August 8, 2024
Doors at 5:30 pm. Artist talk at 6 pm.
474 Broadway, Kingston, NY
On Thursday, August 8, we welcome Alice Proujansky and Catherine Taylor to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Proujansky and Taylor will discuss work and process; family, archive and activism, and layered narratives. They will also talk about Proujansky’s Hard Times are Fighting Times and the role of books in the circulation of ideas.
Most families don’t have their parents’ FBI files in dusty boxes. Alice Proujansky’s does. Hard Times are Fighting Times describes the legacy of Proujansky’s parents’ participation in radical leftist groups like Weatherman, the Native American Solidarity Committee and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee that sought to overthrow imperialism and capitalism through organizing and revolution. Proujansky photographed her parents’ propaganda archive, surveillance records, family snapshots and current lives, describing their activism, and subsequent turn toward family life, from an intimate distance. Alice will have copies of her book Hard Times are Fighting Times for sale during the event. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube Page at 6 pm.
Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.
Alice Proujansky is a photographer and quilter looking at family labor: birth, work, motherhood and identity. Her photobook, Hard Times are Fighting Times (Gnomic Book, 2023), uses archival and documentary photography to examine the legacy of radical activism in her family. It was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award 2024, and selected for an exhibition at Baxter St.
Alice’s work has been published by Aperture, The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review and others. She has received support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, International Women’s Media Fund, Magnum Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Peleh Fund, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Women Photograph.
Alice has led workshops for Aperture, the Bass Museum, Fotografiska, the Magnum Foundation and Working Assumptions. She is Aperture’s teaching artist, and her book Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids was published by Aperture in 2016. A member of Women Photograph, Alice grew up in Greenfield, MA. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Catherine Taylor is the author of Image Text Music, a collection of essays on visual culture; You, Me, and the Violence; and Apart, a mixed-genre memoir and political history that combines prose, poetry, cultural theory, and found texts from South African archives. Her first book, Giving Birth: A Journey Into the World of Mothers and Midwives (Penguin Putnam), won the Lamaze International Birth Advocate Award. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in the Seneca Review, The Colorado Review, Witness, The Believer, and elsewhere, and she is a founding editor of Essay Press, an independent press dedicated to publishing innovative essays in book form. Taylor was a cofounder and producer of The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and she has received residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, the Millay Colony, and others. Taylor received her Ph.D. from Duke University. Taylor is a founding codirector of the Image Text M.F.A. and ITI Press.
Banner image © Alice Proujansky.