Heritage in Practice /// A Panel Discussion

PlySpace Resident Co-Fellows Sydney Pursel and Sarah Trad will be joined by guest artist Toby Kaufmann-Buhler for a special PlySpace panel discussion about the intersections of personal family heritage and art practice. Tania Said, the Director of Education for the David Owsley Museum of Art Ball State University, will moderate the discussion held on Thursday, November 14th from 6-8 PM at Ball State University /// Arts & Journalism Building, room 225.

This conversation will ask each of the three interdisciplinary artists to reflect on their use of personal and cultural heritage in their artistic practice. Each panelist has a unique method for working within the sometimes sticky practice of uniting art, performance, and installation with personal family heritage, genealogy, or culture. The artists will share a short presentation about their work, followed by a discussion of how they incorporate personal, family, and cultural heritage successfully into their practice.

About the artists:

Sydney Jane Brooke Campbell Maybrier Pursel is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in interactive, socially engaged, and performance arts. Through art she explores personal identity drawing from her Indigenous and Irish Catholic roots. Some of Pursel's projects are used to educate others about food politics, assimilation, language loss, appropriation, and history in addition to projects amongst her own community focusing on language acquisition, culture and art. Her work has been shown at public parks, universities, galleries, and alternative spaces in across the U.S. and Canada. Pursel received her MFA in Expanded Media at the University of Kansas and her BFA in Painting from the University of Missouri. She was the first recipient of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists, received a Rocket Grant through the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Spencer Museum of Art, was selected for the Indigenous Arts Initiative Residency program through the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission and the University of Kansas, was awarded a BeWildReWild Community Art Grant through the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. Pursel is an enrolled member of the Ioway Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.

Sarah Trad is a video artist and curator who explores the relationship between subjective and objective emotionality, navigating daily life and relationships while faced with mental illness and breaking down stereotypes of gender and narrative. Her work also highlights how mental illness and coming from marginalized backgrounds intersects with internal emotional worlds. The living embodiment of the correlation between chronic depression and binge-watching practices, her work appropriates and manipulates found footage from movies, music videos and television. Trad’s work uses recognizable narrative structures to be viewed in and outside the academy of art, as well as comment on the individual’s relationship to pop culture. Sarah has participated in other residencies, such as the 77Art Residency in Rutland, Vermont and is a recipient of the Carol N. Schmuckler Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film. Sarah’s work has been shown at The Warehouse Gallery (Syracuse, NY), Kitchen Table Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Gravy Studio and Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) and the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY). She is currently a part of the Philadelphia artist-run gallery, Little Berlin.

Toby Kaufmann-Buhler (based in Lafayette, Indiana) explores history, memory, identity and sensory perception in relation to his family and himself, within individual lives and across broad sweeps of history and culture. Kaufmann-Buhler interprets the evidence of the lives he explores as signals that pass through their respective cultures and time periods; these signals are continuously transformed as they reach our current perception of them. This work amounts to a type of surveillance of these signals, and an examination of the connections between them and himself as they manifest in the work. This work takes form in video, film, found/composed sound, text, installation, performance and interactive media. Kaufmann-Buhler was a recipient of the Individual Artist Program grant from the Indiana Arts Commission in 2018-2019, and in 2020 he will be an artist in residence at MASS MoCA. He has a BA in Fine Arts from the University of South Florida and an MA from the Royal College of Art.

Tania Said is the director of education for the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is also involved in various art, business, and community organizations in Muncie, Indiana and national professional endeavors. On lucky Friday, September 13, 2019 she was bestowed the Mayor’s Arts Educator Award.

Image credit: Toby Kaufmann-Buhler /// Moon Confusion: brightest beams (video still)

Muncie Arts and Culture Council is a nonprofit organization and the designated Arts partner for the City of Muncie. PlySpace is a program of the MACC in partnership with the City of Muncie, Ball State University School of Art and Sustainable Muncie. PlySpace is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.