During the final weekend of Creative Time and Jill Magid’s Tender Presence installation, Creative Time and the Renaissance Society will celebrate their joint publication of Jill Magid’s new catalog Tender, edited by Karsten Lund.
 
Keeping with the live context of the Tender Presence experience, Claire Bishop and Nikki Columbus will enact their essay from the book in a performative reading combining text and images. Together, the art historian and writer/editor offer an expansive mind map that derives insights from Magid’s research and their own associations and leaps of imagination.
 
The event will take place on Saturday, May 7, 2022 from 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM EDT. Event capacity is limited, and registration is required here.
 

Conceived as a story in multiple chapters, this catalogue focuses on the first two parts of Jill Magid’s ongoing Tender project, in which she explores the circulation of pennies against the shifting backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a public artwork in New York produced by Creative Time (2020-ongoing) and a new exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2021), Magid observed various intimate social and financial transactions, while also drawing out vast economic systems that are harder to see.
 
Along with images from these first two chapters of the Tender project, the book offers insights into Magid’s research process and provides additional context in three essays by Claire Bishop and Nikki Columbus, Jamilah King, and Aden Kumler. The book culminates in a conversation between the artist and curators Justine Ludwig and Karsten Lund, in which they discuss the conceptual touchstones of the project.
 

Tender Presence is an extension of Jill Magid’s 2020 Creative Time public art project, Tender, in which Magid distributed 120,000 modified U.S. pennies into the economy, equivalent to a single $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus check. The opening of Tender Presence two years later, amid a legislative and societal push to return to the “new normal,” offers a communal site for reflection on the pandemic and the reality with which many of us are attempting to reconcile: life’s inherent fragility, and the interdependence of all social, financial, and biological health. The live installation with film and sound is sited within the neoclassical landmark of the historic Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg at the Dime, a building symbolic of the 19th-century savings bank movement where low-income earners could open an account with a dime.
 
Copies of the book will be available for sale on this occasion.
 
We highly recommend that attendees make use of the drop-in hours for viewing Tender Presence prior to the event, which will be open from 12-3 PM at the historic Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg, at the Dime.
 

Claire Bishop is a critic and professor in the PhD program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Walther König, 2013). She is a Contributing Editor of Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages. She is currently working on two books: a short publication about Merce Cunningham’s Events, and a collection of essays about contemporary art and attention. Her most recent publication is a book of conversations with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Cisneros, 2020).
 
Nikki Columbus is a writer, curator, and editor based in New York. Her writing and programming focus on museums and social justice, performance, and contemporary art of the Middle East. She has written for n+1 and numerous art publications, organized public forums for the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, held editorial posts at Parkett and Artforum, and curated at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. Her conversation with Lebanese writer Mirene Arsanios was recently published in Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work (Mophradat and Archive Books, 2021). She is currently writing a book about motherhood and maternal discrimination.