on the road : free advice
Sur Rodney Sur performs. Free Advice, a real-time collaboration with Hope Sandrow
Whether expected or not, it's always encouraging to find and receive free advice on the road.
Sur Rodney (Sur), July 6, 2008
Performance Concept and Live Performance: Sur Rodney Sur
Project Concept, Set, Live Performance Director, Camera (Digital Stills and Video) Film concept and edit: Hope Sandrow
Digital Audio: Ulf Skogsbergh
This performance was reprised for Hope Sandrow’s exhibition: Genius Loci at the Parrish Art Museum’s inaugural exhibition launch of their Platform Series.
Free Advice was also performed and the video shown in the traveling exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art; Hope Sandrow’s Genius Loci (Parrish Art Museum), and Summer of Love, Found & Lost (Artsites). The performance is also profiled on Hauser and Wirth Institute’s website.
About the Artists
Enigmatically recognized as an artistic collaborator, poet, eccentric, curator, and community archivist — Sur is well known for his former position as co-director of the Gracie Mansion Gallery from 1983 to 1988 where Sandrow was represented. During the early to mid-1990s he served as a curator and archivist at Kenkeleba House, a Lower Manhattan African-American art institution, and was hired to archive the New School University’s art collection.
His work with artists’ estates, at cause to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, led him to serve on the board of Visual AIDS, beginning in 1994, and helped establish the Frank Moore Archive Project a support for artists with HIV/AIDS, and their estates. After using the archive to co-curate the exhibitions AIDS/Communities Arts Communities: Realizing the Archive Project at the Cyclorama in Boston (1995) and The Living Testament of the Blood Fairies at Artist’s Space and Printed Matter at DIA (1996), the Frank Moore Archive has provided an invaluable resource for curators and publishing projects while producing a monthly on-line web gallery by invited curators internationally.
Sur edited a collection of writings on his experiences with the New York art world that began in 1972 while continuing his work with artists and artist’s estates. He lives and works in Lower Manhattan and maintains respective residences in Montreal, and ( formerly) Cape Breton with his husband, and sometimes collaborator, Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks (1931-2018), who was responsible for announcing their wedding during a recreation of a Happening at a Judson Memorial Church celebrating their mutual artist friend, Al Hansen.
Sur, also archived a complete record of artworks produced by George Deem (1932-2007) for the Estate, to be launched on the web, and archived the records of African American conceptual artist, Lorraine O’Grady for the archives at Wellesley; archiving the work of his photographer father for the Special Collections at Concordia University; setting up the Cloudsmith Foundation and editing projects for Money for Food Press, an artists book project founded by Geoffrey Hendricks & Brian Buczak in 1976.
on the road events (chronological)