Join the Education Department at MAD for a reception and performance celebrating the inaugural MAD Process Lab installation, Josh Blackwell: Neveruses Report Progress, on view in Project Space through Sunday, February 18.

Beginning at 6 pm, MAD’s 6^th floor will feature a performance activating Blackwell’s works by dancer/choreographer Daniel Roberts and musician Alex Huberty. This ongoing cross-disciplinary collaboration is founded upon a kindred approach to making things. The artists work with their materials—whether movement, sound, or art objects—in a responsive and improvisational manner. As Roberts and Huberty move through the Project Space, Artist Studios, and Classroom, they will be accompanied by performers dressed in wearable art-garments. 

Josh Blackwell makes intentionally redundant objects from plastic bags. The plastic bag is a cipher—its malignance derives from its perceived worthlessness. Transformed via colorful embroidery, photography, video, performance, and music, his series Neveruses proposes new and unexpected purposes for this ubiquitous resource.

On view in the 6th-floor Project Space, Josh Blackwell: Neveruses Report Progress is the inaugural installation of the Education Department’s MAD Process Lab, a new series exploring an individual artist’s practice—from inspiration to exhibition—in great depth. Including site-specific installations of raw materials and works in progress transported directly from the artist’s studio, MAD Process Lab presentations feature a small selection of finished artworks among larger displays of studio samples, photographic documentation, research materials, notes, ephemera, and other items that inform an artist’s work. 

Artist Bios

Originally from New Orleans, Josh Blackwell is an artist and teacher based in New York City and Bennington, Vermont. His work has been shown nationally and abroad, including solo exhibitions in New York, London, Los Angeles, and Paris. In 2014, he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. He has also received fellowships from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, ZK/U Berlin, Santa Fe Art Institute, the Delfina Studio Trust, and the Corporation of Yaddo. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Bennington College, where he joined the faculty in 2016.

Alexander Huberty earned a BA in Music and Chinese from Bennington College, where he studied the trumpet with Bill Dixon and Arthur Brooks. Trumpet is his primary instrument, and he also has a working relationship with other brass instruments, piano, guitar, and various percussive and electronic noise-makers.  He has performed at venues throughout the United States and Europe, and has accompanied the SNDO Theatreschool choreography department in Amsterdam. He is active in the local music scene of Sag Harbor, NY, where he lives. He works with the intersection of technology, sound, physics and the properties of periodic systems.

Daniel Roberts has an MFA in Performing Arts from Bennington College. He graduated magna cum laude from the Ohio State University with a BFA in dance performance and a specialization in Labanotation. As a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), Roberts had the opportunity to perform a vast repertory and create several original roles. Roberts’ choreography has been presented in New York at Danspace Project and Movement Research, as well as in Copenhagen. He has taught nationally and internationally at several dance companies, festivals, schools, and universities. Roberts is a 2015 Cunningham Fellow and joined the faculty at Ohio State University as Assistant Professor in Dance this past fall.  He is currently staging Cunningham's choreography as part of the national tour of Look Before you Leap: Black Mountain College at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH.