Printed Matter, Inc. is pleased to present a one-night event for Thomas Ray Willis’ transcript NYU MFA Art Critique. on March 8, 2019 at 6pm. The program will include a live reading-performance featuring twenty-two participants, recreating the subject of the book: Willis’ graduate school art critique. A reception will follow.

Join the event on facebook here.

NYU MFA Art Critique is 57-page transcript that engages with contemporary topics such as affect, surveillance, data collection, visibility, and art etiquette. However, it fails to unpack those of the artist’s sincerity, trauma, and the problematic perspective of him as a white male in this cultural moment. Did Sam’s role distract or reveal the purpose of the piece? What would you have said if you were in the room?

“Samuel Hitten is a professional courtroom stenographer. On a typical day, he records auto-insurance claims and corporate meetings. But on the morning of May 2, 2018 he reports on something new: himself as the subject matter. ‘What is going on here?’ someone demands. Speaking over the typing of his shorthand machine, a group of 20 faculty and students from NYU’s Department of Art ask him, ‘are you part of the show,’ and ‘this is a recording?’ Sam writes their every word. MFA student Thomas Ray Willis hired him to take notes for his graduate school art critique. Neither are certain what the group is more frustrated with: the outsider stenographer or the artist defending 20 watercolors paintings made from his tears. What starts for Sam as a trial of an artist defending his emotional expression––ranging from a family death to childhood nostalgia––devolves into a heated debate about the group’s own feelings of testifying under oath.”

-From the catalog description

Copies of the book––which were recently entered into the Museum of Modern Art Archive, Whitney Museum Library, and New York Public Library––will be available for purchase the night of the event and are available online.

Thomas Ray Willis is an artist working across all forms of media. Before pursuing an MFA at NYU, Willis received his BFA in painting and drawing from UNLV in 2009. His hometown of Las Vegas––a dichotomy of community and spectacle, consumer and producer, reenactment and reality––informs his outlook and work.