With Full Consent, Jill Magid: Artists as Gardens Installation

Artists as Gardens: With Full Consent, Jill Magid
November 20–23, 11am – 5pm
Free with admission

This November, artist Jill Magid launches a new series of activations at Calder Gardens as the next commission in our Artists as Gardens series, which invites contemporary artists to think of their practice as a garden that changes with the seasons and other natural cycles.

Magid interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, forming relationships with governmental and corporate systems, among them police departments, intelligence agencies, surveillance networks, and restricted archives. In doing so, she follows their rules of engagement to the letter, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

In her new project With Full Consent, developed alongside the launch of her monograph spanning 25 years of her practice, Magid works with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Calder Gardens, and the Barnes Foundation to use an existing State Department procedure to pursue questions central to her work: Who determines cultural significance? What can the State protect? And can an individual use the State’s own procedures to enter her body of work into the public record?

For With Full Consent, Magid transformed the pages of her monograph into a portfolio of 275 unique prints: individual art objects that could enter the State Department procedure for Immunity from Judicial Seizure. Acquired by the Centre Pompidou, the portfolio’s international loan to Calder Gardens made this procedure possible, allowing the State to determine the works’ cultural significance and grant it protection from seizure. The resulting determination was published in the Federal Register, the official daily journal of the US government, placing a record of With Full Consent, in the public record and making another form of the monograph—a government document reproducing its contents—available to anyone who requests it from the State Department.

With Full Consent, moves between private object and public record, artwork and procedure, individual and State. At Calder Gardens, the portfolio arrives with immunity from judicial seizure—a temporary legal protection granted by the State—and is presented alongside the Federal Register notice announcing that protection and the work’s cultural significance.

Through a postcard addressed to the State Department, visitors can request the monograph in its new form as a government document, turning an impersonal procedure into a personal exchange.

The Installation
In Calder Gardens’ Multipurpose Room, the installation With Full Consent, brings together the portfolio of prints and the Federal Register notice of its cultural significance. The materials of the international loan, which made the government’s determination possible, is itself part of the work.

Read more about the project in The New York Times.

Panel Discussion and Book Launch
People Talking: Jill Magid, Anthony Elms, and Sara Geelan on With Full Consent, Jill Magid
November 20, 6pm
Magid launches her Artists as Gardens commission in conversation with curator Anthony Elms and attorney Sara Geelan. Together, they explore the interwoven parts of With Full Consent,: the artwork, its installation at Calder Gardens, and the new monograph published by Creative Time and Dancing Foxes Press.

Jill Magid is an artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in New York. Her practice spans sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, text, and moving image. Her work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. She has staged solo exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, London; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her first feature documentary, The Proposal, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Her awards include a Netherland-American Foundation Fulbright Grant, the 2017 Calder Prize, a 2020 Creative Time Artist Commission, a 2021 Via Art Fund Grant, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. She received a BFA from Cornell University and an MS in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Magid is represented by Olney Gleason, New York, and LABOR, Mexico City.

Artists as Gardens is a series that commissions established contemporary artists, working across a wide range of disciplines, to think of their practice as a garden that changes with the seasons and other natural cycles. Over an extended period of time, artists conceive a series of time-based programs such as performances, healing practices, screenings, workshops, and discursive events, working in collaboration with local communities.

Programming at Calder Gardens is generously supported by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz; The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston; Donna Green; Michael Sternberg; and the Friends of Calder Gardens.