Criss Cross: The NYU Gallatin Podcast - A forum for conversations on collaborations at NYU Gallatin, hosted by KC Trommer
Our guests include Gallatin faculty members Nina Katchadourian, Eugenia Kisin, Matthew Stanley, George Shulman, Kwami Coleman, Stephen Duncombe, Shatima Jones, and their student and alumni collaborators.
Listen in via NYU Stream via the links below or subscribe to Criss Cross on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Logo: Chris Baker (BA '22)
To Feel Something Not of Our World
"How can you make what seems like a disadvatage into an advantage? Don't see the limitation as a limitation, see if you can see it as an asset."
–Nina Katchadourian
For the first episode of our second season, Gallatin faculty member Nina Katchadourian spoke with Criss Cross host KC Trommer. A celebrated interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects, Katchadourian spent a good piece of the pandemic working on a collaboration. Her collaborator, Douglas Robertson, survived a 1972 shipwreck and was the subject of a book that Katchadourian has read over forty times, Survive the Savage Sea. Katchadourian’s work engages with self-imposed constraints and this collaboration is no exception. It was, in fact, a constraint within a constraint, with the artist creating a collaborative project in the pandemic about an event that forced a group of six into a dinghy to survive in the Pacific as castaways for 38 days. Both the project and the artist ask what each of us can learn from working within and against the limitations placed on us.
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Nina Katchadourian
To Feel Something Not of Our World - at the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH, through April 24, 2022; the show will open at Pace London in July 2022
Survive the Savage Sea by Dougal Robertson
Last Voyage of the Lucette by Douglas Roberston
Natural Selection, an exhibition of older works and the new "Fake Plants" series, on view at Pace Hong Kong from November 19 to December 23, 2021
For this, our first episode, host KC Trommer speaks with Gallatin faculty member Eugenia Kisin and Gallatin senior Anna Van Dine about Overflow, an exhibition that was shown in The Gallatin Galleries in the summer of 2019. The curation of Overflow was unusual in that Kisin and her fellow curators, Kristy Robertson, and Keith Miller, collaborated with students from Kisin’s “Art of the Anthropocene” course to curate and mount the show.
Recorded in September 2019 at Studios at Stern
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
“We like to forget how hard it is to do science and how it could have been different. A simple story of science seems more true, more convincing.”
–Matthew Stanley, Einstein’s War
Our second episode is a conversation with Matthew Stanley, professor of the history of science at Gallatin and author of the 2019 book Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Among the Vicious Nationalism of World War I. Stanley talks with host KC Trommer about the collaboration between Einstein and British astronomer AE Eddington that helped change our understanding of the universe.
Recorded in August 2019 at NYU Gallatin
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Stanley
AE Eddington
NYU News: "Einstein's Greatest Idea Only Made It Out of Germany Thanks to a Pacifist English Astronomer"
Mileva Marić
Fritz Haber
What the If?
“What's thrilling about teaching, what's exciting about teaching, and always satisfying about teaching, is that you are involved in people discovering their own intellectual and imaginative capacity. And it's an incredible thing to witness." –George Shulman
In our third episode, KC speaks with scholar and political theorist George Shulman about his teaching at Gallatin, the history of the School, the ways in which speech and political theory are forms of storytelling, as well as his teaching with the Prison Education Program, the enduring appeal of Moby Dick–and the dangers of the political moment we are living through.
Recorded in December 2019 at Stern Studios.
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
George Shulman
NYU Prison Education Program
"The ship could sink."
"One of the advantages that anyone in the creative arts has is having the muscle to kind of shake yourself out of routines and to remain an eternal student." –Kwami Coleman
For our fourth episode, host KC Trommer speaks with musician and Gallatin faculty member Kwami Coleman and alumna Rosie K (BA ’08) about 4th Wave, the Gallatin Summer Music Intensive, for a discussion about collaboration, improvisation, and music-making. Recorded in August 2020.
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Kwami Coleman
Rosie K
4th Wave Playlist 2019:
Ethan First, Jack Helfrich, Erica Mancini
“Mason Of The Corpulent” by Pazgeek
Saransh Desai-Chowdhry
“Facade”
Jack Helfrich
“I'm Trapped in my Car” by Meuthazorxd
Ethan First
“Clean”
Erica Mancini
“Le Rossignol”
Henry Sheeran
“on the stairwell, we just fought ft. my curious dog”
Breezy Smoak
“b4rlin”
"This moment will pass, but the general crisis is not going to pass. Art is good when it can respond to a particular moment, art is good when it can deliver on particular concrete objectives, but art is great when it helps us imagine that a different world is possible–and not just help us imagine it, but create scenarios in which we can feel it, we can experience it." –Stephen Duncombe
If the COVID-19 pandemic has asked us all to break with our past and to imagine a new world, what could it look like? How do activists maintain their engagement in the face of so much turbulence? In our fifth episode, host KC Trommer spoke with Center for Artistic Activism co-founder Stephen Duncombe and activist and Gallatin student Sophie Jones about their thoughts on activism and what the social, racial, and economic upheavals of the past year have made possible—and the work still ahead.
"By engaging in activism, I've met so many people and become so inspired by the care that people have had for each other. That's really what's been keeping me going: if we can feel this way in such an intense moment and everything is so disheartening in the world, but we can find joy together through engaging in this process, there has to be some good that will come out of it." –Sophie Jones
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Duncombe
Center for Artistic Activism
Occupy Wall Street
Thomas More's Utopia
ICE Raids NYC
CORE
The V,OID
A Seat at Our Table
“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”—Shirley Chisholm
What does it mean to invite all to the table for a conversation about Black womanhood? What if the space is shared and the invitation and is an open one? What might we discuss and what might we learn? For our sixth episode, host KC Trommer spoke with sociologist and Gallatin faculty member Shatima Jones and her former student Cheyenne Porcher about A Seat at Our Table, a collaboration between Professor Jones' courses, "Detangling the Business of Black Women's Hair" and "Black Experiences in Literature, Movies, and Television," and Gallatin's online platform for student reading, writing, and research, Confluence.
Photograph by Colin Jerolmack (2021), after Carrie Mae Weems
Show Notes
FULL TRANSCRIPT
A Seat at Our Table - Confluence
Shatima J. Jones
Cheyenne Porcher’s “The Black Women Boss Ladies of Shondaland”
Colin Jerolmack
Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series
Solange, A Seat at the Table
NYU Gallatin IG: @nyugallatin