Performance Talks

This episode of Performance Talks is a conversation with Rachel Helm and Rachel Churner from the Carolee Schneemann Foundation, recorded at Schneemann's home in upstate New York. In this conversation, We talk about the complexities of preserving the artist's home, a nearly 300 year old structure, as well as the intricacies of representing an artist who had such a strong presentation and idea of self through an archive, and their plans of turning her home into a residency.Rachel Helm is the manager of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and steward of Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY. Prior to her relocation to the Hudson Valley, Helm worked in public libraries in Missouri and Kentucky.Rachel Churner is the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. Churner is also an art critic and editor, whose writings have appeared in Artforum and October magazine, among other publications. She was a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and is the editor of multiple books, including, The New Television (no place press, 2024); Hans Haacke (MIT Press, 2015), and two volumes of writings by film historian Annette Michelson (MIT Press, 2017 and 2020). She currently teaches at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School.The Carolee Schneemann Foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the legacy of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019). Schneemann was a pioneering artist whose work spanned a range of media, including painting, film, video, dance and performance, installations, and writing. Her art is known for its radical formal experimentation and critical investigations of subjectivity, the erotic and taboo, images of atrocity, and the social construction of the female body. Established by the artist in 2013, the Foundation advances the understanding of Schneemann’s work through scholarship, exhibitions, and publications. Over the next few years, the Foundation will establish a residency program at Schneemann’s home in upstate New York in order to support artists whose work shares Schneemann’s commitment to new methods of aesthetic experimentation. For more information on The Carolee Schneemann Foundation, please visit their website.The intro is a fragment of an interview by Robert Haller with Carolee Schneemann from 1973, accessed at the archives of the Carnegie Museum of Art. Stay tuned for more episodes coming this Winter. The research for this series was generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.Design by Katharine Wimett.Research assistance by Dylan Sherman.