Join us on Saturday, October 5th from 1-5pm at Broadway Plaza, North of Union Square for the opening of Coco Fusco’s Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker, on view on LinkNYC screens around the park.

The celebration will include a special viewing of Fusco’s video, a performance by Xenoduo with A Mobile Home, featuring Yva Las Vegass & Cristina Moya-Palacios; the launch of Noah Fisher’s newspaper, New York 2044: Issue 2, focused on immigration (in collaboration with Jacob Cohen, Luna Fischer, and Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga's esfuerzo project), and a musical performance by Reverend Billy Talen & the Stop Shopping Choir!

In the lead up to the national election and as part of More Art's 20th Anniversary Year, Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco will launch a video for the ubiquitous LinkNYC screens focused on the public perception of newly arrived migrants in New York City.

Broadly known for her interdisciplinary art practice that over the last several decades has been concerned with the themes of colonialism, power, race, gender, and history, Fusco’s work addresses the ways that immigration to New York – which has been constant since the city's founding – is recast as a crisis that threatens city life to serve conservative political purposes.

New York City was built by immigrants and its vibrant culture is composed of contributions from the many cultures that coexist and mingle here. Forty percent of the city's population is foreign-born. Immigrants bolster the city's workforce, making crucial contributions to the city's economy, gastronomy, linguistic diversity, and street life. Our city's guarantee of universal housing and universal education is under threat by those who seek to demonize and problematize the presence of immigrants, overlooking the reality that New York regularly receives tens of thousands of immigrants annually and succeeds in integrating them.

By interspersing historic images with contemporary photographs Fusco's work draws attention to the continuities between past and present immigration to call into question the negative characterization of migrants as a destabilizing force.

Fusco’s video will be on view at 10 link screens around Union Square, Manhattan, from October 5, 2024 to November 5, 2024, the day of the general election. Click here to learn more about Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker.

About the Artists

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco's performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. A retrospective entitled Tomorrow I Will Become an Island opened at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin in September, 2023. An accompanying monograph with the same title was just published by Thames & Hudson.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.

Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). Fusco is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art and Fusco is represented by Mendes Wood DM.

Learn more about Fusco’s practice at cocofusco.com.

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Xenoduo is a creative collective between visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). Since 2017, the duo has been collaborating on installation and performance projects exploring diasporic imagination, future folklore, and the nuanced art of cross-cultural and transatlantic homemaking.

Xinan Ran received her MFA from Hunter College (2022), and BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator and an aspirational set designer for new theaters. Learn more at xinanran.work

Miguel Alejandro Castillo holds a bachelor’s in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Miguel is one of the “25 performers to watch out for in 2024” by Dance Magazine. Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning, Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. Castillo is a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna in 2021, a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist in 2022-2023, and an Abrons Arts Center artist in residence for 2024-2025. Learn more at miguelalejandro.art

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Noah Fischer is a Brooklyn-based maker, performer, and educator whose work shifted from the gallery to the streets; from installations into stage design and performance, organizing, drawing, and writing. Noah has contributed to public discourse over the role cultural institutions play within capitalism and the debts that affect creative communities. He has exhibited in museums internationally with and without permission. As a founding member of Occupy Museums, a member of Gulf Labor Coalition, and a longtime collaborator with Berlin-based theater group andcompany&Co, he balances collective and solo practice. He has participated in the Berlin Biennale, documenta, Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. Fischer teaches art at Parsons and NYU. He is currently finishing a science ficton novel about direct democracy.

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The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the mid 1990s by actor and playwright, William Talen.

The Reverend Billy character debuted on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998, outside the Disney Store, where he proclaimed Mickey Mouse to be the anti-Christ. He was arrested multiple times outside the Disney Store, where he duct-tapped Mickey Mouse to a cross. Reverend Billy’s sermons decried the evils of consumerism and the racism of sweatshop labor, and what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit in Rudolph Giuliani‘s New York.

The Reverend Billy character isn’t so much a parody of a preacher, as a preacher motif used to blur the lines between performance and religious experience. “It’s definitely a church service,” Talen explained but, he added, it’s “a political rally, it’s theater, it’s all three, it’s none of them.” Alisa Solomon, the theater critic at the Village Voice, said of Reverend Billy’s persona, “The collar is fake, the calling is real.” Along with the Church of Stop Shopping, they have been referred to by academics as “performance activism,” “carnivalesque protest,” and “artivists”

The Stop Shopping Choir is a radical performance community based in New York City. They come to the Choir from many different creative and activist backgrounds. They have evolved a very particular sound and performance experience from the synthesis of our lived experience. They are grounded in the work of Justice and in service to the Earth. They love to Sing together.

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Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born of immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. The ways that inequality and power manifest themselves in our lives are consistent threads in Ricardo's work. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, and the effects of monetization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through popular metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Ricardo maintains a research-based practice that combines hand-made with emerging technologies. Ricardo’s work has been exhibited at New York City institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Hall of Science, Museo del Barrio, the Museum of the Moving Image and international venues including Matadero Madrid, Spain; Centro de Bellas Artes, Cuidad de Mexico; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Digital Art Zurich, Switzerland. Awards include artist fellowships and residencies at New Museum’s NEW INC Art & Code; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; HIAP Artist in Residence, Helsinki, Finland; Eyebeam Artist in Residence; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; Tides Foundation Lambent Fellowship; grants from NYSCA and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Ricardo has a Masters of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Arts in Practice of Art and English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He is based in Brooklyn, NY and is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College CUNY.

About More Art

More Art is a NYC-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists across their careers to catalyze social change by producing meaningful participatory public art for a broad audience. Through creative engagement, More Art empowers all people to utilize art to connect with others, build awareness, and drive action on topics that affect our lives and communities. Since its inception in 2004, More Art has produced a wide range of projects reflecting the concerns and challenges of various New York City communities. More Art focused on building collaborations between our neighbors by creating opportunities for a creative community education and public art projects. Consequently, our projects have gone increasingly ambitious, transcending the traditional boundaries of public art and expanding into workshops, lectures and panel discussions. Learn more about our work and explore our 20-year archive of public art at moreart.org.

This project is supported in part by the Lambent Foundation, the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. More Art thanks our partner, NYC Parks.

Image Credits: Video stills courtesy of the artist; Images by Lewis Hine and August Sherman courtesy of Photograph Collection, The New York Public Library.