Public Art is Pasternak’s Mission – Experimental Arts Administrator to Speak

NEW PALTZ — NEW PALTZ – Anne Pasternak, who helped create the World Trade Center’s Tribute in Light memorial as part of her ongoing work bringing art into unexpected public spaces, will speak on Wednesday, April 2, in the SUNY New Paltz Lecture Center, Room 102. Pasternak, the executive director of Creative Time Inc., commissions cultural art projects that transform forgotten places like an abandoned railroad station or run-down storefront into exhibition spaces that comment on contemporary urban experience. Creative Time has installed video projections in Columbus Circle and sculptures in Grand Central Station. For years it held art shows and performances in the historic Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. No place is off-limits. The non-profit group has created events in cyberspace and even in skywriting. “I look at everything as a canvas,” Pasternak says. She and her staff “look at things in our culture that are changing and ask artists, ‘What are you thinking?'” Primary to Pasternak’s mission is challenging old assumptions about where art should be seen, and who its audience will be. Anyone who doubts the ability of art to reach all people need only consider the twin beams of light that shone into the night sky for months at the site of the former World Trade Center, she says. Pasternak, who studied art history at the University of Massachusetts, also curates independent exhibitions, most recently “Pulp Art” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She contributes essays to a number of cultural journals, lectures internationally, and was recently a guest critic at Yale University. Before assuming the directorship of Creative Time, Pasternak was curator of exhibitions and public art projects at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Conn., and director of the Stux Galleries in Boston and New York City. Her talk, sponsored by the Student Art Alliance, is free and open to the public. The student Art Alliance is a funded member of the SUNY Student Association. For more information, call 845-257-3872. An image to accompany the release is available at http://www.newpaltz.edu/news/images/creativetime72_2-03-03.html – 30 –