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Tipping Points

When October 06-07, 2018
Where SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY
Keynote Speaker Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Featured Speakers Eric Gottesman
Honored Educator Francois Deschamps

Announcement: Speaker Change

Due to unforseen circumstances, Sharon Harper had to cancel her talk on Sunday afternoon, October 7. We were unbelievably lucky to find an amazing replacement in Eric Gottesman, and are thrilled to hear his talk entitled Where Do We Go From Here?

Eric Gottesman is an artist who makes images and social interventions that address themes of nationalism, migration, conflict, structural violence, colonialism and intimate relations. Frequently engaging communities in critical self-expression, Gottesman's projects have been shown at health conferences, in government buildings, on indigenous reserves, and in public space as well as at museums like MoMA/PS1, MFA Boston, the Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Center of Photography, MoCA Cleveland, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Sudden Flowers, his decade-long collaborative project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, resulted in temporary street installations and a collective monograph. Gottesman is a Creative Capital Artist, a Fulbright Fellow, an Artadia awardee, and a co-founder of For Freedoms, an initiative for art and civic engagement that won the 2017 Infinity Award. His translation of Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma's banned novel Oromaye was published in Hayden's Ferry Review. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at SUNY-Purchase College.


Congratulations to all the artists who were accepted into Tipping Points at the Palmer Gallery at Vassar College in conjunction with the 2018 Chapter Conference, juried by our Keynote Speaker, Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

Accepted artists: Michael Amato, Farimah Eshraghi, Brad Farwell, Ashley Gardner, Anna Grevenitis, Ileana Doble Hernandez, Defne Kirmizi, Dina Kantor, Cassandra Klos, Julie Mihaly, Jackie Neale, Soha Saghazadeh, Lorenzo Triburgo, Aaron Turner, Rhonda Vanover, Adrian Octavius Walker, Sara J. Winston, Jen Moon, Marc Ohrem-Leclef.

Tipping Points will be on view from Thursday, October 4 - October 25, 2018, with a reception during the SPE Northeast Conference on Saturday October 6 from 6-8 pm

About Tipping Points:
The world is facing unprecedented change on multiple fronts -- environmental, technological, sociological, psychological, and political. While historically things are always in flux, the exponential acceleration of so many factors is new to our age, as is the concept of humans propelling irreversible tipping points at a global scale. The world is facing unprecedented change on multiple fronts – environmental, technological, sociological, psychological and political.  While historically things are always in flux, the exponential acceleration of so many factors is new to our age, as is the concept of humans propelling irreversible tipping points at a global scale.

The 2018 SPE-NE Chapter Conference addresses the ways in which artists are responding to this rapid acceleration at global, local, and internal levels through photography and related media, and how the photographic medium itself might be implicated in these changes.

  • Tipping point (climatology), a point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state.
  • Tipping point (physics), the point at which an object is displaced from a state of stable equilibrium into a new equilibrium state that is qualitatively dissimilar from the first.
  • Tipping point (sociology), the event of a previously rare phenomenon becoming rapidly and dramatically more common.
  • Tipping point (systems theory), signifies a critical point after which the system shifts radically and potentially irreversibly into a different equilibrium state.

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