Panel discussion: OPEN BOOK(S)

Tuesday, April 1st at 6pm, please join us for a panel discussion among exhibiting artists from OPEN BOOK(S) exhibition: Ana Paula Cordeiro, Ann Messner, John O’Connor and Jean Wolff moderated by Philip Glahn.

The conversation will center around the book as a tool, as a device that allows its makers and users to produce and engage with knowledge and experience according to particular patterns and arrangements. To what extent do these tools mimic or challenge canonical ways and apparatuses of seeing and thinking, of recording and communicating? What are the given and latent histories of the book as both medium and as process that can open up potentially new and different ways of situating the self in the world?

 

About Philip Glahn:

Philip Glahn’s research and teaching focus on the histories, theories and practices of art as technology, labor and activism. His writings on the legacies of avant-garde strategies, the politics of drawing, digital media and new social formations, radio and the public sphere, as well as other topics have appeared in publications including Art Journal, Afterimage, The Brooklyn Rail, Parallax, Panorama and PUBLIC, as well as several anthologies.

His research has been supported by several grants including a Fulbright Fellowship and a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship for Critical Studies as part of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. Prior to his appointment at Tyler, he taught art history and criticism at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College and Hunter College, where at the latter he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. Glahn’s book addressing questions of socialism and technology, pedagogy and the utility in the work of Bertolt Brecht was published in 2014 by Reaktion Books. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award, given to the most distinguished contribution published in Art Journal during the previous year. His current research focuses on the relationship between art, communication technologies and concepts of utopia. His second book, The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (with Cary Levine), concerning one of the most significant telecommunications art collectives of the contemporary era (MIT Press, 2024) received the 2025 Frank Jewitt Mather Award.

PhD, Art History and Criticism, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2007
MS, History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture, Pratt Institute, New York, 1998
MA, Cultural Studies, Universität Lüneburg, Germany, 1997

 

About Ana Paula Cordeiro:

Ana Paula Cordeiro makes books by hand, photographs with film, prints from lead type, and writes either sparingly or profusely on unbound folios, which she then proceeds to bind into volumes. In 2018 she co-organized the multi-media installation Introspective Collective. In 2019 she contributed to a book publication about bookmaking called Bookforms. And in 2020 she was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and an Honorable Mention at the International Human Rights Arts Festival Creators of Justice Award for her essay Citizen.

Originally from Brazil, she is based in New York and does much of her work at Shoestring Press and The Center for Book Arts communal shops. Chronologically speaking, in the fall of 2020, she had an interview published by The Interior Beauty Salon; in the Summer of 2020, she was part of an online program in conversation with Merve Emre, hosted by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, and her work Body of Evidence was reviewed on Books on Books. In 2022 she recorded a podcast for Inwood Art Works On Air.

2023 was a year to wrap up a project as Artist Research Fellow at the Hispanic Society of America, with support from NYSCA, and gratefully enjoy the beauty and space of the Arts Center in Governor’s Island residency, with support from LMCC.

Ana is currently the Dean Scholar for the Arts in the graduate program at Gallatin School of Individualized Studies at NYU. In 2024, she had her first solo show in the US at the Gallatin Galleries, and she was awarded The Governor’s Medal of Arts and Culture during the Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations.

 

About Ann Messner:

Ann Messner is a trans-disciplinary artist.  Her work is a research based, often project focused, practice challenged by the more perplexing of dilemmas society finds itself in inner conflict over. Through processes of discernment, social constructions of reality are engaged and interrogated, as specific works develop. 

“The practice is an empathic response to unacceptable conditions. I respond to the fragile, tenuous, bonds that confirm our humanity. Thinking and acting in the world as an artist allows me to problem solve, to make peace on an emotional level, while at the same time intellectually recognizing space for imagination is closing in.” 

Ann is recipient of numerous fellowships inclusive of the National Endowment, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. She was fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (1999-2000) and senior fellow Princeton University Council on the Humanities (2001-2). She has been tenured Professor of MFA Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute.

 

About John O’Connor:

John J. O’Connor was born in Westfield, MA and received an MFA in painting and an MS in Art History and Criticism from Pratt Institute in 2000.  John was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. He attended MacDowell, Skowhegan, the Vermont Studio Center, the Celia & Wally Gilbert Artist-in-Residence Program, and will be a resident artist at Civitai AI in 2025. John was a recipient of 2 New York Foundation for the Arts Grants – one in painting and another in drawing – the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio residency.

John has been in numerous exhibitions abroad, including The Lab (Ireland), Martin Asbaek Gallery (Denmark), Neue Berliner Raume (Germany), Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels), the Louhu District Art Museum (Shenzhen, China), TW Fine Art (Australia); and in the US at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Weatherspoon Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore, the Wellin Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Tang Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, the Village Voice, Art Papers, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America, among others.

John presented his work in discussion with Fred Tomaselli at The New Museum, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Weatherspoon Museum, Hood Museum, Southern Methodist University, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. A catalogue spanning 10 years of John’s work was published with essays by Robert Storr, John Yau, and Rick Moody. He teaches and co-chairs the Visual Arts program at Sarah Lawrence College. John is also a member of the experimental art and technology collective NonCoreProjector.

 

About Jean Wolff:

Jean Wolff’s work explores the creation of subtle order through the use of strong patterns, grids and geometries, creating a unique visual language through an ongoing process of exploration and experimentation. The work is built on an evolving set of interrelations, rather than just a system of theme and variations. Each work embodies the integration of the processes acquired through these formal investigations.  Working in various media, along with an interest in surface, scale and an evolving color palette there exists a conversation between these ideas and the abstract works that she creates.

Wolff received her MFA from Hunter College and has exhibited in New York, Mexico City and Amsterdam.  She is part of the Westbeth Artist Community in Manhattan. Her workspace studio is located in Mana Contemporary Arts Center.