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Considered among the most important political artists of the last dozen years, The Yes Men are a group of culture-jamming activists who practice what they call “Identity Correction.” By posing as spokespersons for prominent organizations and powerful entities, The Yes Men create spoof websites and newspapers, stage productive interventions, and appear in conferences and TV shows to highlight how corporations and government organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public. Keep it Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men exhibits The Yes Men's practice through five fantastical scenes of elaborate costumes fabricated for their bold interventions, slapstick videos and PowerPoints presented at business conferences, outrageous posters and props, scripts, sketches, research materials and selected ephemera from their personal collections. Keep It Slick is on view April 30 through June 5, 2010 in the DiverseWorks Main Gallery with a "business casual" opening reception Friday, April 30, from 6:00 to 8:00pm.
About The Yes Men
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who couldn't hold down a job until they became representatives of Exxon, Halliburton, Dow Chemical, and the U.S. federal government. As The Yes Men, they use humor, truth and lunacy to bring media attention to the crimes of their unwilling employers. Their film, The Yes Men Fix the World, won the audience award at this year's Belin Film Festival, the Grierson Award for Most Entertaining Documentary, and went on to become a box-office sensation, only just barely surpassed by Avatar.
About Astria Suparak
Astria Suparak has curated international exhibitions, screening and events at The Kitchen, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, Anthology Film Archives, P.S. 1, FotoFest Biennial, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Participant Inc., Yale University and the Liverpool Biennial, in addition to numerous alternative spaces. In the last ten years, she has presented close to 300 shows in ten countries. Suparak was the director of the media series at Pratt Institute from 1997 to 2000 and of Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery from 2006 to 2007. She is currently the director of Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, where she curated Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men and Your Town, Inc.: Big Box Reuse with Julia Christensen, and co-organized Contestational Cartographies Symposium.
Suparak edited the Yes Men Activity Book (2010) and her writing has appeared in NY Arts, The Independent and Heeb, and in the upcoming anthologies Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader, and A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas. Suparak's drawings have been published in feminist journal LTTR, photo essay book I NY, British Art Magazine Black Diamond, and Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents. Her curatorial work is included in the collections of institutions including the Orange County Museum of Art, University of California, San Diego, FACT Centre, and Northwestern University.
Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men is curated by Astria Suparak and organized by Feldman Gallery at Pacific Northwest College of Art and Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University.
