In Conversation: Sue Murad and Shana Dumont Garr

Tuesday, November 18 from 6:30 – 7:30pm, 6pm doors open

Artist Sue Murad shares about her ASSEMBLE walking tour with Curator Shana Dumont Garr. Based in the Boston Common, Murad’s part of the Hidden Histories walking tour is inspired by the archival photos of people spending time together in the park from the nineteenth century to the present. Murad created a series of prompts to celebrate the right to peacefully assemble and create a temporal micro-culture for each group during the tour.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Shana Dumont Garr is a contemporary art curator, writer, and educator based in Greater Boston. She is a curator at Emerson Contemporary and a professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College. She is also curating the independent project NO SLEEPING, a nomadic, participatory series of performances by Sue Murad and Deb Todd Wheeler at select historic houses in Massachusetts. Garr is a doctoral student at the Institute of Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She earned her MA in Art History from Boston University and her BA in Creative Writing and Art from Colby College in Waterville, ME.

Sue Murad responds to culture through an intuitive, sensory engagement with everyday objects, often in the public or private places they inhabit. Through a combination of attention, study, and play, she may alter, arrange, and choreograph a subject, or set up situations where change and chance happen without direct contact, such as a subject melting, falling, or sliding. She is drawn to both semblance and difference, and the strange and surreal synthesis that can occur with comparison and contrast. Disregarding notions of usefulness, common meaning, and prescribed narratives, these formal and philosophical explorations feed her interdisciplinary practice of performance, installation, sculpture, collage, and film.