Magnum Foundation invites you to celebrate the launch of Hard Times are Fighting Times by Alice Proujansky, a Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories Fellow. Alice will be joined by photographer Justine Kurland and Columbia professor Thai Jones for a conversation and Q&A, followed by a book signing and celebration.
Monday, December 4, 2023 | 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM ET
In-person and online
Doors open at 6:00 PM
59 East 4th St, 7W | New York, NY 10003
About the Book:
Most families don’t have their parents’ FBI files in dusty boxes. Alice Proujansky’s does.
Hard Times are Fighting Times describes the legacy of Proujansky’s parents’ participation in radical leftist groups like Weatherman, the Native American Solidarity Committee and Prairie Fire that sought to overthrow imperialism and capitalism through organizing and revolution. Books are now available online through Gnomic Books, and will be for purchase and signing at the event.
“My parents fell in love while planning a 60,000-person demonstration in 1976 (their friends joked it would never last: my mom was a Marxist, my dad an anarcho-communist). The story of their activism is the story of me. Radicals like my parents believed that another world was possible, that together they could forge a more just future for humanity. Their utopian dreams of Marxist-Leninism, feminist rigor and fairness are deeply compelling – but also intensely rigid.”
About the speakers:
Alice Proujansky is a photographer looking at family labor: birth, work, motherhood and identity and is a Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories Fellow. Her book, Hard Times are Fighting Times, is a project about the legacy of radical activism in her family. She is also working on photo essays about culturally-responsive birth work and photography and visual literacy workshops. Alice has taught photography since 2002 and was the lead curriculum writer for On Sight, Aperture’s photography and visual literacy curriculum. Her first book, Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids, was published by Aperture. Follow Alice on Instagram.
Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation. Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others.
Thai Jones teaches the history of radicalism and social movements at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004). He served as historical consultant and co-writer on the award-winning podcast Mother Country Radicals (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of national publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, and the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Hard Times are Fighting Times was made possible with support from the Magnum Foundation, the Peleh Fund, and Polycopies & Co.
Magnum Foundation is in an elevator building and has a restroom that is wheelchair accessible and gender-neutral. For access requests or questions, please contact events@magnumfoundation.org. As a small team, we will better be able to respond to requests made at least one week in advance.
Masks are currently appreciated, but not required. We may provide additional instructions ahead of the event.
Magnum Foundation events are made possible by the Henry Nias Foundation and our Circle of Friends.
