Collecting and archiving dance: Autumn Knight and Megan Metcalf in Conversation
In this freeform conversation, American artist Autumn Knight and art historian Megan Metcalf will explore ways Knight’s interdisciplinary practice has engaged institutions with varying relationships to collecting and archiving live art. Projects such as Knight’s interventions at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC, 2019), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC, 2019), the Kitchen (NYC, 2020), and the Western Front (Vancouver, 2021) will provide a jumping-off point. These works negotiated liveness and mediation, permanence and ephemerality, proximity and distance, in ways that redefine dance, performance, choreography, as well as institutions themselves. What could terms like “documentation,” “archiving,” and “ownership” mean in physical and virtual spaces, and how might they be pressured to creative and productive ends?
Biographies
Autumn Knight, is a New York based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, video, sound and text. Her work has been on view at various institutions including Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) Shedhalle (Zurich), The Whitney Museum of American Art, PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art) The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Museum Ostwall (Germany) BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Performance Space New York, Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired for the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors and fellowships including Artadia Award, Art Matters Grant, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship and most recently the Trellis Art Fund.
Megan Metcalf received her PhD in contemporary art history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a project on the intersection of the visual and performing arts in art institutions. Her practice-based research is informed by her work in museums and study with major figures in American dance, including Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, and Anna Halprin. She was a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 2021-2023 and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico (USA).
