Summer Think Tank 2025

Guest Curator: Limor Tomer, vice president of programming and production, Segerstrom Center for the Arts

This week takes a critical look “under the hood and under the carpet” at live performance within the context of museum practice. Are museums increasingly embracing performance as a vital component of their programming?  If so, how and why?  If not, what are the barriers? Additional topics will include the power and potential of performance to diversify institutions and audiences, the realities of staging performance in museums, the relationship between performance and the object-centered context of museums, the issues of collecting performance, and more.

Guest Curator: Ed Patuto, director for audience engagement, The Broad Museum  
 
Bringing together a group of both cultural leaders and educators, this week’s conversations will examine new and emerging models for incubating, developing and presenting performance art across global institutions. In taking an international perspective, the group will consider what possibilities exist or might otherwise be developed for exchange between countries, cultures and communities, as has always been the foundation of American art. Particular emphasis will be placed on both the pedagogical impact of these new models and modes of exchange, in terms of how we approach both the teaching of performance and the performance of teaching as well as how performers and presenters can create new opportunities for engaging audiences and communities. 

Guest Curator: Dell Marie Hamilton, artist, writer, curator; interim director of Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research  
 
This week's conversations are inspired by guest curator Dell Marie Hamilton and collaborator Angela Counts current project, which engages speculative fiction, performance and public art to retell the story of Mark, Phillis, and Phoebe, three enslaved individuals who were tried in 1755 Boston for the murder of their master. Bringing together a group of Black artists, scholars, curators and cultural leaders, the cohort will be invited to engage with performance as a mode through which to contextualize America as nation, geography, project, and myth. In particular, the group will contend with the relationship between performance and the camera, which can be understood not only as a technology of documentation but also as a witness (i.e. the lens as audience). Rooted in the specificities of Black performance, the cohort will also consider the multiplicity of roles that Black practitioners must assume in order to build and sustain a career in contemporary art particularly as they grapple with the implications of American authoritarianism.

Guest Curator: David Thomson, interdisciplinary performing artist  
 
This week’s conversations look to (re)imagine sustainability within an arts ecosystem that is at once shifting and breaking down. Bringing together a group of artists from across various disciplines, the cohort will be invited to consider what kinds of resources are needed beyond money? How are we making work, and who do we imagine that will change? What is the new relationality that is called for? Grounded in the belief that artists can be the creators of their futures, the group will contend with the "What if…" that we face in this present and beyond.

Guest Curator: Kristin Juarez, PhD, senior research specialist, Getty Research Institute  

This week takes as its focus the legacy of experimental choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings, in particular her solo works, including Chicken Soup (1981). Exploring documentation of Chicken Soup, including performance recordings, video art, and restaging, the cohort will consider the archive’s role in transmission and exhibition of performance. Together, the cohort will examine dance records and their continual transitions between event, document, and art object. From the performance venue to the museum, participants will share the various forms of archival stewardship required to preserve an artist’s legacy.

Guest Curator: Cynthia Post Hunt, artist and curator of performance, Crystal Bridges & the Momentary  
 
For this final week of the Summer Think Tank, we will look at the role institutions play in shaping the contemporary performance art landscape through commissioning, producing, archiving, and/or collecting. Participants from across the field will consider the defining edges of performance art and how it is shaped by navigating the various internal systems across museums, galleries, festivals, and collections through budgeting, marketing, the division of labor across departments, and the allocation of space and time. Together the cohort will be invited to think about the valuation of performance within the institutions and how it is we make space for both artists and audiences.

Guest Curator: Hannah Haynes, professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, MCLA; 2025-26 LIAA Fellow  
 
In Audre Lorde’s 1983 address “Learning from the ‘60s,” Lorde celebrated the community-centered work of Malcolm X. Lorde encouraged us to look towards the past while studying the present. With an “energy for the present,” we seek creative and scholarly abstracts that “metabolize” scholarship, history, and creative praxis that consider “tensions within diversity.” We seek papers that (re)frame these tensions within art, history, culture and society, and the US academy that “metabolize” the struggles of the past and present, considering the role of community in activating social, artistic, and political change. Possible paper topics may problematize or consider the multiple valences of “frame” and “frameworks” across genre and medium: such as, artwork frames, academic frameworks, architectural frames, bodily frames, racial frames, etc.  
 
NEASA is the regional chapter of the American Studies Association (ASA) representing Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. This chapter organizes a number of events and awards including an annual late spring conference, a collection of prizes for recent books and essays, and an annual fall colloquium.  
 
Conference August 5–6, 2025  
Keynote: Dr. Brian Michael Murphy, Williams College, “Black Vermont.”  
 
The tentative program will be updated as more information is available. Panel times/days will not change.   
 
Registration:  
All participants must register for the conference, noting name tag preferences and dietary restrictions. Please note that the conference fee is waived for students and contingent faculty. For tenured/tenure-track faculty, we’ve instituted a pay-what-you-can system, with a recommended fee of $45. After you fill out this form, you’ll be redirected to the payment page.