Laurel Ptak is an artist, curator, writer and educator based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

Career

She previously served as director and curator of the artist-founded non-profit organization Art in General in New York City from 2017 to 2020. A multidisciplinary figure inside the field of culture, she has made contributions across disciplines of

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employe ...

new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

, social practice art, curating and

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and Reproducibility, reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in me ...

. She was named one of 100 top Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2014. She is currently an MFA professor in the School of Art, Media and Technology at

The New School The New School is a private research university in New York City. It was founded in 1919 as The New School for Social Research with an original mission dedicated to academic freedom and intellectual inquiry and a home for progressive thinkers. ...

and faculty member in the Curatorial Practice graduate program at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has looked at the social effects of technology and recent projects have taken up topics including feminism, hacking, and social media. She is co-editor of the book ''Undoing Property?'' with artist Marysia Lewandowska. Its essays, interviews and artistic projects explore themes of immaterial labor, political economy and the commons. One of Ptak's best known projects, Wages For Facebook, draws upon ideas from the 1970s international

Wages for housework The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa,Dalla Costa, M. & James, ...

feminist campaign to think through contemporary relationships of capitalism, class and affective labor inside social media. When it launched as a website it immediately drew over 20,000 views and was rapidly and internationally debated via social media and the press, setting off a public conversation about worker's rights and the very nature of labor, as well as the politics of its refusal, in the digital age. She is a co-founder of the award-winning Art+Feminism Wikipedia-Edit-A-Thon project which addresses gender disparities online and their effects on public forms of knowledge, with public edit-a-thons organized each year at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

in New York City and co-organized by numerous art institutions and universities around the world. Ptak studied art, critical theory and art history at

Hampshire College Hampshire College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was opened in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges in the Pioneer Valley: Amherst College, Smith College, Mo ...

and holds an M.A. in curating and the history of contemporary art from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College where she wrote her graduate thesis on feminist art from the 1990s.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ptak, Laurel American art curators Artists from New York City Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American Wikimedians American women curators