Please join us for wine and conversation at the opening reception for Trade Routes, the third exhibition of our COMMERCE year. Trade Routes focuses on the infrastructures and pathways of commerce, from the winds and tides that were the first determinants of inter-cultural trade to the technological breakthroughs that fuel global trade today. Sociologist-artist team David Schleifer and Tracy Gilman explore Navajo trading rug styles using weather-resistant electric cables. The works of Shari Mendelson and Venetia Dale address the impact of product innovation, specifically the invention of plastic, on the movement of objects and commodities from their countries of origin to their point of consumption.

Female Dog Vessel by Shari Mendelson

The slow but massive efficacy of international shipping is presented in Charlotte Lagarde’s video and collage. Paul Lloyd Sargent and Tony Stanzione show us the river-borne perspective of industrial flotsam. And in her two-month residency at Proteus throughout the Trade Routes exhibition, mobile vending activist Lauren Cannon will present her Institute for Mobile Vending, including weekly onsite collaborative design workshops and presentations by activists and designers on the vending industry.

The exhibition will also include depression-era WPA images of American workers on plates by Claire Leighton, an atlas of the trans-atlantic slave trade andCameron Becarrio‘s streaming video of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers and updated every three hours. These various works, along with accompanying public programming including lectures and film screenings, will highlight not only the movement and mapping of trade routes, but also the resulting changes in styles, uses and meanings of commodities and their materials as they criss-cross the globe.

Trade Routes was curated by Tammy Pittman and Susie Silbert.

A Way of Thinking: A Workshop on the “Proteus Process”

Sign up now for this Proteus Gowanus workshop located in the MoMA Education Department. Participation is limited to 20. Proteus subscribers pay less! $50 for the three-hour workshop instead of $90. Just use the secret code “Proteus” in the “discount code” box.

In a romp through the Museum of Modern Art, Proteus Gowanus core collaborators Sasha Chavchavadze and Tammy Pittman have designed a game to demonstrate our Protean process so you too can experience the “way of thinking” that results in our interdisciplinary exhibitions.

The workshop demonstrates a knowledge-seeking process in which participants enter into selected topics via a thematically interconnected array of art, artifacts, and books. Gather and create (individually or as a group) a collection of objects that speaks to newways of seeing your subject. You will develop and expand on that theme as you explore MoMA exhibitions. This thematic, process-oriented workshop, developed especially for MoMA, includes working in exhibition galleries, with a focus on curating and creating.

We hope to see you there! Your participation supports our ongoing programs at Proteus Gowanus.

Predator 2 by Joy Garnett

Secret Wars, the second exhibition in Proteus Gowanus’ yearlong exploration of Battle, explores the cryptic ways of warfare waged behind the cloak of invisibility. From neurophysical conflict deep inside the human amygdala, to the broadcast signals used by spies and intelligence agencies, to the everyday observation of ordinary citizens by omniscient bureaucracies, Secret Wars reveals covert communications hiding in plain sight.

Curated by Proteus Gowanus co-creative director Tammy Pittman and anthropologist Thomas Ross Miller, the exhibition brings artists from New York, Amsterdam and Berlin to trace the gaps, silences, and blackouts that conceal vital and deadly knowledge.

Who controls secret information, and who has the power to understand it? How do we protect ourselves from unseen enemies? Who wins and who loses when the battle is unending and unknowable? Through art, artifacts, books, sound and surveillance, these installations render what is absent present and what is invisible visible. Inside a special room, mysterious and hypnotic short-wave radio messages in unbreakable codes are beamed to hidden spies. Lost treasures, occult symbols and predator drones appear and disappear, closely guarded enigmas shrouded in obscure and half-forgotten codes.

Artists and works include:

Front404 – PanoptICONS
Joy Garnett – Predator series
David Goren – “Atencion! Seis Siete Tres Siete Cero”: The Mystery of the Shortwave Numbers Stations
Nene Humphrey – Circling the Center
Anna Livia Löwendahl-Atomic – Did a Nose Launch a Thousand Ships? and Otophgraphs, fragments from The Mu{e}sum
Renée Ridgway – Revelation of the Concealed: Politics (in)form
Tony Stanzione – Safety First
Smudge Studio – TRANSCOM Room
Bryan M. Wilson – Canticle for Sebeok (Atomic Priesthood)
The Mildred Complex(ity) – Vestments for Ten Millennium (Atomic Priest Suit)