The Fun

Jake Yuzna is a NYC-based cultural producer focusing on nightlife, cinema, performance, design, and institutional apparatus. In 2011, as head of programming at the Museum of Arts and Design, Yuzna conceived and founded THE FUN fellowship in the social practice of nightlife, the first, and to date only, fellowship to support nightlife practitioners. Yuzna has curated projects for the 4th Moscow Biennial, and Intermedia Arts. Also know for his film directing, Yuzna was the youngest recipient of a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in filmmaking. He has also received fellowships from Creative Capital Foundation, Creative Time, Jerome Hill Foundation, Frameline Foundation, and others. His debut feature film Open, was the first American film to receive the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010. Claire Bishop is an art historian and critic based in the History of Art department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York since September 2008. Previously Bishop was an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick, Coventry and Visiting Professor in the Curating Contemporary Art Department at the Royal College of Art, London. Bishop edited Participation (MIT Press, 2006) and Installation Art: A Critical History (Routledge, 2005) and has contributed to Artforum, Flash Art, and October. Michael Musto is an American columnist, author, and journalist. He is currently a popular columnist at Gawker.com and Out.com. For over 26 years, Musto wrote the "La Dolce Musto" column in the Village Voice, covering gossip, nightlife, politics, and personal issues. His books include Downtown (Vintage, 1986), Manhattan on the Rocks (Henry Holt and Co., 1989), and most recently, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back (Vantage Point, 2011). Maria Lind is a writer and curator, as well as the director of the Center for Curatorial Studies Graduate Program at Bard College. She has curated internationally at a multitude of institutions and festivals, including Kunstverein München where she served as director from 2002 to 2004. In 2009, Lind received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. Iconoclast Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English-born singer-songwriter, writer, artist, and cultural engineer. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution, pornography, serial killers, occultism, and P-Orridge's own exploration of gender issues, generated controversy. Later musical work with Psychic TV received wider exposure, including some chart-topping singles. In the 1980s, P-Orridge and performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer began their androgynous life project BREYER P-ORRIDGE wherein they merged their identities through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, and behavioral modification. The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has championed NYC artists working in nightlife since 2011, when it launched THE FUN Fellowship in the Social Practice of Nightlife. THE FUN Fellowship not only gives nightlife artists the opportunity to develop their own practices through financial and logistical support, it also seeks to raise awareness and spark dialogue around nightlife as an art form. MAD explores the intersection between art, design, and craft today with a particular focus on contemporary creativity and the ways in which artists and designers transform materials through processes ranging from the artisanal to digital. Education is at the center of the Museum's mission and Cathleen Lewis, V.P. and Director of Education and Programs, Museum of Arts and Design provides the introduction framing this publication.