ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of Theodore Kerr as 2022 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Kerr will present THE BODY POPULAR, a curated series of gatherings and broadcasts, propelled by artists, podcasters, writers, and others in NYC across the U.S. invested in questions around power, community, knowledge, and consumption in the 21st century.
THE BODY POPULAR will explore these ideas through public events, publications, and social gatherings, using both online and offline formats. “The Body Popular” riffs on the phrase, “The Body Politic,” a notion that groups of people together have power, and a voice. Throughout the series, audiences, artists, and other collaborators are invited to consider the limits, possibilities, and responsibilities of the “popular.”
Kerr notes, “My main objective for the Curatorial Fellowship is to work within community structures to explore questions around how we make and share knowledge. I think we are at an inflection point where people may be losing faith in strangers, in the idea of collective action and global communities, and maybe even in popular or mass media. Yet, at the same time, we are aware that the only way we will survive is by working together. That means sharing ideas, listening, and even trusting one another. For as many reasons there are for despair, I think there are reasons to move forward, together, in action. The artists, podcasters, writers, and others that I will be working with offer a sense of hope and direction.”
The Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship supports emerging curators in realizing ambitious projects that will significantly transform their own artistic practice, move their work in new directions, and enable them to gain exposure to a broader audience. In its sixth year, ISSUE’s Curatorial Fellowship commissions emerging New York curators to organize challenging projects, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate innovative art within the local community. Theodore Kerr follows Sami Hopkins, ISSUE’s current 2021 Fellow, Leyya Tawill in 2020, Benedict Nguyen in 2019, Queer Trash in 2018, and DeForrest Brown Jr. in 2017.
Named for ISSUE’s visionary founder Suzanne Fiol, the program mentors a Curatorial Fellow by providing them with financial, technical and marketing support as they work to cultivate, incubate and present innovative music and performance projects.
The Curatorial Fellowship complements and builds upon ISSUE’s existing Artists-In-Residence Program (AIR). Both ISSUE’s AIR and Fellowship programs provide artists and curators with an opportunity to develop significant new works in partnership with ISSUE over the course of a year by offering a stipend as well as access to rehearsal space and facilities, equipment, documentation, pr/marketing, Curatorial mentorship and technical expertise.
Suzanne Fiol, who passed away in October, 2009, was an extraordinary spirit, a force of nature and a prominent figure in the visual and performing arts worlds. As both a visionary artist and the founder of ISSUE Project Room, she created one of New York City’s premiere destinations for experimental culture and avant-garde performing arts— a legacy that will resonate for decades to come.
Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer, organizer, and artist. With Alexandra Juhasz, he is co-author of the book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Cultural Times of AIDS (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Kerr curated the 2021 touring exhibition AIDS, Poster, and Stories of Public Health: A People’s Pandemic for the US’s National Libraries of Medicine. In 2020, he worked with the New York City AIDS Memorial as a creative consultant on HEAR ME, an audio installation at the memorial, that resulted in A Time To Listen, a multi part online conversation series. In 2016 / 2017 Kerr performed 10 interviews for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. In 2019, Kerr was the editor of an issue of On Curating entitled, What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill A Museum. Kerr is a founding member of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective. Their 2019 / 2020 exhibition, which Kerr co-curated, Metanoia: Transformation through AIDS Archives and Activism was on view in LA and New York, and is now online.The collective’s work has been featured in The Body, Art in America and POZ magazine.
