NEW PUBLIC FORUM7–9 P.M.The Cooper Union for the 
Advancement of Science and ArtFrederick P. Rose Auditorium
41 Cooper Square, New York NY 10003Free and open to the public
Live on radio.cooper.edu

NEW PUBLIC FORUM is a student-led series of lectures and demonstrations aimed at instituting public dialogue between various fields as they evolve and adapt to a changing world. With actions and words, we attempt to rattle or dismount the stability of entrenched systems and constructs, speculating on evolving approaches to creative and technical disciplines.  

The series will highlight critical practices that synthesize historical and current developments with an emphasis on speculation over retrospective preoccupation. The program constitutes a public forum for exchange, towards new critical approaches across fields and geographies.





1.29.26 Richard Maxwell The Audience

I had a dream last night where i was failing a class , i thought i understood what they were talking about and i just plain didnt . the prefessor wrote 'see me' and gave me a grade of 41. 
recently the press person for the theater i worked at laughed at me because i could not tell her how many people were in my cast.   it was either 11 or 12.  but  i will speak to the children  about what i have learned.  my gpa in college was 3.2.  .

        

RICHARD MAXWELL is an artist and the artistic director of New York City Players since its inception in 1999. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, as well as two Obie awards, a Creative Capital grant, a Spalding Gray Award and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Mr. Maxwell’s work has been commissioned by ICA London, Barbican Centre, Festival D’Automne, Kunsten Festival, Vienna Festival, and presented in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Mr. Maxwell’s book Theater for Beginners (2015) is his reflection on what it means to perform. His video works have been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Greene Naftali Gallery, and White Columns, and his Port Authority paintings were shown at Six Summit Gallery in 2021. Mr. Maxwell studied acting at Illinois State University and co-founded the Cook County Theater Department in Chicago. He has resided in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City for the last 30 years.

2.26.26 Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa Parallel Acts

Some unfolding thoughts on the works of Zoe Leonard (To the River/Al Río) and Lucy Raven (Dam Breach LIC (2024) & Depositions).

STANLEY WOLUKAU-WANAMBWA (b. 1980, UK/Uganda) is an artist, writer, and editor. His recent publications include INDEX 2025 (Roma, 2025), “ECHO—LOCATION” (e-flux Journal #153), Indeterminacy: Thoughts on Time, the Image, and Race(ism), co-written with David Campany (MACK, 2022); Dark Mirrors (MACK, 2021); and the photographic monograph Hiding in Plain Sight, co-authored with Ben Alper (Harun Farocki Institute, 2020). His solo exhibition, Scene at Eastman (George Eastman Museum, 2024-5) closed in Spring 2025, and is the subject of an eponymous short film (directed by Adam Golfer, 2025).

4.09.26 Nina Rappaport Hybrid Urban Factory As Community

Nina Rappaport will discuss the concept of the Hybrid Urban Factory in which light industries are mixed in buildings with other community, arts, cultural, and social uses based on ideas of social condensers and participation. She will show international examples along with clips from her Worker’s Lunch Box films.

NINA RAPPAPORT is an urbanist, a professor in history/theory at Kean University School of Public Architecture. She directs Vertical Urban Factory, a think tank and consultancy, which focuses on the intersection of production spaces, architecture, and the role of the factory worker. She is author of Vertical Urban Factory (Actar 2015, paperback 2020) and curator of the eponymous traveling exhibition (2011–24); author of Hybrid Factory/Hybrid City and the symposium Hybrid Urban Factory at Yale School of Architecture in November 2023. She co-edited Design for Urban Manufacturing (Routledge 2020). She created a series of films of factory workers called A Worker’s Lunch Box, which has been displayed in Philadelphia and New York and with Vertical Urban Factory.           
She is Publications Director at the Yale School of Architecture where she edited the magazine Constructs for 24 years and continues to manage the book series and exhibition catalogs. She has written significant essays on urban production. She has taught at numerous New York City area universities and lectures internationally. She co- founded Docomomo US and New York/Tri-State, in 1996, and is on the steering committee of the Western Queens Community Land Trust.

