Youthful Fruits

300 Route 42, Shandaken, NY

June 8 to 15, 2014

Shandaken Projects' Youthful Fruits, a week-long, retreat-style conference, investigated how the principals of queer theory can inform contemporary artists and art institutions. Our participants gathered in the early summer in a think-tank environment on our residency grounds. We were pleased to work with:

• Chris Bogia, visual artist and co-founder and director of Fire Island Artist Residency
• Katherine Brewer Ball, curator, writer, and performance studies scholar
• Zanna Gilbert, postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Modern Art
• Jonah Groeneboer, visual artist
• Gordon Hall, visual artist and founding director of the Center for Experimental Lectures,
• Sara Magenheimer, visual artist
• Ethan Philbrick, writer, performer, and doctoral candidate at NYU
• Christopher Stiegler, curator, writer, and founding director of the Institute for American Art.

This program was guided by the question: How can artists or organizations maintain continuously contingent subject-positions while producing culture in our current historical moment? Four participants—Brewer Ball, Magenheimer, Philbrick, and Shandaken Projects' own Nicholas Weist—were present for each conversation, and the remaining participants were responsible for leading one discussion each. They were also offered the chance to join the other conversations. Each conversation was held over dinner, over the course of a single week on Shandaken's residency grounds.