Wednesday, November 20 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Dawn Weleski co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the US government is in conflict. Their art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Previous work includes City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters, and their most recent work, Refuse Refuse: Radio, is a speculative fiction radio series that dramatizes current and impending climate catastrophe throughout rural New York State. Broadcast from a mutual aid ambulance, Refuse Refuse will record and transmit survival skill share workshops and participatory climate collapse drama and is supported by a 2023 Anonymous was a Woman Environmental Art Grant, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts Grant, and the Harpo Foundation.
Weleski has worked in hospitality and food service for over twenty-five years, and their current wage work as bartender/baker/line cook, house cleaner, landscaper, adjunct professor, and Emergency Medical Technician, among other gigs, informs their collective stewardship of emergentCNY, a Central New York mutual aid network that exchanges goods and services during times of ever-present crisis through reciprocal care, rest, repair and regeneration. emergentCNY links people across geography, time and systematized difference through its repurposed ambulance that archives and transmits stories of historical and contemporary mutual aid in CNY and around the world. Weleski is currently is University of Michigan Student Life Sustainability Artist in Residence where they co-initiated Noon at Night, a global solidarity network of transgressive learners during this crisis and the next that acknowledge interdependence across difference, utilizing food as a binder. A collaboration of University of Michigan students, Southeast Michigan cultural organizers and educators, and experiential learning hubs around the world, Noon at Night will ultimately take the form of a mobile classroom and pay-what-you-can cafe connected to other transgressive educators and learners around the world, opening when it is noon in the partner location each weekend.
They have exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Hammer Museum; San Jose Museum of Art; Anyang Public Art Project; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art; Project Row Houses; Townhouse Gallery (Cairo); Festival Belluard Bollwerk International; Contemporary Calgary; The Mattress Factory Museum; Arts House (Melbourne); and 91mQ (Berlin); have been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; was a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2019 to 2020 NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University and Upstate Institute Fellow; was a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow nominee, a 2023 New York State Traditional and Rural Artist Fellow, and a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Finalist; and holds a BFA in Visual Art with a concentration in Contextual Practice from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University.