The Yes Men are among the most visible and effective activist-artists of our time, reaching countless people through websites, newspapers, and television broadcasts. Over the past decade they have fearlessly taken on the world’s biggest corporations and bureaucracies. Infiltrating the elite realm of the influential and the moneyed, cloaked in the sheerest layer of authority–thrift-store suits, quick-print business cards, forged press releases–these social activators urge us to question where ethics belong in our capitalist-driven society.

This survey represents the first-ever solo exhibition of the Yes Men. Here you can walk into a re-creation of their past exploits in the Conference area, witness a comically apocalyptic future, and pay your respects to a janitor who generously donated his body to satisfy our insatiable energy needs. In the Executive Board Room, you may browse through the Yes Men’s personal office items and orate along to their absurd PowerPoint presentations.


Co-organized by the Feldman Gallery at Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Keep It Slick” exhibits the Yes Men’s practice with elaborate costumes, slapstick videos, outrageous posters, and selections from their personal collection.


Exhibition accompanied by:

- Business Casual Reception
- Workshop + lecture by the Yes Men titled “How To Be A Yes Man,” with preview clips of their upcoming feature-length film

Photographs + sculptural installation by:

Julia Christensen

Exhibition accompanied by:

- Hometown BBQ Reception (with spiced vegan blue cornbread, vegan mini corndogs, homebrewed beers - crisp sweet potato, blueberry wheat, and ginger)
- Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Series: Big Box Reuse Presentation + Book Signing Nov. 13, Thurs. 4:30-6pm
- Slate of related programming by regional groups

As technology advances, our concept of physical comfort becomes increasingly narrow and artificially mediated. We can program thermostats to the degree, swim in heated pools in the winter, and ice skate in tropical regions. We prefer to encounter the seasons as an aesthetic experience, when convenient, within the self-created myth of a weatherless society.
Syracuse is the perennial winner of the Golden Snowball Award, for the most snowfall in New York State.

Embracing Winter celebrates this crystallized precipitation as the key to a delightful set of activities, and as an ephemeral filter to make ordinary surroundings new again.

Knitted sculpture, psychedelic video, sly photography, crisp audio work, book, new works by:

Janet Morton
Bruno Munari
Takeshi Murata
Collin Olan
Lisa M. Robinson
Rudy Shepherd

Exhibition accompanied by:

- Interactive displays by Frank Olive + A. Suparak
- Screening of Winter Light curated by B. Kashmere + A. Suparak
- Video event, Winnipeg Babysitter, by Daniel Barrow
- Hot Cocoa Bar reception
- Talks by artists Murata, Shepherd, + an earthscientist

15) FAUX NATUREL

Curated by A. Suparak for

The Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University, NY

+ Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop's University, QC

2006 -2007

Sculpture, video, prints, embroidery, collage, installation, new work by:

Alex Da Corte
Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Nick Lenker
Annie MacDonell
Allyson Mitchell
Andrea Vander Kooij

Exhibition accompanied by:

- Talk by artist Mitchell
- Tour with curator Suparak and artists Lenker and Da Corte
- Naturel Selection reception

This inspirational screening and mini-exhibition catalogues heroes, compressing history, and hallucinating futures.

These artists are as inspired by history they weren't quite conscious for as by their lived experiences. Here it is possible to amalgamate eras, to break out of social and gender constraints, and to cobble together a fantasy lineage. Many of the artists bypass ineffectual adoration for social edification, by documenting communities, reincarnating overlooked experimental films, sharing Communist souvenir collections, assembling biographies of personal heroes, and dispatching personal visions of history through the storytelling tradition.