Sara Reisman at Stacion
26 June 2013, 20:00

Sara Reisman is a New York-based curator and, since 2008, the Director of New York City's Percent for Art Program where she commissions permanent public artworks for newly constructed and renovated city-owned spaces, indoors and out. Recently commissioned artists include Mary Mattingly, Duke Riley, Odili Donald Odita, Ester Partegas, Mary Temple, Julianne Swartz, Karyn Olivier, Xu Bing and Kanishka Raja, whose artworks will be permanently installed within public schools, streetscapes, libraries, plazas and parks.

As an independent curator, Reisman has organized more than fifty exhibitions and artist projects focused on the politics of public space, globalization and site-specificity, social practice, collaboration, sustainability, and cultural identity and transformation. She has curated exhibitions at venues including The Cooper Union School of Art, New York; Smack Mellon, New York; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Philadelphia ICA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Banjaluka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria, among others. 

Reisman has organized numerous solo projects, most recently Christopher K. Ho: Privileged White People (2013), Claudia Joskowicz: Sympathy for the Devil (2012), and Leslie Johnson: Days to Go (2012) (all for Forever & Today, Inc., where she was the 2012-2013 guest curator for Forever & Today. She was the 2011 critic-in-residence at Art Omi, an international visual artist residency in upstate New York.

At Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, Reisman will discuss her experiences of the differences between politically and socially engaged art, and art that is produced in a political system, specifically within the framework of New York City's Percent for Art program, one of the oldest and largest civic public art programs in the United States.

In her role as Director of Percent for Art, Reisman implements a local law that requires New York City government agencies to commission permanent works of art within publicly funded construction projects on city-owned properties. 

She will review how artists are commissioned, and how they collaborate with architects, engineers, and community representatives, with examples of artworks for public schools, plazas, cultural institutions, and other civic spaces. Reisman will also provide background to the program in the context of other public art initiatives in New York City, and will discuss some of her recent projects as an independent curator.