Presentation and Q&A with Noah Simblist, editor of Tania Bruguera’s The Francis Effect.

Tania Bruguera’s The Francis Effect (2014) was a performance in the guise of a political campaign, aiming to request that the Pope grant Vatican City citizenship to all immigrants and refugees. Stemming from this performance’s provocative inception in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas, Tania Bruguera: The Francis Effect book-project explores Bruguera’s work as an artist, activist, and Cuban immigrant to the US and the tension created with art’s pragmatic, activist, and aesthetic possibilities. As a conversational, collaborative project, the book-project mirrors Bruguera’s artistic practice with essays and conversations with the artist and the curators who supported its presentation. In addition, the book-project includes commissioned essays by art historian Our Literal Speed; sociologist Saskia Sassen; and historian Nicolas Terpstra.

For this talk, Simblist will describe the unique process of the book-project with the artist and the ways it was designed to illuminate layers of meaning; provide examples of impact, and introduce models for social action with cultural dimensions. Noah Simblist is associate professor and former chair of Painting + Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. As a curator and writer, he examines how contemporary artists address history. Simblist has contributed to such journals as Art in America, Art Journal, Modern Painters, and Terremoto. His curatorial projects include Commonwealth at the ICA at VCU (2020), Aissa Deebi: Exile is Hard Work at Birzeit University Museum (2017), False Flags at Pelican Bomb, New Orleans (2016), and Emergency Measures at the Power Station, Dallas (2015).