Tuesday, April 8, 2025
6:30PM
Kelly Skylight Room 9100
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
The persistence of the idea of the commons is expressed as action in the transnational urban squatting movement, and in the many occupations impulsed by social movements. Alan W. Moore joins Greg Sholette and Ashley Dawson for a discussion of his work on “occupation culture.” This conversation is on the occasion of the “ABC No Rio at 45 Years” exhibition at Emily Harvey Foundation, NYC, April 2025.
Alan W. Moore worked as a critic, artist and organizer in NYC for 30 years. He was a member of the artists’ group Colab, and co-directed ABC No Rio and the MWF Video Club. He took a PhD in Art History from CUNY in 2000, and published Art Gangs in 2011. He began to study squatting in Europe in 2009, publishing the zine “House Magic” (2009–16), co-edited Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces, and wrote Occupation Culture (both 2015). In 2022 he published Art Worker, a memoir. He lives in Madrid, and blogs at “Occupations & Properties” and “Art Gangs.”
Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Recently published books of his include Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024–25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist, and scholar of social art theory and history, as well as a co-founder of the art collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980–88), REPOhistory (1989–2000), and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010–present). Sholette’s books include The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, and Delirium and Resistance: Art Activism and the Crisis of Capitalism. He is a co-director with Chloë Bass of Social Practice City University of New York (SPCUNY) and Affiliated Doctoral Faculty Professor with the Earth and Environmental Sciences Geography Program at the CUNY Graduate Center.
This event is organized by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and Social Practice at CUNY. It is Free and Open to the Public.
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