Fitter, Happier, More Productive Public Program
apexart, New York
September–October 2023
Programmers: Lexington Davis, with Ash Hagerstrand & Ryan Soper
Online Curatorial Tour
Thursday, September 14, 2023, 12:00 pm
Online 3D tour and discussion of the exhibition, Fitter, Happier, More Productive with curator Lexington Davis.
Reading & Conversation with Author Fariha Róisín
Tuesday, September 19, 2023, 2:30 pm
Multidisciplinary artist and author Fariha Róisín will read excerpts of her work followed by a moderated Q&A.
Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist who was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles, California. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam, Degrowth, and queer identities. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Cure a Ghost, the journal Being in Your Body, the novel Like a Bird, and the nonfiction book Who is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind. Her second collection of poetry, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, will be out Fall 2023.
Movement Workshop with Ashley Rucker (TherapART)
Saturday, October 14, 2023, 11:00 am
Join Ash Rucker, movement educator and founder of Therapart for a workshop to liberate yourself, meditate, move, and create. This movement and art experience will allow you to drop into self, exploring your inner world to make space and growth to move through things in your outer world. This workshop will help you unlock and unblock to reach your highest potential and provide the tools to dive deeper into how emotions live in our minds, bodies, and souls.
Ashley Rucker founded TherapART to promote the positive effects of art therapy after struggling with the anguish of a sibling suffering from drug addiction and incarceration. A gifted dancer and passionate creative, she formed her unique method using meditation, dynamic movement, and creative play as an alternative to traditional therapy. The results and breakthroughs were incomparable. Doubling down on how effective it was on adults, she’s been paying it forward from the beginning. Focusing on youths significantly affected by the criminal justice system, helping them to work through the release of emotional barriers that limit their future lives. A trained yoga teacher and graduate of the Institute of Transformative Mentoring (ITM) at The New School, she has facilitated TherapART workshops and ceremonies both nationally and internationally. Ashley has called New York home since 2011.
Panel: “The Roots of Wellness Culture”
Friday, October 20, 2023, 12:00 pm
Join Michaela Haffner, Rachel O'Neill, and Lexington Davis for a panel on the historical roots of wellness culture from the late nineteenth century into the present day. In her talk, Michaela will explore the visual origins of wellness in the United States in the nineteenth century. While the term “wellness” only emerged as common parlance in the 1970s, its holistic and natural health ideology emerged in the “health and pleasure” resorts and sanitaria of the late nineteenth century. This talk will explore the ways in which art not only constructed beliefs of natural health, but racialized wellness as an exclusive practice that endures today. In this talk Rachel will discuss her research on the emergence of “wellness” as a novel cultural formation and new commercial development in the UK, one that is intimately bound up with the aspirational economies of social media. Exploring both the glamorous trappings of wellness media and the more mundane entanglements these generate in women’s everyday lives, she will consider how the rise of wellness coincides—temporally but also ideologically—with the decline of welfare.
Michaela Haffner is a PhD candidate in art history at Yale University where she studies U.S. art and material culture. Her dissertation examines the visual culture of natural health movements at the turn of the 20th century, a project which has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Huntington Library & Museum, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Dr. Rachel O’Neill is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research centers questions of subjectivity, culture, and inequality, pursued through a feminist lens. Her work has been published in leading academic journals and received coverage in outlets such as The Guardian, Vice and The Quietus.