The Intersection of Art and Collaboration

“The Intersection of Art and Collaboration” is a panel discussion that will be moderated by Donny Levit (Park Slope Stoop). Panelists will include George Del Barrio, Sean Qualls, A. E. Souzis, Dale Williams and Monika Wuhrer.

“The Intersection of Art and Collaboration” is presented at the Dweck Auditorium (Brooklyn Public Library) as part of the first ever Art Slope Festival!

Since 2008, Open Source has been dedicated to exploring the social change that can be enacted through communities formed around art. We realize that art is not only important within communities, but community is also critical to art-making. In 2016, our goal has been to further our mission by exhibiting artist collectives and artist-run spaces from around the world to engage the neighborhood in conversation about how art can not only generate communities, but how it can also be a catalyst for social and political change. “The Intersection of Art and Collaboration” is a panel discussion with local artists that will explore how artists’ processes change and grow during collaboration, the role of art-making in community and the role of community in art-making.

DONNY LEVIT is the Editor of Park Slope Stoop and South Slope News. A New York native, Donny has also spent parts of his life in Atlanta, New Orleans, and San Francisco, but he’s happy to now call Brooklyn home, planting roots with his wife and young son. He’s a news junkie who also has experience as a stage director, and is an accomplished runner and guitarist as well. And his writing extends beyond the news — his new novel, Rock n’ Roll Lies, which came out in 2015.

GEORGE DEL BARRIO is an experienced photographer, graphic/type/projection/lighting designer, motion/photo/copy editor, curator and producer. A doer that dreams, he serves as Founder × Creative Director of The Vanderbilt Republic (“VR”), a creative agency formed in 2009 to catalyze the impact of creative expression in all modes. VR sees artists as leaders, activists, and agents for positive change. Through their work with the creative diaspora VR offers boutique solutions in: creative production, design & direction; artist representation; landscape projection design.

SEAN QUALLS is an award winning, Brooklyn-based, children’s book illustrator, artist and author. He has illustrated a number of celebrated books for children, including “Giant Steps to Change The World” by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis-Lee, “Little Cloud and Lady Wind” by Toni Morrison and her son Slade and “Before John Was a Jazz Giant,” for which he received a Coretta Scott King Illustration Honor. His work has received two Blue Ribbon citations from the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books where he was also cited for his “serious craftsmanship” and an “original style.” Qualls has created illustrations for magazines, newspapers and advertisements. His work has been shown in galleries in New York and across the country.

A.E. SOUZIS is a New York City-based writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her writings, site-specific tours and installations use storytelling and technology to uncover or reimagine public space, alternative or underground histories and real-life networks of power. Her work has been featured in venues and publications that include the Transit Museum, Queens Museum, Art in Odd Places festival, the website Urban Omnibus and journal Cultural Geographies, among others. She is also a member of /rive, an artist collective focusing on site-specific, locative projects that meet at the intersection of psychogeography, locative media and documentary narrative.

DALE WILLIAMS’s paintings, drawings, and books usually depict figures, largely imaginary, and often contain traces of writing, legible and illegible. His art aims to create a contemporary mythos – an imaginal way of understanding and explaining the world. For the past ten years he has collaborated with writer Ben Miller. Their most recent work together, “Cage Dies Bird Flies,” is an ongoing multidisciplinary project incorporating painting, book publication, sound recording, and performance. Williams has exhibited in venues in the New York City area, such as the Drawing Center, Kentler International Drawing Space, Gowanus Loft and the BRIC Rotunda Gallery. He is a 2014 fellow in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

MONIKA WUHRER develops work as a reaction–critical, yet playful–to her environment. She is interested in making art a hyper-vivid expression of daily life, challenging art world conventions by playing with its cliches. Monika is the founder and executive director of Open Source Gallery. Originally from Austria, she received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and completed post graduate work in multi media studies at the same school. Wuhrer’s work has been included in exhibits and festivals such as ArtPrize (US), Columbia University Teacher’s College (US), Prosjektrom Normanns (Norway), Austrian Cultural Forum (US), Hofburg (Austria), Rotunda Gallerie (US), Gallerie pro Arte (Austria, US), Temporary Services (US), Kunst Raum Dornbirn (Austria), Fondazione Pistoletto (Italy), Tokyo Zokei University (Japan), Galleria Dialoghi (Italy), Kartause Ittingen (Switzerland) and Progetto Arte – Museo Pecci (Italy) among others.