Speech Acts

Speech Acts
Podcast Description
Speech Acts is the podcast of Pratt Fine Arts' Project Third (P3). Each month, a faculty member sits down with artists, curators, and cultural producers whose work engages deeply with social, political, and community-based issues. These conversations explore practices that defy traditional categories, experiment across disciplines, and respond to the urgent conditions of our time.Speech Acts features original music by Alejandra Tokatlian.About Project Third (P3)Pratt Fine Arts Forum for Research & Community EngagementProject Third (P3) is a Pratt Fine Arts forum for students, visiting artists, academics, and activists whose work is research-based, socially engaged, and politically involved. P3 seeks to promote substantial interdisciplinary collaborations between Pratt’s Fine Arts and other departments, as well as meaningful collaborations with communities outside Pratt Institute. Located at Dekalb Gallery on campus, P3’s multiple programs include artist residencies, exhibitions, workshops, seminars, performances, lectures, and student-led engagements. P3’s mission is to offer Pratt Institute students and their larger communities’ access to visiting artists, academics, activists, and others whose practices are motivated by a desire to instigate social and cultural change.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on socially engaged art, political discourse, and community issues, with episodes exploring topics such as interdisciplinary performance, socially engaged artistic practices, and the intersection of art and activism. For example, recent discussions have covered the role of curating in social change and the emotional impact of performance art.

Speech Acts is the podcast of Pratt Fine Arts’ Project Third (P3). Each semester, a faculty member sits down with artists, curators, and cultural producers whose work engages deeply with social, political, and community-based issues. These conversations explore practices that defy traditional categories, experiment across disciplines, and respond to the urgent conditions of our time.
Speech Acts features original music by Alejandra Tokatlian.
About Project Third (P3)
Pratt Fine Arts Forum for Research & Community Engagement
Project Third (P3) is a Pratt Fine Arts forum for students, visiting artists, academics, and activists whose work is research-based, socially engaged, and politically involved. P3 seeks to promote substantial interdisciplinary collaborations between Pratt’s Fine Arts and other departments, as well as meaningful collaborations with communities outside Pratt Institute. Located at Dekalb Gallery on campus, P3’s multiple programs include artist residencies, exhibitions, workshops, seminars, performances, lectures, and student-led engagements. P3’s mission is to offer Pratt Institute students and their larger communities’ access to visiting artists, academics, activists, and others whose practices are motivated by a desire to instigate social and cultural change.
Today, Associate Professor and artist Carlos Motta speaks with Taja Cheek, a Brooklyn-born curator and musician based in New York City.
Taja is presently Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, a radical interdisciplinary performance institution in the East Village, founded in 1980 as PS122 and is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who frequently records and performs under the name L’Rain.
Taja was guest curator for the 2024 Whitney Biennial performance program and led performance programs at MoMA PS1, including Warm Up, a summer outdoor music series that the museum has hosted in its courtyard since 1998, and Sunday Sessions, an interdisciplinary performance series. As a curator Taja has championed the creation of new performance works and has worked closely with artists for many years.
Experimental and emotive, her music explores composition and structure and addresses themes of grief, identity, emotion and experience.

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