ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Wednesday, September 23rd at 8pm, ISSUE presents an evening of performance and conversation in partnership with Franklin Furnace as part of their 50th anniversary commemoration and November release of Back to the Present: 50 Years of Free Expression with Franklin Furnace, edited by founder and pioneering artist, Martha Wilson. Held at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater during the 2026 Brooklyn Book Festival, the program reflects the two organizations’ commitments to experimental practice and freedom of expression, while celebrating their respective anniversary seasons.
Founded by Wilson in 1976, Franklin Furnace has spent five decades championing cutting-edge performance art, avant-garde art practitioners, and their publications. Back to the Present — published by Princeton Architectural Press — traces that history through rare archival materials, artist writings, and reflections on censorship, free speech, and artistic freedom. Both an archive and a call to action, Back to the Present documents how artists challenged institutional norms, and is a reminder that the struggle for creative freedom is far from over.
The evening extends that dialogue into the present, and features a new collaborative performance by Jean Carla Rodea (2023 ISSUE AIR) and 2020 Franklin Furnace FUND alumn Arantxa Araujo, alongside a conversation between Wilson and “mediamystic maverick” Bradley Eros (1993 Franklin Furnace FUND alumn & 2007 ISSUE AIR) reflecting on live art and alternative cultural spaces across fifty years of interdisciplinary practice.
Arantxa Araujo is a Mexican artist with a background in neuroscience. Her work is essentially multidisciplinary, feminist, meditative and rooted in bio-behavioral research and technology. Her work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, at the Radical Women Latin American Art Exhibit, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Grace Exhibition Space, The Queens Museum (NYC); RAW and Satellite Art Fair (Miami); Illuminus Festival (Boston), and SPACE Gallery (Pittsburgh); ExTeresaArte Actual Museum, and La Explanada del MUAC (Mexico); and Nuit Blanche Festival (Canada). Araujo is a Franklin Furnace FUND awardee, BAC and LMCC grantee and has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship, Creative Capital taller, ITP Camp and EMERGENYC (flagship program 2017). Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT. She holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in Theater Studies from Emerson College.
Bradley Eros is an experimental film director, actor, curator, poet, and performance artist who also makes Musique concrète sound collages, music videos, photographs, live projection performances, works on paper and art objects. His work has been presented in multiple screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and is in the permanent collection of the museum. He has also created dozens of zines, posters, soundtracks and unique artist’s books. He is represented by Microscope Gallery in New York City and is known for his work in the field of contracted cinema.
Jean Carla Rodea (b in Mexico City) is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and educator currently living between Brooklyn, NY and San Francisco, CA. Her/their work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, poetry, vocal performance and performance art, photography, video, movement, and sculpture. Her artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where problematic socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multimedia installations and performance.
Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past five decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances as political personae. In 1976 she founded, and as Founding Director Emerita, continues to help direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, online and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.
