16.05.2016 / 1:00 p.m.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Pkwy. Chicago, United States.
Commencement Speech
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Tania Bruguera: Commencement Speaker
A leading performance artist, Tania Bruguera (MFA 2001) researches relationships between art and politics, specifically transformations of social affect into political effectiveness and institutional structures of collective memory, education, and politics, and some of her performances interrogate the Cuban Revolution’s failed promises and evoke the realities masked by propaganda and mass-media interpretation. One of Foreign Policy magazine’s “100 Leading Global Thinkers,” and shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award 2016, she won the 2015 Herb Alpert Award, served as a Yale World Fellow, and inaugurated the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs’ artist-in-residence program. Bruguera also helped create the first document on cultural freedom and rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. In 2010 she was the first recipient of the Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize for emerging artists. After the Cuban government detained Bruguera and confiscated her passport as she attempted a public performance, she opened Havana’s Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism. She lives and works in New York, New Haven, Connecticut, and Havana, Cuba.