Swim Parallel to the Shore: A Lecture Performance by Chloë Bass

Swim Parallel to the Shore: Art at an End of Empire

What does public art do when public culture feels increasingly at odds with daily living? Part artist talk, part lecture-performance, this presentation by artist Chloë Bass considers feelings as forms of knowledge through the lens of artistic work in the contemporary public realm. Working from poet Tan Lin's idea of general feelings” (the idea that emotions are not our own (individually held, or private), but shared as a kind of communal recipe), Bass will discuss the production of artistic work in the contemporary public realm using two conceits: first, what it means to think of objects through the scale of the human body, and thus as a stand-in for potential emotional action; and second, what happens when we consider the presentation of static artworks as a form of rehearsal, which in turn provokes the co-creation of a world.

This program is presented in conjunction with Chloë Bass: Soft Services, on view at the Henry and offsite at Volunteer Park until August 2026.

This program is presented in partnership with the University of Washington Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Generous support for this program is provided by the Earl and Edna Stice Lectureship in the Social Sciences.

Bio

Chloë Bass (b. 1984, New York, NY) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), followed by a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family (Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018 – 2024). She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law.

Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: most recently, the 2022 – 2024 Kupferberg Arts Incubator fellowship, a 2022 – 2023 Silver Art Project residency, the 2022 Future Imagination Fund Fellowship at NYU Tisch College of the Arts, a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellowship for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), and a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center. Previous honors include a grant from Art Matters, a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits and projects with Creative Time, the Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Time Magazine, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published in November 2020 by DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published in Paletten, Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is the co-director of Social Practice CUNY with Gregory Sholette, with whom she published the book Art and Social Action in 2018. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates.

Accessibility

The Henry strives to be a welcoming and accessible space for all visitors. Assisted Listening Devices (ALDs) and AI-generated live captioning will be available. This program will also be live-streamed via YouTube with automated captions. For additional accessibility information, please visit henryart.org/visit/accessibility or contact Museum Services at 206.221.3850 or [email protected] with questions or needs.

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