Artist Brendan Fernandes merges dance, visual arts, and political protest. He’s exhibited everywhere from the Guggenheim to the Getty. And now he’s taking on the world of NFTs.
Fernandes is also no stranger to the East End, particularly Sound View Greenport, where he has participated in the past as part of the hotel’s Kulture Collective programming — most recently spotlighted in the fireside conversations this past summer. And now he will be one of the renowned artists to host NF NFT Weekend in March.
Fernandes was born in Kenya and moved to Canada when he was nine years old. As a contemporary artist, he specializes in installation and visual art and also serves as a faculty member at Northwestern University where he teaches art theory and practice. His projects address race, migration, queer culture, protest, and forms of collective movement. He now splits time between New York and Chicago.
He trained professionally as a ballet dancer, but tore his hamstring during his senior year in college. He went on to train as a visual artist, now merging the two art forms to create his work.
Some of his most recent work includes “Together We Are,” a commission by the Walker Hotel in Greenwich Village and Visual AIDS, and “A Solo Until We Can Dance Again,” a commission for Portals. Both explore the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic. His work was also featured in the 2019 Biennial at the Whitney Museum.
With NFT obsession thriving, for many, the concept can be foreign. In an effort to make NFT education more accessible and collaborative, the NF NFT weekend will include roundtable discussions, exhibitions, and creative workshops.
The events will be held March 25 to 27, and the community is invited to delve into the NFT space. An out-of-the-box itinerary is built for beginners and experts alike, and the three-day event intends to serve as a supportive space for open exchange, free-flowing ideas, and endless — yet digestible — information.
“As a dance maker, as a performance maker, it’s complicated to make these kinds of works because it’s live, its ephemeral. So for me, thinking about an NFT is a way to support the practice in different way. An NFT can live on. It’s a way to possibly sell the work, so that performance can be purchased in a way that’s never been done before. It creates archive, it creates revenue, it creates legacy,” said Fernandes.
The event is the latest extension of Sound View’s Kulture Collective platform at the hotel — which is part of Eagle Point Hotel Partners, founded by hotelier Erik Warner. The platform aims to foster togetherness and community through curating shared experiences rooted in culture and creativity — the NFT Weekend is all about providing the tools and interactions to guide guests to learn about NFTs in a tangible and non-intimidating way, all while granting one-of-a-kind access to experts and leaders in the market.
Participants will include Melissa Zhao Jones, Brian Gorman, Jonathan Weiskopf, Jonathan Rosen, and others.
Ahead of the events, Fernandes plans to record dancers to create an NFT that will be dropped the Friday night of NF NFT weekend. He emphasizes the idea that NFTs allow the dancers to be paid continually, as the NFT lives on and is traded. Unlike live work, it’s not a one-time performance. “It’s an ongoing process of support and giving,” he points out. He cites community and mutual support in the crypto space as a major factor for becoming involved.
And speaking of support and giving, Fernandes plans to give 10 percent of his NFTs to Moving Forward: The Dancer Fund, which was created as a support fund for emerging dancers. His NFT series “Souvenir” dropped recently and will also be on display during the weekend at Sound View.
The “Souvenir” NFTs go back to the artist’s work from 2010 where he began investigating ideas of authenticity “through the dissemination of Western notions of an exotic Africa through the symbolic economy of African masks.” The new work is focused on the mask as an object, still in flux, that lives within a cryptographic and digital space — reinventing the mask to become a new object in the metaverse.
For Fernandes, when it comes to NFTs, it’s about working within the same themes, but finding a different way to create. “NFT just supports the work in a different way,” he said.
The NFT weekend will go beyond classic informative panels to also incorporate hands-on creative workshops and activities made to inspire curiosity and creativity — from a Polar Bear plunge and NFT cocktail-making class to art, poetry, and karaoke sessions.
The event will dive into important conversations and need-to-know information in the space, such as the equal access of this new marketplace as well as the medium itself and the basic principles of a blockchain world.
Fernandes acknowledges that it’s an all-new concept for many, including himself. “It’s an educational weekend… I’m trying to constantly understand and also educate at the same time,” he said.
“It’s a new way of making, a new way of being creative, a new way of understanding that’s also connected to economy — an economy that’s not an economy that we know — like cryptocurrency. It all exists in this space that’s not really there,” he continued. “It’s interesting to think about in relation to the world we’re living in right now through the pandemic, where we’re connecting through screens and we’re connecting through virtual spaces. We’re all in the real world but then there are these moments like, ‘Oh wait. I’m not there. You’re not there.’ It’s like this new way of making, but also within that we are connecting to each other and still doing the things we want to do.”
Coming up, Fernandes is working on a new project with eight NFTs that can be sold individually but will “live together and dance together in the metaverse,” he noted. He also has a project for MASS MoCA coming up, along with other projects in Scandinavia.
As for the East End, he said, “Sound View has always been such a place for respite — to recharge, to refocus. They’re always so generous to me to bring me back. It’s a magic place… I think the water is so important and powerful.”
Having experienced it at different times, he notes that whether it’s fall, summer, or the dead of winter, “It’s a place to be quiet and still. As a person who makes movement and dance, being still is really important… That space really allows for creativity.”
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