeseen” visual art practices, Franklin Furnace (FF) enables artists to investigate today’s expanding horizons. Arantxa Araujo, Tam Gryn and Andrea Lerdo explored new opportunities such as the digital Metaverse with its simulated environments, Web3, and new revenue models for performance. FF seeks to support artists in the process to formalize the knowledge to reach large audiences, build communities, and create spaces for rich user interactions with the latest in tech. We examined opportunities, challenges and real life examples of performance collectives experimenting with Web3 from the process of building communities to potentially achieving perpetual royalties.
FF proposes to continue supporting artists in their experimentation with avant-garde art and new technologies in their presentations of public visual art IRL (in real life), digital realms, and/or elsewhere. Araujo, Gryn and Lerdo created an online guide and presented findings in this free, live, interactive 90-minute event, “Performance Artists: Web3, NFTs & Digital Communities” at the FF LOFT, the new virtual space for presentation of artists’ innovative work. The guide and a recording of the event are available on FF’s website as a permanent free resource.
Bios
Arantxa Araujo
Arantxa Araujo is a Mexican artist with a background in neuroscience and an arts administrator. She is the Program Director at Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Since joining the team, she oversees the annual grant and has spearheaded new initiatives, such as The LOFT and redesigning the new website to better support our community. She deeply believes in avant-garde art and performance to be crucial in generating awareness and catalyzing change in the quest of equity and racial justice.
Her work is essentially multidisciplinary, feminist, and rooted in bio-behavioral research and technology. Explorations of gender constructions, performativity and identity, and the politics of migration are seen and experienced in her installations. Her work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, at the Radical Women Latin American Art Exhibit, The Queens Museum, Panoply Lab, Art in Odd Places in NYC; RAW during Miami Art Week; the Semel and Huret & Spector Gallery in Boston, and the SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh; in Mexico, at El Monumento a la Revolución and La Explanada del MUAC, during the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro and El Vicio; also participated in the Nuit Blanche Festival in Saskatoon, Canada.
Araujo is a Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art award recipient (2020/1019), BAC grantee (2020), an LMCC (2019) grantee and has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship (2019-2020), Creative Capital taller (2018), ITP Camp (2018, 2019) and EMERGENYC (2017). Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT (2012). She holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in Theater Studies from Emerson College.
// @ArantxaAraujo //arantxaaraujo.com
Tam Gryn
Tam is the former Director of Fine Arts at Rally.io where she helped artists create their own autonomous crypto economies as well as Head Curator at SHOWFIELDS. Tam is a Guest Lecturer at Harvard Business School and New York Academy of the Arts. She currently contributes to Decentralized Arts by BanklessDAO and Women in Web3 Equity Miami. She is the former Head of the Curatorial Department of the Artist Pension Trust as well as Head Curator for RAW POP UP and Founder of Culturadora. Tam sits on the board of the Kulturespace Foundation in Berlin.
Originally from Venezuela, she studied Art History at the Sorbonne University. She then specialized in Politics and Diplomacy at the Reichman University in Israel and received her M.A. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Tel Aviv University.
Tam has curated multiple art exhibitions as well as charity fundraisers. Cultural projects that Tam and her team produced hosted 300,000+ individuals, curated 300+ site-specific art installations by global artists and reached 13B+ in online impressions.
Clients and collaborators include The Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney Museum, United Talent Agency (UTA), 2×4, McCann WorldGroup, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, Locust Projects, Glossier, Heineken, Bombay Sapphire, The Glenlivet, Diptyque, Evian, Mastercard, SVA School of Visual Arts NYC, Neuehouse, Downtown Development Authority Miami, Miami Design District, Lincoln Rd, VICE, Paper Magazine, CNN en Español, CULTURED Mag, Haute Living, Miami New Times, Art Basel, KIND, Espace Meyer Zafra, Brightwire, The Bakehouse Art Complex, Lifion, Arevalo Gallery, Bas Fischer Invitational, Garis & Hahn, The LA Art Show, Untitled Miami, Inga Gallery, University of Miami Frost School of Music, Brickell City Centre, Create! Mag, All She Makes, Paradigm Gallery and many more.
Tam specializes in the intersection between art and other industries, new creative economies, crypto for creative communities, creating memorable immersive art installations, satisfying audience’s desire for new and genuine experiences, generating social media buzz, content creation, newfound exposure and foot traffic.
https://www.tamgryn.com/
Andrea Lerdo
Andrea Lerdo has spent +15 years in the financial industry, where she has helped build new financial infrastructure and innovative products. In 2015, Andrea was relocated by JPMorgan from Mexico to NY to lead the industry’s first attempt to digitalize the law and automate controls. In 2019, Andrea transitioned to the Real Time Payments business, where she helped enhance payment processing from days to under 5 seconds. In 2020, Andrea joined JPMorgan’s Blockchain initiative called Onyx, where she acted as Head Business Architecture and Marketplace (AppStore). Andrea is currently the CEO of the Palm Foundation responsible for the growth the Palm network, by driving increased adoption, and guide its long term success as the leading NFT platform for creators by creators.
// @lerdiedabirdie
This project is made possible with funds from the NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, Printed Matter, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
