About
among friends
2009 Mellon Symposium
Coordinated by John Muse, 2007-09 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow
Hurford Humanities Center, Haverford College
Monday March 23rd – Thursday, March 26th, 2009
The 2009 Hurford Humanities Center Mellon Symposium among friends presents a series of four simultaneous, collaborative workshops that team contemporary artists with Haverford students and interested members of the community. Each workshop will produce an installation, a performance, or some work of art, however ephemeral.
The visiting artists—William Pope.L, Nao Bustamante, Jennifer Delos Reyes, and Harrell Fletcher—sometimes make things, but they always make things public. Pope.L and Bustamante have been called performance artists; Fletcher and Delos Reyes, social practice artists. All four take as their medium the relation between artist and audience.
The symposium invites these visiting artists together to practice their craft among friends—students, faculty, staff, and local and not so local neighbors. They will thus seek to orient their work and their collaborators to politesse and kindness on the one hand, and the impolitic, the rude, the ill-mannered on the other.
Two talks bookend the collaborative projects: an initial presentation by Pope.L, Bustamante, Delos Reyes, and Fletcher will introduce the campus to the artists’ work, while a concluding round-table discussion will allow the artists and participating students the chance to talk about their work together, publicly debrief, and present visual documentation of their pieces
