Previous Projects
ART-IN-PLACE 2022
As a response to the violence epidemic in the United States, CNL Projects and Terrain Exhibitions relaunched ART-IN-PLACE for late summer 2022. Over two years after the first iteration, ART-IN-PLACE continued its efforts to bring people together to call us to action through the experience of public art. Over 100 artists across the country participated in this public art project.
As Curatorial and Research Associate at CNL Projects, Elise managed this project.
More information and documentation available here.
Sept 1 - Oct 15, 2022
Maria Burundarena, Silver Peninsula, Northerly Island, IL, 2022
Nadine Lollino and Rachel Damon, Light Folds, Performance at Paseo Festival in Taos, New Mexico, Sep. 16 - 17, 2022.
Open Letter
This project brought a Disabled perspective to Force and Motion, Comfort Station’s 2022 performance series. Open Letter approached addressed the series’ larger questions of place-making and complicating the performer-audience dynamic by exploring relationship-building as a form of place-making. Specifically, Open Letter dealt with care and vulnerability in relationships. How do we care for each other well? What does it feel like to be vulnerable with each other? And how do these experiences alter our connection to and/or understanding of physical space and embodiment?
In this event, four North American artists -- Erin Clark, Fran Flaherty, Ana García Jácome, and Nic Masangkay -- responded to these questions through handwritten letters addressed to recipients of their choice. They ended the letters by asking the audience to perform simple actions.
Elise was the curator for this project.
More information here.
August 28, 2022
Letters by Ana García Jácome
Performative action instructions from Erin Clark
I Invited Myself, vol. I, Eiko Otake
From January 31 to February 5, 2022, movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake occupied one entire floor of the SAIC Galleries. Working closely with her co-curator Elise Butterfield, Eiko used this rare access to gallery space, approximately 15,000 square ft, to explore new possibilities of her performance-based practice together with her media works.
Approaching 50 years as a working artist, Eiko has amassed a vast catalogue of video and film work. Her project at SAIC was an active inquiry into how she can share this trove of material moving forward. She developed an exploratory and relational choreography of the gallery space, media works, her body now and past, and her viewers. Visitors saw her as a narrator, conversationalist, and performer, who from time to time, betrayed or sabotaged her own choreography.
During her 10 days in the public incubator of the gallery, Eiko was present during all open hours. As part of the programming for this experimental exhibition, Eiko conducted performative tours of the gallery. This experimental residency was in the spirit of her ongoing Duet Project: Distance is Malleable. In addition to the duet of co-curation, Eiko dueted with landscape, artist partners, and camera. Ultimately, Eiko's presence was a dance with each viewer's gaze.
Elise was the curator for this project.
More information here. Documentation available here.
January 31 - February 5, 2022
Photo by Elise Butterfield
Photo by Maddie May
They did not hesitate, Eiko Otake
They did not hesitate was a site-specific performance on August 7th, 2021, created and performed by MacArthur Fellow Eiko Otake. Born and raised in post-war Japan but a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist. Combining movements and monologues, this ritual of mourning invited viewers to imagine what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week 76 years ago. Her frail, unadorned body also intersected with the site of the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. Eiko asked: How can we stop celebrating the history of massive killings and technology that made it possible? How can we learn to hesitate against momentum? How can we survive?
As Abakanowicz Fellow at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Center for Curatorial Research and Practice, Elise served as curator, producer, and dramaturg of this work. Elise also produced a workshop led by Eiko Otake and connected to this project titled Body-Based Democracy.
More information and documentation available here.
August 7, 2021
Photo by Ming Tian
Photo by Ming Tian
emerge
emerge is an online journal produced by graduate students in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Master of Arts Administration and Policy program, featuring collaborations with guest editors from the SAIC community. It features original, pioneering theory and practice in the field of arts administration and related domains. We seek to engage with issues related to arts administration as a professional practice in order to broaden the overall scope of discourse.
The 2021 issue of emerge was the Dream issue, which asserted that dreaming is a method that enables praxis in the face of necessary change.
Elise was an associate editor for this project.
The full issue is available here. Elise’s writing can be found here, here, and here.
April, 2021
Isabel Vargas’ “Untitled,” 2021.
Marcelese Cooper’s “The Messenger,” 2021.