The Alternative Art School Presents: Small Uses and OFF-TIMES Issue No. 2
About this Event
The program begins with the unboxing of Small Uses, an exhibition of fourteen artworks contained within a single wooden box. Developed through a class led by Nato Thompson, the project began with a paradoxical assignment: to make art that was not art. Inspired in part by Fluxus boxes, the participating artists created objects and propositions that hover between usefulness and uselessness, purpose and absurdity, and the everyday and the inexplicable. Nato Thompson will introduce the exhibition, followed by a brief presentation by participating artist Bruce Williams and Fiona Yun-Jui Chang and an activation of the works inside the box. Small Uses features work from Elizabeth Burden, Fiona Chang, Veronica Jackson, Kristy Wallace Knight, lottëstina, Carmen Menza, Margaret Mount, Marlon Barrios Salano, Gil Spears, Judy Suh, Kimberley White, Bruce Williams, and Amber Zora.
The second half of the evening celebrates the launch of OFF-TIMES Issue No. 2, an exhibition presented in the form of a newspaper. Directed by Eden Imrie and created by twelve artists from The Alternative Art School’s international community, OFF-TIMES treats each page as an exhibition space and each reader as a participant. The newspaper will continue to travel through a year-long series of performances, installations, readings, workshops, and gatherings.
The launch will include an introduction by Abigail King and a performance by Beckett Brueggemann combining recorded text, movement, ghost drag, and the activation of a lamp. Following the performance, guests will be invited to explore the newspaper, encounter the works in Small Uses, and join a conversation with the participating artists.
RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required.
ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to [email protected].
About the Speakers
Beckett Brueggemann (aka Grendelin Drag) is a drag, fibers, and narrative based artist. He received his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2023 and is currently working across the East Coast. Beckett is guided by the concept of restorative reimagining, a term encountered across research. He explores how folklore and fairytales hold remnants of communal fears and warnings—cultural anxieties that seeped into our nightmares. His work asks how we might use those inherited fears to better understand our world as it exists now, and then reimagine these stories to create the world that we want to live in.
Fiona Yun-Jui Chang 張昀叡 (b. 1982) grew up in a Hakka family in Taiwan, an island in the northeastern Pacific with many names and an unsettled history. Chang’s work often begins when friction in everyday life becomes a question. She gives these questions form and returns them to everyday life through public encounters and private exchanges. Her projects have included taking photographs without sight while living blindfolded for seven consecutive days; typing rumors onto two-dollar bills and releasing them back into circulation; and, most recently, inscribing “KEEP IT AS LONG AS YOU KEEP YOUR NAME” on emptied eggshells that entered a gift exchange. By making language, objects, and photographs misbehave, her work creates conditions for questions to travel through lived experience, ordinary materials, and encounters with others. Chang lives and works in Los Angeles.
Abigail King is a poet, artist and yoga teacher based in Austin. Texas. Abigail grew up in the Hudson Valley and received a BFA in film from NYU. Her current project investigates dreams, memories, fears and family history in the shadow of the mighty Bear Mountain Bridge, which she crisscrossed almost every day of her childhood. Both an ardent builder and burner of bridges, Abigail believes in art, optimism, curiosity and community.
Nato Thompson is a curator, writer, and cultural organizer whose work explores how art intersects with politics, education, and everyday life. He is the founder of The Alternative Art School, a global membership based platform supporting working artists through collective learning, critique, and shared resources. He also leads Dreaming in Public, a consultancy that supports artists, institutions, and cultural projects navigating questions of ethics, power, and sustainability.
His writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Frieze, and e flux, and he is the author of several books including Seeing Power and Culture as Weapon.
He is currently completing a new book, Making a Life of Art.
Bruce Williams is an abstract painter and professor of cultural studies at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. His multilingual academic publications have focused primarily on cinema, with a special emphasis on Eastern Europe.
Originally trained in traditional landscape painting, Williams moved to abstraction while a doctoral student in Los Angeles. After building a career in research and teaching, he returned to painting a few years ago and has appeared in juried exhibitions throughout the United States. Two virtual solo exhibitions were recently curated by Kledian Myftari of Prague.
A Russian-language monograph on Williams’ art appeared through Mirror Table Editions in April, 2026. It draws upon the poetry of Alexander Blok to probe the relationship between inner and outer light, between revelation and erasure. The book’s title, which translates to “Where the Light Is Different,” reflects the heart of Williams’ work: how light can hold memory without possessing it, how the past can shimmer just at the edge of perception.
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