Projects
Speech Acts
Speech Acts is the podcast of Pratt Fine Arts’ Project Third (P3). Each semester, a faculty member sits down with artists, curators, and cultural producers whose work engages deeply with social, political, and community-based issues. These conversations explore practices that defy traditional categories, experiment across disciplines, and respond to the urgent conditions of our time.
Listen wherever you listen to podcasts:
Episode 3: Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo: Lady Liberty
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.
Photos (left to right): Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, courtesy of the artist; Carlos Motta, photo by Manuel Carreon Lopez
Episode 2: Macon Reed
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.
Photos (left to right): Macon Reed, photo by Meg Turner; Langdon Graves, photo by Joe Leonard
Episode 1: Taja Cheek: Sonic Rapture
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.
Photo, left: L’Rain, Fatigue. Album cover, 2021. Courtesy of L’Rain
Photo, right: Cory Rice