How Do We Continue in Public?

In this nightlong program, we face the necessity of going on in an age of personal, systemic, ecological, and international polycrises. Organized by Chloë Bass and Cory Tamler, our long-form, open conversational gathering explores continuity through perspectives such as disability, geologic time and the climate disaster, gentrification, internationalism/anti-nationalism, and abolition.

Drawing on the ambivalences of the nocturnal season, How Do We Continue in Public? asks how we can keep building our collective future from fragmented, often questionable material. Invited facilitators will contribute texts and knowledge to a six-hour, open conversation that guests can enter, leave, and return to on their own rhythms, in a space full of comforts to see us through the long night. Join us to read, rest, and rediscover wonder through togetherness in uncertainty.

Those who reserve a spot are welcome to arrive at any time before midnight during the event's long run. Guests are also welcome to come and go throughout the evening. If we are above capacity when you arrive, we will provide a room where people can wait cozily until more space becomes available.

TBA!

The event will take place in the Westbeth Community Room (6:30pm–10:30pm), followed by a silent procession and outdoor experience departing at 11 PM. The Community Room is wheelchair accessible, and offers a wheelchair accessible gender neutral restroom. Limited seating will be available in the Community Room; the outdoor experience will be ambulatory, and involve standing. Please dress appropriately for the weather.

More accessibility details will be shared soon. If you require ASL interpretation, or have another access requirement, please contact Cory and Chloë at [email protected] by November 30 and we will make every effort to provide it.

This program is the final event in SPCUNY's year-long series "How Do We ________ in Public?" (more on the series below). Food, drink, and comfort will be provided.

Produced by Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), How Do We ______ in Public?, is a new, free public programming series of four experimental events taking place across New York City throughout 2026. Organized by the SPCUNY core team of artists, educators, and scholars (Chloë Bass, Tom Finkelpearl, Catherine LaSota, Nicolás Dumit Estevez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Gregory Sholette, and Cory Tamler), the series expands SPCUNY’s existing work and reaffirms its commitment to strengthening socially engaged artistic practice, especially at a moment when culture faces sustained attacks and freedom of expression is increasingly constrained.

Since its founding, SPCUNY has centered artist-led research and projects and supported individual artists who teach, study, or work at City University of New York (CUNY) campuses through its Fellowships. Building on this foundation while making a deliberate shift, How Do We ______ in Public? is designed intentionally to engage a broader, non-CUNY public through the SPCUNY team’s collective years of producing, experiencing, researching, and teaching social practice within a public university. Framed as an open-ended, collective experiment, each program is a participatory proposition exploring methods of being, thinking, and enduring together in today’s complex sociopolitical landscape.

How Do We ______ in Public? responds to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the series tests new forms of social practice in real time, foregrounding experimentation, solidarity, and public accountability.

Across four interconnected programs, How Do We ______ in Public? asks how we study, move, keep secret(s), and continue together in public when the infrastructures that once supported those actions are fraying. As SPCUNY assesses its organizational moment and contemplates its evolving legacy, the series will culminate in early 2027 with a reconvening of participants to reflect on the insight, tensions, and possibilities surfaced through these programs.

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist asking how the named and unnamed feelings we hold in common shape our civic society. Through installation, conversation, performance, text, sculpture, and media-based practices, her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent or upcoming projects with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the ICA at VCU, St. Louis Art Museum, Creative Time, the Buffalo AKG, Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, The Kitchen, and elsewhere.

Cory Tamler is an artist and dramaturg working across performance, writing, and social practice. Cory is a founding member of In Kinship Collective (Wabanaki/Maine), the author of A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography (2022, Laboratory for Social Choreography/Segal Center Publications), and a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Growing up in a city of three rivers, she has worked with bodies of water in Pittsburgh, Maine, Helsinki, Palau, Brandenburg, and in Berlin, co-designing and leading walks, paddles, and residencies with marine biologists, anthropologists, and with other artists across disciplines. She walks the Panke from its source area near Bernau to its two mouths in the center of Berlin.

Event venue & nearby stays

Westbeth Community Room, 155 Bank Street, New York, United States

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