Project Third 2025-Present

Visiting Associate Professor Alex Strada speaks with Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow, Kamau Amu Patton, an intermedia artist whose practice engages history and culture through archives, documents, stories, sound, and sites. Drawing on improvisation, experimentation, and processes of listening, his practice considers how artistic encounters can generate new forms of attention, connection, and collective experience.

Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Patton’s work engages archives, documents, networks and sites. Patton’s practice is a charting of language, movement, thought, speech and actions, which aims to develop structures to archive histories of community building through an investigation of stories and strategies of placemaking. Patton’s project, Afterlife Geographies, documents “way of life” practices in relation to processes of settlement and the development of sites through which communities articulate worldview, synthesize experience, and establish infrastructures of empowerment and remembrance. In September 2017, Patton installed an iteration of his ongoing project, Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public. Patton is a 2020 Creative Capital Grant Awardee. In 2020 Patton was an artist in residence at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles and he was a 2020 Archive Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection, Patton created The Past & Other Dreams, a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Paton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps Recitals, Second Mind | Alto Age, was released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021. In 2022 Patton performed new sound compositions at Roulette Intermedium and Basilica Arts in Hudson New York. In October of 2022, Patton presented a solo exhibition at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University. In June 2023 Patton presented a new inter-media performance, Dromeostasis as part of the Signals exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 2024 Patton performed new sound compositions as part of the exhibition Flight Into Egypt, Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876- Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Alex Strada is a multimedia artist and educator based in New York City whose work spans installation, film/video, sound and orality, printed media, participatory workshops, and public practice. Through a research-based approach grounded in transdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement, her projects reimagine systems of power and create platforms for collectivity, civic agency, and political transformation. Since 2022, she has served as the Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Her work has been shown internationally including at the Queens Museum, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Aurora Biennial, Dallas, TX; Times Square Arts, NY; Anthology Film Archives, NY; UnionDocs, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Museum of Moving Image, NY; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Italy; Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico; Listasafn Árnesinga Museum, Iceland; and MuseumsQuartier, Vienna. Strada’s projects have been featured in the New Yorker, BOMB, New York Times, Hyperallergic, Montez Press Radio, New York Magazine, and WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Her work has been supported through artist residencies at Artist Alliance Inc., Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Triangle Arts Association, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and through grants/fellowships from the Graham Foundation, Artadia, NYFA, NYSCA, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. 

Strada holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and is a studio alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She has taught at RISD, Tyler School of Art at Temple University, The Cooper Union, Columbia University, and in K-12 public schools throughout NYC with Studio in a School. She was the 2024-26 Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow and is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. 

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo—also known in the art world as Puppies Puppies— is an artist who moves fluidly across performance, sculpture, installation, and community activism.

Jade’s work questions notions of what is and isn’t art, blurs the line between the personal and the public, and explores how identity is shaped by the commodities and media we consume. Drawing on the emotional resonance of found objects and shared experiences, she has built a body of work that grapples with love, mortality, power, visibility, and what it means to exist—all while channeling the art world’s resources back into her trans and gender non-conforming community. What began as a deliberately anonymous practice has transformed into an autobiographical and politically urgent voice.

Among her career highlights is her inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 9th Berlin Biennale, and the 60th Venice Biennale.

Carlos Motta is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at Pratt Institute and an artist. His traveling mid-career survey exhibition “Pleas of Resistance” is currently on view at OK Contemporary Art Center in Linz, Austria.

Visiting Assistant Professor Langdon Graves speaks with Macon Reed, a New Orleans-based artist.

Macon Reed works in sculpture, video, painting, and social practice. Their projects bridge participatory approaches with intensive object-making and research. Reed’s work has shown at venues such as Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), La Patinoire Royale (Brussels), University of New South Wales Gallery (Sydney), Wattis Center for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco), Museum of Art and Design (NYC), Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans). Reed holds an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago and BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. They studied Physical Theater at Dah International Theatre School (Belgrade), Radio Documentary at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (Maine), and Socially-Engaged Arts at The Kitchen (NYC). Residencies and fellowships include Royal Academy of Arts (London), Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology at Ameherst College, Center for Craft (North Carolina), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Langdon Graves is a Virginia-born, New York City-based artist who holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Painting & Printmaking and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.  She is adjunct faculty at Parsons School of Design and the Graduate Fine Arts program at Pratt Institute.  Langdon has shown her work throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia with solo and group exhibitions that include Dinner Gallery, TEI’s Art in Buildings, Mrs., Tilton Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects, Grimm, Taymour Grahne Projects, STONELEAF and the Delaware Contemporary Museum.  Langdon has attended the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Kunstenaarsinitiatief Residency and Exhibition Program in the Netherlands, the Object Limited residency in Bisbee, Arizona and STONELEAF Retreat in upstate New York.  She is a recipient of Canson & Beautiful Decay’s Wet Paint Grant and has been featured in Artnet, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Vice Creators Project, Juxtapoz, The Wall Street Journal, the Sound & Vision podcast and Madeline Schwartzman’s See Yourself X. 

Associate Professor and artist Carlos Motta speaks with Taja Cheek, a Brooklyn-born curator and musician based in New York City.

Taja Cheek is Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, a radical interdisciplinary performance institution in the East Village, founded in 1980 as PS122, and is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who frequently records and performs under the name L’Rain. Taja was guest curator for the 2024 Whitney Biennial performance program and led performance programs at MoMA PS1, including Warm Up, a summer outdoor music series that the museum has hosted in its courtyard since 1998, and Sunday Sessions, an interdisciplinary performance series. As a curator, Taja has championed the creation of new performance works and has worked closely with artists for many years. Experimental and emotive, her music explores composition and structure and addresses themes of grief, identity, emotion and experience.

Carlos Motta is an artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice, Fine Arts, Pratt Institute. His multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. His career-survey exhibition Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance is on view at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) through October 2025 and will travel to OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria in 2026 and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France in 2027. Motta received a Ruth Arts Award in 2025.