A Participatory Reading and Workshop
In conjunction with the exhibition How We Work: Smack Mellon at 30, join artist, activist, and exhibition alum Avram Finkelstein for a 90-minute participatory reading of an adaptation of Wallace Shawn’s 1996 script of The Designated Mourner. Curated by Sara Reisman and directed by Sam Feder, this performative project is intended to activate Shawn’s play through an audience-participatory reading of Finkelstein’s adaptation of the original script. The reading will function as an opportunity to workshop Finkelstein’s interpretation of the script, in preparation for a more elaborate staging in the fall of 2027.
Structured around two interwoven acts, the play explores love, class, and survival under an authoritarian regime that targets culture and intellectual freedoms. Together, the collective reading forms a meditation on modern political anxiety, accountability, and the survival of art in uncertain times, proposing that collective participation may provide us with a path forward.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop as a reader, please email mourner@smackmellon.org. Readers will be provided access to the script in advance of the workshop.
Please note that some of the language within the project refers to violence.
Bios:
Avram Finkelstein is an artist, writer and curator, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS 1, David Zwirner, and Smack Mellon, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art artist oral history, and his book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was published by UC Press. He has written for BOMB, frieze, Art21, OnCurating and Foam, been interviewed by The New York Times, Artforum, NPR, and Interview, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU. He is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Creative Capital grant recipient.
Producer Sam Feder created and directed the critically acclaimed films Heightened Scrutiny (Sundance 2025), DISCLOSURE (Sundance 2020), Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger (2014), and Boy I Am (2006). Sam’s filmmaking practice centers on exposing silences in order to build solidarity across movements for political, social, and economic justice. Their films explore the intersection of visibility and politics along the lines of race, class, and gender. Sam’s work has been programmed internationally at festivals, theaters, and museums such as, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Thessaloniki Film Festival, DOCNYC, Sheffield DocFest, DC/DOXS, MOMA-PS1, The Hammer Museum, The Alamo Drafthouse and more. Sam’s film, DISCLOSURE, was nominated for a Peabody Award and Sam was recently invited to be a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch. Sam’s work has been supported by Ford/JustFilms, Perspective Fund, California Humanities, The Jerome Foundation, Threshold, IFP Film Week, Good Pitch USA, and MacDowell, and Yaddo artist residencies.
Sara Reisman is a curator, educator, and writer whose work focuses on socially engaged art, art in the public sphere, the history of exhibition making, and the intersections between art and social change. Reisman has held numerous leadership roles, including Chief Curator at the National Academy of Design (2021–2025), Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014–2021), and Director of New York City’s Percent for Art Program (2008–2014). She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the State University of New York – Purchase College, and, since 2016, at the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice MA Program. Recent exhibitions include The Useful Life of Objects (Materials for the Arts, NYC), Rumor de la Tierra (Q Galería, Quito, Ecuador), When Thoughts Are Free (601Artspace, NYC), and Stephen Antonakos: Vectors of Time and Space (B&M Theocharakis Foundation, Athens, Greece), all 2026.
Image: Untitled, Avram Finkelstein, 2026. Image courtesy of the Artist.