4.16.26 Eduardo Cadava 'Every photograph is of the sun’: Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains

This presentation will be organized around Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains, his most extended reflection on photography. Taking its point of departure from a series of 34 photographs of Athens taken by the French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme during the course of fifteen years, the book raises a whole set of philosophical questions about the nature of photography but also about light, representation, truth, time, death, mourning, subjectivity, identity, archives, singularity and repetition, memory and forgetting, presence and absence, and the fugitive character of cities. As such, the book is also a training manual on how to read—and not just photographs. Written in the form of a series of stills—to recreate the experience of looking at a series of photographs-in-prose—the book also enacts, in the movement of its sentences and paragraphs, what it wishes to convey. It therefore gives us an opportunity to think about what it means to imagine a language or form that can match what we wish to explore—whether it be a book, a sentence, a set of questions, or even the past, the present, or the future.

EDUARDO CADAVA is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, Paper Graveyards, and, with Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red, and co-editor of Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He has curated exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum. He is co-directing with Eyal Weizman a multiyear project on the relation between political conflict and climate change titled Conflict Shorelines that has included field work in Amazonia and the Negev desert, and collaborating with Fazal Sheikh on a project titled Exposure on the ruination of the Utah landscape by uranium mining and oil and gas drilling and its consequences on native communities.

4.23.26 Will Holder “The real codex is invisible; I’ll continue working on the false one”*

Talk & reading copies, Will Holder          
On measure, reporting, accounting, transcription, “machine data […]  throwing light on the role of emotion,” love [what the world needs now, is…], “non-dominating authority”, and “other [musical and material] factors” of conversation, sequencing and song.

“The essence of my music is that the syllables go by as fast as they do in the American English language and the pitch stresses, which make one syllable more important than the other syllable, are all within a range of half an octave. It's like you squeeze it in one direction and expand it in another direction. I've always been interested in tempo because it's a big, big factor in vocal music. The other factors, like melody, have been used up for the time being.” Robert Ashley, 2003

*Alice Notley, “Diamond”, Culture of One, Penguin, 2011

Brussels-based typographer WILL HOLDER edited and published F.R.DAVID, from 2007–24, a journal concerned with the organisation of reading & writing in the arts (co-published with de Appel, Amsterdam 2007–16, and KW, Berlin 2017–24). In 2017, Holder was inaugural fellow of “A Year With…”, at KW, Berlin: a year-long programme placing publishing, writing and documentation in parallel with the institution’s exhibition programme. Holder furnished and ran a private residency with 13 guests, publicly discussing and producing publications, on site at KW. This period laid the foundations for uh books, and Will’s work with Alice Notley will be the last book it will publish. The singular “uh” suggests an adaptive whole of a plural “books”. The disparity between logotype (a) and its phonetic “uh” (say out loud: “a sandwich, a wallet […] a giraffe”) is suggestive of the publisher’s work with artists, musicians, dancers, readers & audience using conversation as model and means for writing; by way of speech, performance and transcription.

Holder has received a Paul Hamlyn Award in support of his practise, and has had most recent solo displays of his work at British Art Show, (various venues) UK; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Institut Funder Bakker, Denmark; Oscillations Festival, Brussels; Kunstverein, München; and Alma Sarif, Brussels. Amongst many others, Will has made books with Cady Noland, Ricardo Basbaum, Robert Ashley, Michael Stevenson, The Otolith Group, Falke Pisano, Lucy Skaer; and he has published the work of poets Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley, and H.D..


Program:
Agatha Carlson, Mika Pinhasi, Nina Diwan
Identity:
Mika Pinhasi
Broadcast:
Cooper Radio Collective (Abraham Marx, Tre Brown, Evy Ray, Agatha Carlson)
Steering Committee:
Zaid Arshad, Dylan Clark, Fia Backström, Nada Ayad, Jess Kuronen, Matthew Bower, Cristóbal Lehyt, Jayne Miller, Nora Akawi



Thanks to Doug Ashford, Adriana Farmiga, Alexander Tochilovsky, Alya Miratti, and innumerable others.

Supported by The Cooper Union Grant Program and The Cooper Union Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.