Projection from Karen Finley’s Grabbing Pussy/Parts Known presented at ISSUE Project Room in 2018. Photo by Cameron Kelly McLeod.
The ISSUE Project Room 2022 Gala will celebrate renowned performance artist and APP Professor Karen Finley. This event runs concurrently with the free, online presentation of Karen's 2018 Grabbing Pussy/Parts Known performance at ISSUE.
This year’s Gala celebrates Karen Finley, an artist and teacher whose performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism and examinations into the nature of live art, media, politics, and censorship. Taking up provocation as a form of public conversation, Finley has continuously pointed a lens at the ongoing disenfranchisement of artists and underrepresented voices—inviting further discourse around the complex issues of our time.
Karen Finley is an artist, performer, and author. She is an interdisciplinary artist working in sound, music, poetics, film and video, installation, public and social practice art. Born in Chicago, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her raw and transgressive performances have brought debate and controversy. Finley was the named plaintiff for the Supreme Court case Finley v. NEA that challenged the decency provision in government grants to artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. Her performances and visual art have been presented internationally such as in The Barbican in London, Lincoln Center, New York City, the Bobino in Paris, amongst others. Finley is interested in freedom of expression concerns, social justice, visual culture, art education, metaphysics and lectures, and gives workshops widely. Her most recent work is a collaborative participatory walk Invocation: Retracing Seneca Village with Kimiyo Bremer; and, a new performance COVID Anxiety Vortex Opera Kaleidoscope Kitty Disco. She is the author of nine books, including her latest, Grabbing Pussy (OR Books 2018) and the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment by City Lights. A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is an arts professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University. Karen Finley has performed at ISSUE Project on a number of occasions and is a member of the organization’s Artistic Advisory Council.
ISSUE plays a vital role in NYC’s cultural ecology, facilitating the commission and premiere of new works and presenting a diverse array of artists working across sound, movement, film, performance and literature. Programming aims to bring recognition to artists whose important contributions fall beyond infrastructural boundaries of discipline or genre, elude audience expectations, or are otherwise underrepresented as a result of bias within the fields of art and performance, and broader histories of social and economic participation. Through the cultivation of innovative new work, ISSUE performs an essential research and development function that fosters a dynamic influx of ideas into the local, national, and international creative landscape.