TUG Collective

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Ethnographic Contrafacta is a collection of poetic prose and graphic scores from Borders, Corridors, Lines of Desire, an installation of seven works that acts as a platform for thinking about how the interlocking dynamics of colonialism, immigration, and social race in U.S. history continue to resonate with a range of critical themes. Emerging out of TUG Collective’s three-year engagement with people and places along the National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail, the collection intentionally amplifies direct observation and participation (the stuff of ethnographic fieldwork) with performative text and images that strive to capture what anthropologist George Marcus calls “the side of culture that travels….in multiple, parallel, and simultaneous worlds of variant connection.”

TUG is an interdisciplinary arts collective that creates contact zones where people can generate insights about, and produce actions around, contemporary social issues. Since 2006, TUG has focused on participatory, problem-based interventions related to borders, borderlands, and other fuzzy frontiers, and their relationships to the global processes that put people, ideas, media, technologies, and capital into circulation with one another. TUG’s work has been presented in such creative spaces as the Luminary Center for the Arts, Charlotte Street Foundation, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Holter Museum of Art, SoCA Armouries Gallery, Lawrence Arts Center, Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium, and the Center for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence. TUG is on faculty in the MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.