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The Bureau Of Personal Belonging
February 15, 2021 - February 26, 2021
The Bureau of Personal Belonging
by Stacey L. Kirby
https://www.greensboroprojectspace.com/blog-post/the-bureau-of-personal-belonging
Zoom Artist Talk with the Weatherspoon Art Museum
February 4th, 2021 5:30pm – 7pm
Art Installation and Immersive Performances at Greensboro Project Space
February 15 – 26, 2021
Immersive Performance Dates:
February 17th, 20th, 23rd, and 26th
Click here to RSVP for Immersive Performance
You can also view the installation during our opening hours
GPS will be closed on Thursday, February 18th due to UNCG’s Condition 2 of the Adverse Weather Policy.
The Bureau of Personal Belonging, art installation and immersive performances, by Stacey L. Kirby will be on exhibition at Greensboro Project Space from February 15-26th as part of UNCG’s “She Can, We Can: Beyond the Women’s Suffrage Centennial.”
Artist Stacey L. Kirby brings The Bureau of Personal Belonging to UNCG’s campus and to downtown Greensboro to provide a vehicle for a dialogue on citizenship, identity, and human rights through a series of ‘performative interactions’ or performances set within art installations activated by viewer participation. With social distancing and safety measures in place, this unique iteration of The Bureau will allow our community to create a discourse and reflection on this historical moment as we navigate COVID-19 and escalating social unrest. Kirby creates interactive works that utilize bureaucratic forms, papers, postures, language and aesthetics to immerse participants in questions around citizenship and civil authority. After performances, student and community voices are shared through correspondences with public officials. Each performance and installation are living, breathing works that evolve with the physical and historical setting, political climate, and community involvement of each location.
Kirby will be engaging virtually with UNCG students in the Fall Semester 2020 through School of Art courses. Kirby will give a virtual artist talk via Zoom on Feb 4, 2021 05:30 PM EST. Students and community members are encouraged to join Kirby as performers and/or participants in the interactive socially-distanced work.
Stacey L. Kirby
Stacey L. Kirby is a queer, self-appointed civil servant from North Carolina who creates socially-engaged interactive performance art. Her performative interactions set within site-specific installations utilize bureaucratic forms, postures and language in vintage office environments to engage participants and community performers in questions around civil authority. Through humor and satire, Kirby reinvents the bureaucratic process in alternative, private and public spaces to elicit diverse dialogue about identity, community and human rights in the United States. Developed over the past 20 years, in more than 200 performances, with over 300 community performers and 10,000 participants, Kirby’s work evolves with the physical and historical setting, political climate and participants’ involvement at each location. Kirby’s work takes place in traditional art spaces and alternative public spaces such as restrooms, billboards and protests as well as in locations suchs as 21c Museum Hotel (Durham, NC), Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC), Appalachian State University (Boone, NC), ArtPrize (Grand Rapids, MI), Meredith College (Raleigh, NC), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC), ArtPrize (Grand Rapids, Michigan), the Nasher Museum of Art and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Durham, NC), Contemporary Art Museum (Raleigh, NC), North Carolina Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Craft and Design (Charlotte, NC) and other venues.
Kirby is a recipient of numerous awards including the ArtPrize 8 Juried Grand Prize, a NC Arts Council Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists and nominated for the United States Artist Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award and a finalist for the 1858 Prize. Kirby has also been awarded artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL) and the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC). Her work is represented in the Duke University Rare Book Collection and other private collections. Kirby has a dual degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Studio Art and Journalism and Mass Communication.
For video documentation and more information visit: www.stacey-kirby.com
She Can, We Can
The suffrage movement resulting in the passage of the 19th Amendment (women’s right to vote) in 1920 may be dated to at least the mid-19th century. Like other movements for social and political change in the nation, it was a decades-long grassroots undertaking. In communities across America and internationally, people picketed, negotiated, and sacrificed to gain not only women’s voting rights, but equal access to education, employment, and health care. While the movement in the U.S. was able to pass the Constitutional amendment through acts of extraordinary courage and determination, it was also riddled with contradictions and exclusions. Most notably, and with long-lasting effects in our society, African-American women and recent immigrants were excluded from the white-female dominated movement. Delving into this history helps us both recognize how far we have come, and how far we still have to travel in the ongoing struggle for equality and justice in the nation.
Throughout 2020-2022, UNC Greensboro presents “She Can, We Can: Beyond the Women’s Suffrage Centennial.” Through a diverse and inclusive series of events, discussions, and performances we ask: what political advances and compromises resulted in the passage of the 19th Amendment, and how have these shaped issues of equity in our own time?
