Talk begins at 7:15pm.

Art historian Rhea Anastas introduces the methodologies and projects undertaken by Orchard, an artist-run space in New York that was conceived in 2004 and active until 2008. At the invitation of Anastas, the talk will be presented as a dialogue with Robert Snowden, curator at Yale Union, a center for contemporary art in Portland that was also founded by artists.

Orchard was an experimental gallery in the Lower East Side cofounded by Rhea Anastas, Moyra Davey, Andrea Fraser, Nicolàs Guagnini, Gareth James, Christian Phillip Müller, Jeff Preiss, R. H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, Jason Simon, and John Yancy Jr. One further member elected to remain anonymous.

The gallery project was, in the words of Schneider and Guagnini, “a means of production in which younger artists can assert their genealogies and benefit from explicit endorsements, hence generating a system of public legitimation not necessarily regulated by sales; a place where art history is read and reconstructed without institutional agendas and constraints, to enable us and others to see, and see ourselves and themselves seeing; a space in which discursive and curatorial coordinates are exclusively geared to the desires and politics of the producers and their created, found, or preexisting audiences”.

This is the eighth event in our year-long season about and around the work of Andrea Fraser. http://wattis.org/view?id=292

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
360 Kansas Street San Francisco
www.wattis.org