SEARCH: A Conversation with Julia Rooney, Mira Dayal, and Stephanie Sparling Williams

Join Artspace New Haven and the Yale University Art Gallery for a roundtable entitled, “SEARCH: A Conversation with Julia Rooney, Mira Dayal, and Stephanie Sparling Williams.” Engaging the concept of SEARCH, with a particular eye to its changing meaning since 1998— the year that Google launched its eponymous search engine—the conversation will draw upon research, texts, and artworks produced across the humanities and sciences. Rooney, Dayal, and Sparling Williams will speculate upon the ways in which SEARCH is performed on materials ranging from archives to sidewalks, in spaces both digital and analog, asking: As citizens of a technologically-surveilled world, how is SEARCH being used for systemic disenfranchisement on the one hand, or conversely, being harnessed as an act of radical empowerment on the other? And what critical role do artists, writers, curators, and educators play in this process? Following the conversation there will be a public Q&A.

This event is part of the programming series for the exhibition Footnotes and other embedded stories, on view April 30–June 25, 2022. As an in-person program, the exhibition opening will be limited to 50 audience members at a time in compliance with COVID-19 venue safety. Artspace New Haven encourages mask-wearing and social distancing. Please register for this program.

Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in New York. Her studio work often involves laborious, critical uses of language, material, and site, and has been shown at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, OCHI, Hesse Flatow, Kunstverein Dresden, Gymnasium, Lubov, NURTUREart, NARS Foundation, Abrons Art Center, and other spaces. Dayal is also co-organizer of the residency program rehearsal, co-publisher of the collaborative artist publication prompt:, founder of the Journal of Art Criticism, and Ideas Editor at Art in America.

Julia Rooney (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores perception, sociality, and the increasing pressure of algorimithcally-designed systems on human behavior. While rooted in painting, her practice often engages other analogue modes of production including postal correspondence and papermaking. Her recent solo show @SomeHighTide featured a series of phone-sized paintings (2×2-in), installed both physically at Arts+Leisure Gallery (NYC, 2021) and digitally on her eponymous Instagram account, which she intermittently reactivates for site-specific projects as an ongoing form of critique and inquiry. Her ongoing series “paper paper”—made entirely of pulpified and re-formed newspapers—was recently exhibited at The Weatherspoon Art Museum’s Art on Paper exhibition (Greensboro, NC, 2021), and has had solo exhibitions at Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, 2019) and Real Eyes Gallery (Adams, MA, 2021). Recent group exhibitions include Affective Histories (Hesse Flatow, NYC), Out of Office (Collar Works, Troy NY), Painting Abstraction: 197X-Today (Zeit Contemporary Art, NYC) and Patterns of Influence: Artists Who Teach (The Painting Center, NYC). Rooney has attended residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA (Assets for Artists, North Adams MA), Engaging Artists (More Art, NYC), SU CASA (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC), and the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT); and in 2022, will be an Artist in Residence at The Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA). Rooney received her BA in Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College in 2011, and her MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art in 2018. She is currently a 2021-2022 Happy and Bob Doran CT Artist in Residence.

Stephanie Sparling Williams is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She holds a Doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California (USC) and a Certificate in Visual Studies, also from USC. Her scholarly work is invested in art and African Americans, and the space of the museum. Related interests include material histories, cross cultural exchange, strategies of address, and contemporary art that engages with the American past. Her book on feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language is the first monograph dedicated to the artist’s forty-year oeuvre. Examining O’Grady’s use of language, both written and spoken, Sparling Williams charts the artist’s strategic use of direct address—the dialectic posture her art takes in relationship to its viewers—to trouble the field of vision and claim a voice in the late 1970s through the 1990s, when her voice was seen as “out of turn” in the art world. Speaking Out of Turn situates O’Grady’s significant contributions within the history of American conceptualism and performance art while also attending to the work’s heightened visibility in the contemporary moment, revealing both the marginalization of O’Grady in the past and an urgent need to revisit her art in the present.