In response to Franklin D.Roosevelt’s iconic 1941 State of the Union Address—popularly known as his “Four Freedoms” address—artists, writers, and political thinkers offer reflections on the state of our union, and our freedoms, in 2019. During the final 30 minutes of the program, we transform the space into an open mic, and audience members are invited to offer their own performative responses to the Four Freedoms.

Participating artists include Dread Scott, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, Maya Binyam, Ken Chen, Avram Finkelstein, Katie Pearl, Michele Pred, Amy Khoshbin, Sonia Guiñansaca, Melanie Crean, and Demian DinéYazhi.

This is a free event, but please register in advance. ICP Members have access to preferred seating in our reserved members’ section.

This program is held in conjunction with For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here?, on view starting February 8. Our ICP Museum–public program combination ticket grants $10 entry to the galleries starting at 4:30 PM to those attending the program. Tickets are only available online when you register for the program.

Read our public program attendance policies.

Bios

Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary visual artist. For three decades his work has encouraged viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed one of his artworks and former president George Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, BAM (Brooklyn), and galleries and street corners across the country an internationally.  He is a 2018 United States Artists fellow, a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation grant, and his work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are multidisciplinary artists whose projects and research investigate contemporary music and sound, the electromagnetic spectrum, dissent, and public fora. Nevarez and Tevere have exhibited and screened their work internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, and the New Museum, New York; Manifesta 8, Spain; Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico; Casino Luxembourg, LU; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden/Oslo, Norway, and elsewhere. The first US survey of their work was exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2016. Tevere is Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Nevarez is a musician, and faculty at Parsons School of Design and the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Maya Binyam is a senior editor of Triple Canopy, an editor of the New Inquiry, and a lecturer in the New School’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program. She is the co-creator of Bail Bloc, a desktop application that mines cryptocurrency to pay bail for people in pretrial incarceration. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the Paris Review, SSENSE, Real Life, and elsewhere.

Ken Chen is a poet and attorney. His debut collection of poetry, Juvenilia (2010), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Chen’s poetry and nonfiction essays have appeared in journals such as Fence, Boston Review, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City, where he directs the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and founded CultureStrike, a national organization seeking to bring artists into the migrant justice movement.

Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for the University of California Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, was nominated for a 2018 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction.

Katie Pearl is a playwright, director, and performer. She is co-artistic director of the Obie Award–winning interdisciplinary performance company PearlDamour. For twenty years PearlDamour has pushed the boundaries of contemporary theater with projects such as How to Build a Forest, an eight-hour performance installation responding to Hurricane Katrina and losses around the BP Oil Spill; Milton, created with and performed in small towns named “Milton” across the US; and Ocean Filibuster, an epic solo performance commissioned by the American Repertory Theatre and the Harvard University Center for the Environment (currently in development). Pearl is the recipient of four Map Fund, two NEA, and a Creative Capital Award. She was the 2017 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton and a visiting lecturer of Socially Engaged Art at Harvard. She is a producer of The Rest I Make Up, a documentary on playwright Maria Irene Fornes, which premiered at MoMA.

Michele Pred is a Swedish-American conceptual artist whose practice includes, sculpture, assemblage, and performance. Her work uncovers the cultural and political meaning behind everyday objects with a particular focus on themes like equal pay, reproductive rights and personal security. She organized the Parade Against Patriarchy during Miami Art week in 2017 and the We Vote Parade in NYC 2018. Pred is a founding member of the artist collective For Freedoms. Recent exhibitions include her solo show Vote Feminist at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery and group shows For Freedoms at Jack Shainman Gallery and The Future is Female at the 21C Museum.

Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American, New York-based, artist, rapper, and politician. Her practice advocates for changing commercial culture through co-opting and using popular media genres to create connections and catharsis. She has shown at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, the High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, VOLTA Art Fair, PULSE Art Fair, Leila Heller Gallery, Mana Contemporary, National Sawdust, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She has received residencies at spaces such as the Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts. She is a 2017 Franklin Furnace recipient and has received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant.

Sonia Guiñansaca is an internationally acclaimed queer migrant poet, cultural organizer and activist from Harlem by way of Ecuador. Guiñansaca, a VONA/Voices and BOOAT Alumni, has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Highline, Joe Pubs, El Museo Del Barrio, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Lehmann Maupin Gallery and featured on NBC, PBS, Latina Magazine, Pen American, the Poetry Foundation, and UK’s Diva Magazine to name a few. They have emerged as a national leader in the undocumented/migrant artistic and political communities. They were named as one of ten Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know by Remezcla, and are now leading cultural equity work as the managing director at CultureStrike.

Melanie Crean is an artist, educator, and filmmaker whose work explores how representations of power can be equitably shifted in media, culture, and technology. She is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design, teaching courses on emerging media, social engagement, and visual culture. Previous work includes directing Eyebeam’s production studio; managing animation teams at MTV’s Digital Television Lab; and producing documentaries in Nepal on the effects of women trafficking. Crean has received fellowships, residencies, and commissions from A Blade of Grass, Art in General, Creative Capital, Franklin Furnace, the Jerome Foundation, No Longer Empty, and Rhizome.

Demian DinéYazhi´ is an Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Through research, mining community archives, and social collaboration and activism, DinéYazhi´ highlights the intersections of Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist identity and political ideology while challenging the white noise of the contemporary art movement. They have recently exhibited at Whitney Museum of American Art, Henry Art Gallery, Pioneer Works, CANADA, and Cooley Gallery. DinéYazhi´ is the founder of the Indigenous artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. They are the recipient of the Henry Art Museum’s Brink Award, Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts, and Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow.