Mildred's Lane Historical Society and Museum 2010

Mildred's Lane is collaboration between artists Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett and their associates. This Project is a long-term experiment in large-scale project , research and event based practices with a living museum and an educational institution attached. This active site is a 92+-acre compound in the upper Delaware River Valley region of Pennsylvania near New York City. The Project is actively reassembling the terms of exchange and collaboration, and enthusiastically soliciting participation to co-evolve our (inter- and intra-) institutional engagements. It means to be a revolutionary rigorous rethinking (the 3 Rs) of the contemporary art complex.

The core of the project practice and educational philosophy at Mildred's Lane is an attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world -- this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, new sociality- all of which compose an ethics of comportment - and are embodied in workstyles. As a participant at Mildred's Lane these issues will be negotiated daily through the rethinking of one's involvements with food, shopping, making, styling, gaming, sleeping, reading, thinking and doing. This is a program and a place where a work-live-research environment is developed to foster a rigorous engagement with every aspect of life. The entire curriculum is based on experimentally rethinking being as a practice.

There are so many events in our cultural history celebrating expanded notions of reinventing the world, of making difference, of reassembling our own strategies, and it is within these such outpost projects that we endeavor on with others like Olafur Eliason's Laboratory; Andrea Zittell's High Desert Test Sites; Rirkrit Tiravanija's The Land; the Whitney Independent Study Program in NYC; or, historically, with Mark de Suvero's Socrates Sculpture Park; the feminist artist-founded Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY; Black Mountain; Donald Judd's Marfa, TX; and, other groups/sites of embracing difference such as Sarah and Gerard Murphy and the Lost Generation; and Bloomsbury; within this context, all in pursuit of co-evolving, we introduce this new experiment.

As a participant one will experience an entanglement of international practitioners and institutions collectively engaged in every stage of the research, theory, production, construction, performance, presentation, documentation of projects that are part of this new and living Contemporary Art Site and History.

Please come visit, be involved! Warmest regards to all,

Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett
Artist CO-Directors

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