<< Vehicle
City Artist Corps Grant
and brought to you in collaboration with
Made possible through aOct 29: Nate Harrison
7pm at The Park Church Co-Op
129 Russell Street
Brooklyn, NY, 11222
City Artist Corps Grant
and brought to you in collaboration with
The Sunview Luncheonette
“Pour le Peuple” (2021)
56 min. HD video, color with sound
Pour le Peuple is an essay film that retraces the history of one of modern American art’s most iconic public sculptures, La Grande Vitesse. The film examines how a local citizenry has given meaning to such a cherished work of art, and it also paints the portrait of a midwest city in all its complexity: one comprised of progressive and creative communities that also voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election. La Grande Vitesse (roughly translating from French to “The Great Swiftness” or “The Grand Rapids”) is one of sculptor Alexander Calder’s large-scale metal “stabiles,” erected in June 1969 in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. “The Calder,” as Grand Rapidians refer to the sculpture, was also the very first public art work to be commissioned by the then, newly-established National Endowment for the Arts. Yet La Grande Vitesse met a lukewarm reception at the time of its installation from a mostly conservative, Protestant population that had little patience for modern, abstract art. The art work's peculiar legal status has has further contributed to its ongoing controversy.
Nate Harrison is an artist and writer working at the intersection of intellectual property, cultural production and the formation of creative processes in modern media. His work has been exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg, among others. Nate has several publications current and forthcoming, and has also lectured at a variety of institutions, including Experience Music Project, Seattle, the Art and Law Program, New York and SOMA Summer, Mexico City. From 2004-2008 he co-directed the Los Angeles project space ESTHETICS AS A SECOND LANGUAGE. Nate is the recipient of the 2011 Videonale Prize as well as the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research. Nate earned his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego with his dissertation Appropriation Art and United States Intellectual Property Since 1976. Nate also received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts. Nate serves on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/361452291
More info: https://nkhstudio.com/pages/bio.html