DIY at Bard Graduate Center is a public festival that explores different approaches to making. DIY@BGC gathers together thinkers, curators, and artists to reflect on their own immersive approaches to creating scholarship, writing, visual art, and choreography. This interdisciplinary event takes inspiration from our current exhibitions, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles and The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity, in which each curator’s research explores craft processes as experiential and devotional acts.
Full Festival Schedule:
Monday, May 7
6:30 pm
Creativity, Choreography, and Embodied Knowledge
Timothy Ingold and Stephen Petronio in conversation
Moderated by Dean Peter N. Miller
Thursday, May 10
6:30 pm
Resistance, Power, and Transformation
Tanya Aguiñiga and Sheila Pepe in conversation
Moderated by Elissa Auther
Friday, May 11
6:30 pm
Some Methodologies of Making
Thomas Thwaites, Janine di Giovanni, and Nomi Stone in conversation
Saturday, May 12
2–4 pm
Biocentric Interconnectedness: We All Contribute to the Web
A participatory performance in with artist-in-residence Neil Goss
Drop in any point and stay as long as you like
This performance concludes Goss’s month-long residency at Bard Graduate Center in the Textile Arts Center Makerspace. Throughout his time at Bard Graduate Center, Goss has lead visitors through open studio workshops in backstrap weaving in order to build an installation that accumulates over time. The materials and processes used to create the installation (hemp yarn, wool yarn, natural dyes, weaving, etc.) serve to strengthen the concept of interconnectedness. This participatory performance will engage gallery-goers in the finalized installation. The performance attempts to visually and physically capture the importance and impact of the energy that we all put into the interconnected web.
Neil Goss has dedicated the past 8 years to researching and experimenting with sustainable art materials and processes. He preserves technologies like backstrap weaving and natural dyeing to create contemporary works of art. Subversion plays an important role in his practice while focusing on contradiction, duality, biocentrism and interconnectedness. In 2012 he received two BFA’s in Design (Textiles and Ceramics) from the University of Kansas SOTA.
