1:00 – 2:30 PM
Session D
Co-dependency Anonymous
Dawn Weleski 
((workshop))

This session with center around using the work of art itself as a retail institution that is self-sustaining and not dependent on arts grants; recontextualizing the project as something other than art for a large audience to garner outside funding (restaurant development, CDCs, donations, retail, etc.). Participants will workshop a potential budget for a project that they are currently working on or are brainstorming.  

Dawn Weleski’s practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by re-purposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Recent projects include City Council Wrestling, a series of wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters, and “I will not bomb Iran” (100 times), a curriculum designed and taught by Weleski to generate student-authored apologies on behalf of the United States. Her on-going project with collaborator Jon Rubin, Conflict Kitchen, a take out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict, has been covered by over 450 international media and news outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, NPR: All Things Considered, and BBC News.

Weleski holds an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and has exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland; The

Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; and 91mQ, Berlin; has been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; and is a courtesy fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.