Ted Purves is an artist, author of the forthcoming What We Want Is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art, and chair of the Graduate Program in Fine Arts at CCA

“Chan is an unusual model for an artist, being one for whom creating objects in the studio and dynamic situations outside it are equally important,” the New York Times noted. Our two programs highlight this diversity in Chan's artistic and activist output, focusing on his single-channel and online work. Tonight he shares documentation from the performances of Waiting for Godot he produced in Katrina-devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans, an experiment in community art, and discusses the ideas underpinning it and a number of his other projects. He also screens two video explorations of the state of the U.S., post-9/11, Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law and Poetry and Now promise now threat.