Sur Rodney Sur performs Free Advice a real time collaboration with Hope Sandrow

Whether expected or not, it's always encouraging to find and receive free advice on the road.

Sur Rodney (Sur), July 6 2008

About the Artists

Sur Rodney Sur

Enigmatically recognized as an artistic collaborator, poet, eccentric, curator, and community archivist —Sur is most renown for his former position as co-director of the Gracie Mansion Gallery from 1983-1988. During the early to mid 1990s he served as a curator and archivist at Kenkeleba House, a Lower Manhattan African-American art institution and was hired to archive the New School University’s art collection.

His work with artists estates, at cause to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, led him to serve on the board of Visual AIDS, beginning in 1994, and help establish the Frank Moore Archive Project a support for artists with HIV/AIDS, and their estates. After using the archive to co-curate the exhibitions AIDS/Communities Arts Communities: Realizing the Archive Project at the Cyclorama in Boston (1995) and The Living Testament of the Blood Fairies at Artist’s Space and Printed Matter at DIA (1996), the Frank Moore Archive has provided an invaluable resource for curators and publishing projects while producing a monthly on-line web gallery by invited curators internationally.

Sur is currently editing a collection of writings on his experiences with the New York art world that begin in 1972 while continuing his work with artists and artist’s estates. He lives and works in lower Manhattan and maintains respective residences in Montreal and Colindale, Cape Breton Island, Canada with his lover, and sometimes collaborator, Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, responsible for announcing their wedding during a recreation of an Happening at a Judson Memorial Church celebrating their mutual artist friend Al Hansen.

Currently Sur has been archiving a complete record of artworks produced by George Deem (1932-2007) for the Estate, to be launched on the web launch; archiving the records of African American conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady for the archives at Wellesley; archiving the work of his photographer father for the Special Collections at Concordia University; setting up the Cloudsmith Foundation and editing projects for Money for Food Press, an artists book project founded by Geoffrey Hendricks & Brian Buczak in 1976.

Ulf Skogsbergh

Performance Concept Live Performance Sur Rodney Sur

Project Concept, Set, Live Performance Director, Camera (Digital Stills and Video) Film concept and Edit Hope Sandrow

Digital Audio Ulf Skogsbergh

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art ; Genius Loci; Summer of Love, Found and Lost