From the Mount Auburn Cemetery website:

“It has been recognized since Mount Auburn’s early decades that the Cemetery’s aesthetic richness, educational value, and historic significance are derived in large part from the remarkable tapestry formed by its diverse collection of monuments and burial markers carefully sited in the landscape. In the nineteenth century, the Cemetery and individual lot owners commissioned a vast array of public art: monuments, structures, and buildings. Visitors, therefore, experienced the site as an outdoor museum as well as a place of burial. Today, Mount Auburn continues its dual mission of active cemetery and cultural landscape by striving to inspire all who visit and commemorating the dead in a landscape of exceptional beauty. While the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery has long offered tours and programs to the public, in recent years we have further embraced our role as a cultural resource and have begun working with contemporary artists and art organizations to create original site-specific programming.

In 2014, Mount Auburn became the first cemetery in the United States to establish an artist residency program. Our two-year program supports the creation of new work by a contemporary artist inspired by his or her in-depth experience at the Cemetery. The resident artist is charged with creating works for visitors, drawn from their direct experience, that convey a fresh and innovative perspective of Mount Auburn. To date, we have awarded residencies to filmmaker Roberto Mighty (2014-2015), composer Mary Bichner (2016-2017), and playwright Patrick Gabridge (2018-2019). Currently we are delighted to be hosting visual artist Jesse Aron Green as the 2020-2012 Artist-in-Residence.”

From the MacDowell Colony website:

"The mission of The MacDowell Colony is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination.

The sole criterion for acceptance to The MacDowell Colony is artistic excellence. MacDowell defines excellence in a pluralistic and inclusive way, encouraging applications from artists representing the widest possible range of perspectives and demographics.

We welcome artists engaging in the broadest spectrum of artistic practice who are investigating an unlimited array of inquiries and concerns. We apply the same egalitarian standards for all those who serve MacDowell either in a staff, volunteer, or representative capacity.

At its founding, the Colony was an experiment with no precedent. It stands now having provided crucial time and space to more than 6,000 artists, including such notable names as Leonard Bernstein, Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Spalding Gray, and more recently Alice Walker, Alice Sebold, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Suzan-Lori Parks, Meredith Monk, and many more."

LET’S DANCE

Art Stations gallery, Stary Browar, Poznań

Artists: Akademia Ruchu, Atoms for Peace, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Wojciech Bąkowski, Vanessa Beecroft, Jérôme Bel, Beyoncé, Tim Etchells & Forced Entertainment, Dan Flavin, Massimo Furlan, Frédéric Gies, Jesse Aron Green, Trajal Harrell, Christian Jankowski, Spike Jonze, Jungle, Alicja Karska & Aleksandra Went, The Knife, Katarzyna Kozyra, Tony Orrico, Rick Owens, Agnieszka Polska, Yvonne Rainer, R.E.M., Józef Robakowski, Piotr Wysocki & Dominik Jałowiński, Artur Żmijewski

Curators: Joanna Leśnierowska, Tomasz Plata, Agnieszka Sosnowska 

A dance stage turned into a gym? Or the parquet in a disco? Or a fashion show catwalk? Modern dance more and more often occurs in an intermediary sphere: between the conventions of art and the spaces of ordinary behaviour. Choreographers and visual arts artists are looking ever closer at that which is under their noses – how we move on the street, in clubs, while jogging, at social gatherings and even during sex. And they’re making it their subject. Of course, their practice would be hard to imagine (and hard to comprehend, to say the least), if earlier in the mid-60s the creators of post-modern dance hadn’t decided that dance could be anything – even typical walking or running. Today, we’re still coming to terms with the consequences of that discovery: not only do we see onstage the simplest daily  gestures, but we also frequently view amateur dancers almost as the direct inheritors of the classics of post modern dance. A woman dancing alone at a bus stop? A man dancing on the treadmill in a gym? It’s almost conceptual dance. Online we can find videos of similar events and enjoy them, as if we’d discovered some new, wonderful artists. 

Before our very eyes, dance is becoming more and more democratic. Everybody dances – amateurs, stars, celebrities. Those who in the common understanding “know” how to do it, and those who aren’t entirely successful. What’s more, everyone’s copying one another, and so we’re becoming more and more aware that the patterns suggested to us by the mass culture of movement are subtly, but effectively disciplining us. Dance liberates us, but also subordinates. Observing the process of the democratisation of dance today, we have to notice its flip side: among other things, the achievements of all these artists in whose work dance is not so much a promise of unrestricted expression, as a metaphor of social conditioning.

The Let’s Dance project is an attempt at describing that tension. Fragments of the most important pieces of dance theatre in recent years are juxtaposed here with the works of renowned visual artists, with music videos in which dance plays a leading role, with amateur films found on the Internet. Viewers are prompted to react by specially prepared installations – to even more clearly make them aware that their movements also deserve to be called dance. The starting point is provided by important pieces from the Grażyna Kulczyk Collection, above all the installation which hasn’t been shown in Poland before, by Dan Flavin, one of the most renowned American minimalists and a highly important reference point for post modern dance. It was Flavin who was one of the first to argue that more important than the art objects is the movement they generate - a sort of dance of the viewers around them.

The place where Let’s Dance is staged is no accident. The Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk is a unique institution within which, for years, dance and visual arts have coexisted. It’s an ideal place for a project where the borders between these two areas of art become hard to spot, in fact invisible.

Jesse Aron Green’s celebrated multi-component installation Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Medicalized Indoor Gymnastics) (2008) comprises an 80-minute projected video and associated sculptural and photographic works and drawings, all of which were recently acquired by the Harvard Art Museums. The installation takes as its point of departure a book of the same name by German physician Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–1861). Schreber’s 1858 publication was a popular manual of exercises prescribed for “the maintenance of health and vigor of body and mind.” Green’s installation elegantly and provocatively explores cultural tropes and ideologies of the disciplined body through the lens of modernist art—its operations and its legacies.

Green’s video presents the 45 exercises explained in Schreber’s book, enacted by 16 male performers on wooden platforms arranged as a 4 x 4 grid. The camera documents their movements in a 360-degree tracking shot, which ends at the same moment the performers finish the exercises. A series of photographs that document each of the 45 exercises, drawings, three concrete sculptures, 16 wooden platforms, and a 24-hour backwards-moving clock in homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres are also included.

The exhibition is made possible by support from the Widgeon Point Charitable Foundation and the José Soriano Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.