Deitch Projects Redeems Your Faith
By
June 23, 2009
The installation of PIG. Courtesy of Deitch Projects
Sunday school was never supposed to be fun, but if it included zine making and chats with trail-blazing punks, many deserters may have stuck through their religious training. Deitch Projects, which uses its quirky star power to turn art into a group activity (Last winter’s Be Kind Rewind show at the Wooster St. location hosted director Michel Gondry’s work and allowed visitors to create DIY, on the spot videos), has decided Sunday school needs a revamp, with a little less God and a little more new-wave visionary Alan Vega. Maybe they know something we don’t?
At its newest studio, Deitch’s third space, in Long Island City, the gallery has released a summer program that should appeal to any New Yorker, regardless of spiritual upbringing. In conjunction with the irreverent PIG exhibit—a colorful, jumbled group of works featuring such diverse artists like Jeff Koons and Paul Chan—The Summer Sunday School is opened to the public and geared towards lectures and demonstrations. “Though the PIG group show is curated by the (collective) Gelitin and (installation artist) Paola Pivi, all of the participants were invited to be a part of the process,” says director Andrea Cashman. “We thought it would be wonderful to continue this emphasis on community summer long, with artists, musicians and critics starting their own New York-centric ‘Sunday School.'”
The programming is varied and timely, ranging from more formal lectures to hands-on lessons. Dan Graham, whose retrospective mounts at the Whitney in June, will give a chat, while punk legend Alan Vega talks Suicide and art in a Q&A format. Sticking with the communal credo, Paper Rad’s Ben Jones and Dan Nadel, art director of the Brooklyn art and comics publisher PictureBox, will lead a zine-making workshop to close the summer on August 9.
“The point is pretty laid back,” Cashman says. “Just great artists coming into the space and talking about what interests them.” And, unlike traditional Sunday school, the audience might actually want to listen.
See here for a complete listing of Sunday School programming.
