Allora & Calzadilla
Under Discussion, 2005; Single Channel Video with Sound, 6:14
Copyright Allora & Calzadilla
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

FREE AS AIR AND WATER
Wednesday, September 16 to Saturday, October 27, 2009
Opening reception Wednesday, September, 16, 7-9 pm

Allora & Calzadilla, Amy Balkin, Robert Bordo, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Ross Cisneros, Amy Franceschini and Free Soil, Andrea Geyer, Hans Haacke, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Runo Lagomarsino, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrč, Simon Starling, Temporary Services, Oscar Tuazon, Lidwien Van de Ven

Curated by Saskia Bos and Steven Lam

EXHIBITION DETAILS
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 7-9pm
Exhibition on view: September 16-October 27, 2009
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6pm

41 Cooper Gallery
The Cooper Union School of Art, 41 Cooper Square (3rd Ave. b/w 6th and 7th Sts.)
Lower Level 1,
NYC, NY 10003

The Cooper Union School of Art's exhibition Free as Air and Water opens Wednesday, September 16, 2009 and will run to Saturday, October 27, 2009. In connection with the exhibition there will be a series of conferences, the first before the opening reception, 9/16, from 5 to 7 pm in The Great Hall and the second on 10/12 from 7 to 9 pm in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium.

The exhibition takes Peter Cooper's quote that "Education should be Free as Air and Water" as a starting point. The exhibition addresses the spirit of this statement by recognizing the difference between then (1859) and now (2009). Today, air, water, land, an all are all subordinated to the logic of privatization impacting the environment in challenging ways. As the past few decades have witnessed how global power has systematically distributed the world's resources in unfair ways, concerns such as human rights become increasingly tied to issues involving land, space, and environmental justice.

Free as Air and Water poses these questions for our contemporary moment linking a broad set of issues such as public access to resources, political ecology, and governmentality within a group exhibition that features a diverse array of artistic operations and tactics. Featuring projects that are rigorous and poetic in its conceptual processes, the exhibition provides a needed density when one discusses the role of art in relation to ecology.

Free as Air and Water inaugurates the 41 Cooper Gallery's exhibition program to the public and is scheduled to open along with the New Academic Building in September 2009, which commemorates Cooper Union's 150th anniversary. The building designed by Thom Mayne and the architectural firm, Morphosis, inaugurates the first green academic laboratory building in NYC.

SYMPOSIA DETAILS
Free as Air and Water Symposium I: Artistic Responses to Self-Sustainability and Climate Change
Amy Balkin, Hans Haacke, Yates McKee, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrč, moderated by Doug Ashford

Wednesday, September 16, 5- 7 pm (before the reception)
The Cooper Union, Great Hall, 7 East 7th Street

Free as Air and Water Symposium II: Art in relation to Human Rights and the Freedom of Expression
Doug Ashford, Andrea Geyer, Paul Ramirez Jonas, among others

Monday, October 12, 2009, 7 to 9 pm
The Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Square

A catalog will be produced documenting the symposia and exhibition and will be available to purchase after the exhibition. Please contact the Cooper Union School of Art or check the website for additional information.

This project was funded in part by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and Duggal Visual Solutions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: 212.353.4200, www.cooper.edu, artschool@cooper.edu

41 Cooper Gallery
The Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square (lower level)
New York, NY 10003-7120
Phone: 212-353-4200
Email: artschool@cooper.edu
Web: http://www.cooper.edu/art/exhibitions.html

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6 p.m. (Mondays by appointment only)

Opening Night: Tuesday May 26, 5 – 9 PM
Foundation Building
Exhibition Hours:
Monday through Friday 11 AM – 7 PM
Saturday 12 – 5 PM; Closed Sundays
Free and open to the Public

Pablo Helguera, Committed Explanations in Geography
January 27 - February 21, 2009
Opening Reception: Tuesday, January 27, 6 - 8 pm
Houghton Gallery

Pablo Helguera's solo exhibition presents a timely selection of artworks produced between 2002 and 2009. Shown together for the first time, his projects highlight under-recognized historic and contemporary movements and communities embedded within the cultural landscape of the Americas. Helguera's geographic scope is both far-reaching and specific, touching on the everyday life and heritage of places like Anchorage, Alaska; Puebla, Mexico; Tierra del Fuego, Argentina and Albany, New York, to name a few.
Helguera's historical, cultural, and geographic explorations materialize as an artistic form of cultural preservation that archives seemingly obscure ethnographic material, both real and re-imagined. A number of works in the exhibition — Chipilo (2008), Marie Smith Jones (2008), Conservatory of Dead Languages (2004 - the present) and Past and Future (2007) — address linguistic slips and losses taking place in North and South America. Other projects revisit the faith and traditions of the Shakers, John Pershing's failed expedition through the Mexican Desert in 1916 in search of Pancho Villa, and the notion of Manifest Destiny, interpreted by Helguera as "history as a territory that is conquered and owned." The breadth of the subject matter and geography addressed within Committed Explanations in Geography serves to constructively complicate our understanding of American identity, past, present and future, at the start of a new era of politics in America.

Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache
By Lene Berg
October and November 2008
Houghton Gallery and Foundation building façade

In the fall of 2008, The Cooper Union School of Art presented a solo exhibition Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache by Norwegian artist Lene Berg. The Houghton Gallery featured two videos and two book projects, and on the façade of the Foundation building were three banners of Joseph Stalin, Pablo Picasso and the largest of Lene Berg holding a up the 1953 portrait of Stalin by Picasso. This public installation was immediately met with intense anger on the part of the neighboring Ukrainian community due to their history of genocide under Stalin in the 1930s. Because the Cooper Union School of Art did not obtain the proper permits from the Department of Buildings, the banners were taken down within a week of their installation. Without the banners, Lene Berg asserted that the project had lost its initial intention and the artist insisted that the entire exhibition be closed.
During three weeks following the removal of the banners and closure of the exhibition, Lene Berg activated the content of the exhibition through dialog in the press and web blogs. The discussions focused on the issues of freedom of expression and the regulations of the City of New York's Department of Buildings.

  Fluids Happening
Presented by the Cooper Union School of Art and >Performa 07
November 10, 2007

FLUIDS, a happening by Allan Kaprow was reinvented by Adjunct Professor Zach Rockhill and students of The Cooper Union School of Art in front of the Foundation Building. During one day, one rectangular enclosure of ice blocks measuring 30 feet long, 10 feet wide and 8 feet high was built. The unbroken walls were left to melt over several days.

Alphabet: An Exhibition of Hand-Drawn Lettering and Experimental Typography
October 11-27, 2007
Houghton Gallery

Hosted by the Lubalin Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union, the traveling exhibition featured the work of 51 artists and designers and their inventive ways to interpret the alphabet. Ranging from graceful to witty and subversive. Artists in North America, Europe and Asia created the sixty-three alphabets featured in Alphabet.

What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery
A Knock at the Door
Presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
Great Hall Gallery
September 8th - October 1st, 2005
Panel discussion September 30th, 2005

Over three days of roundtable discussions, performances, films, and art installations in all media, Cities, Art and Recovery considered how people remember and rebuild after tragedy and how the arts have been crucial to such recovery. The exhibition component, A Knock at the Door was held in the Cooper Union Great Hall Gallery and The Melville Gallery in the South Street Seaport Museum.

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." Where is the line between art and "un- American" activity? When is it art? And when is it dangerous?
The A Knock at the Door exhibition challenged the assumption that there is a clear line defining so-called "threatening" or "Un-American" art and activity, and that all art is an expression of the most basic foundation of a democratic society — the free expression and exchange of ideas.

Artists: Carlos Andrade & Todd Ayoung; Doug Ashford; Autonomedia; Al Brandtner; Lisa Charde; Keith Christensen; Jim Costanzo; Critical Art Ensemble; Daedalus; Kouross Esmaeli; Nicolas Dumit Estevez; Benj Gerdes; Day Gleeson; Grace Graupe-Pillard; Anthony Graves; Gregory Green; Group Material Archive; Hackett; Kathy High; Hiroyuki; Christina Nguyen Hung; Jason Lahr; Lou Laurita; John Leanos; James Leary; Ligorano/Reese; Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry; James Mead; Saul Melman & Ani Weinstein; Arnold Mesches; Neistat Brothers; Barbara Nitke; Jenny Polak; Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer); Walid Raad; Red76; Duke Riley; Miguelangel Ruiz; Christy Rupp; Tom Sachs; Jayce Salloum; Julia Scher; Dread Scott; Gregory Sholette; Shelly Silver; Camilla Storm; Surveillance Camera Players; Ken Tam; Miyuki Tsushima; Ultra Violet; U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force; VISIBLE Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen; Paulina Von Ahlstrom; Naomi White; Christopher Wool.
Panel Discussion with Gregory Green, Barbara Nitke, Naeem Mohaimen, Siva Vaidhyanathan and moderator, Andras Szanto
Curated by Seth Cameron (A'04), Creative Director, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.