“The Lovers, The Dreamers, and Me”
(performed with drums, bass, and electric guitars)

Jen Delos Reyes
Artist, Founder-Director of Open Engagement, Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago

Thursday, February 23, 2017
6:00-7:15 PM
The Carrack (947 E. Main St, Durham, NC 27701)

Join Jen Delos Reyes for a performance and artist talk in collaboration with local musicians/Duke students, faculty, and staff. Her lecture will be delivered throughout a set list of songs they will perform together that reference utopian leanings, relationship breakdowns, and leading a meaningful life. The songs will serve as anchor points to discuss her own socially engaged art practice, as well as content to contemplate collaborative impulses, and the potential artists have of imagining new ways of being in the world together.

Jen Delos Reyes is a creative laborer, educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. Her practice is as much about working with institutions as it is about creating and supporting sustainable artist-led culture. Delos Reyes worked within Portland State University from 2008-2014 to create the first flexible residency Art and Social Practice MFA program in the United States and devised the curriculum that focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. The flexible residency program allows for artists embedded in their communities to remain on site throughout their course of study.

She worked with the Portland Art Museum from 2009-14 to create a series of programs and integrated systems that allow artists to rethink what can happen in a museum, and reinvigorate the idea of the museum as a public space.

She is the director and founder of Open Engagement, an international annual conference on socially engaged art that has been active since 2007 and hosted conferences in two countries at locations including the Queens Museum in New York. She is working on I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning, a book exploring the artist impetus toward art and everyday life.

Delos Reyes currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois where she is the Associate Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Learn more at:
jendelosreyes.com
openengagement.info
imgoingtolivethelife.com

Sponsored by the FHI Social Practice Lab and Duke Vice Provost for the Arts Collateral Fund.