"I Want a President…” workshop

A public art project as a collective act of political imagination.

What do you want in a president? What experiences should be reflected? What do you wish to see in government that seems impossible from where we stand now? Visual AIDS hosted the New York workshop for "I Want A President...", an evening co-facilitated by Saisha Grayson and Avram Finkelstein in which we invited the public to join in a writing workshop to adapt, update and engage with a 1992 text by artist and activist Zoe Leonard listing demands for a new U.S. president, originally written in response to the AIDS crisis and identity politics.

The adapted texts from a series of workshops in fall 2016, including this New York City workshop, were archived online and culminated in a public collective reading on October 16 in front of the White House. Carrying forward an initiative started by four Swedish artists in 2010, the DC iteration is being produced by curators Natalie Campbell & Saisha Grayson, in collaboration with Furthermore, Creative Time Summit, Visual AIDS, and a growing list of community partners.

For more information visit: https://www.facebook.com/iwantapresidentdc/

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP FACILITATORS

Avram Finkelstein is one of the founding members of the Silence=Death collective and the art collective, Gran Fury, with whom he collaborated on public art commissions for institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Venice Biennale, and The New Museum. He has just completed a book and is one of the artists featured in the upcoming "Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project" for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Saisha Grayson is a curator, writer, art historian and teacher focused on the intersections of contemporary art, feminist politics, and cultural activism. As Assistant Curator at the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, she organized and helped realize numerous exhibitions and public programs, and is now finishing her dissertation at the Graduate Center, CUNY as a Smithsonian American Art Museum Predoctoral Fellow.