Ģý

Project Third 2025-Present

Projects

Speech Acts

A white silhouette of two people sitting at a table with two microphones between them, directed toward their heads. The text at the top left corner reads in all-caps "SPEECH ACTS" in white and bold. The bottom text in black superimposed over the silhouette of the figures reads left to right the Ģý Fine Arts Department logo and "Project Third," both in black. The background is a perspective radial gradient featuring Ģý's main brand colors of yellow, grey, and black.

Speech Acts is the podcast of Pratt Fine Arts’ Project Third (P3). Each semester, a faculty member sits down with artists, curators, and cultural producers whose work engages deeply with social, political, and community-based issues. These conversations explore practices that defy traditional categories, experiment across disciplines, and respond to the urgent conditions of our time.

Listen wherever you listen to podcasts:

Episode 4: Kamau Amu Patton: Listening to Places

Kamau Amu Patton, Light Atmospheres: Saint Andrews Park at Night, 2023, digital photo (photo courtesy of the artist) Kamau Amu Patton

Visiting Associate Professor Alex Strada speaks with Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow, Kamau Amu Patton, an intermedia artist whose practice engages history and culture through archives, documents, stories, sound, and sites. Drawing on improvisation, experimentation, and processes of listening, his practice considers how artistic encounters can generate new forms of attention, connection, and collective experience.

A man stands outdoors, wearing a dark hat and a patterned, oversized jacket. He has a serious expression and is positioned in front of a backdrop featuring bare trees and residential buildings. The scene is set in a park-like area, suggesting a cool, overcast day.
Kamau Amu Patton at Fulton Park, Brooklyn, NY, 2023 (courtesy of the artist)

Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Patton’s work engages archives, documents, networks and sites. Patton’s practice is a charting of language, movement, thought, speech and actions, which aims to develop structures to archive histories of community building through an investigation of stories and strategies of placemaking. Patton’s project,Afterlife Geographies, documents “way of life” practices in relation to processes of settlement and the development of sites through which communities articulate worldview, synthesize experience, and establish infrastructures of empowerment and remembrance. In September 2017, Patton installed an iteration of his ongoing project,Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public. Patton is a 2020 Creative Capital Grant Awardee. In 2020 Patton was an artist in residence at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles and he was a 2020 Archive Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection, Patton created The Past & Other Dreams, a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Paton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps Recitals,Second Mind | Alto Age, was released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021. In 2022 Patton performed new sound compositions at Roulette Intermedium and Basilica Arts in Hudson New York. In October of 2022, Patton presented a solo exhibition at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University. In June 2023 Patton presented a new inter-media performance,Dromeostasis as part of the Signals exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 2024 Patton performed new sound compositions as part of the exhibition Flight Into Egypt, Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876- Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Portrait of Alex Strada wearing a black and orange checked button-up layered over a black turtleneck, hair in a bun, in front of a white background

Alex Strada is a multimedia artist and educator based in New York City whose work spans installation, film/video, sound and orality, printed media, participatory workshops, and public practice. Through a research-based approach grounded in transdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement, her projects reimagine systems of power and create platforms for collectivity, civic agency, and political transformation. Since 2022, she has served as the Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Her work has been shown internationally including at the Queens Museum, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Aurora Biennial, Dallas, TX; Times Square Arts, NY; Anthology Film Archives, NY; UnionDocs, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Museum of Moving Image, NY; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Italy; Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico; Listasafn Árnesinga Museum, Iceland; and MuseumsQuartier, Vienna. Strada’s projects have been featured in the New Yorker,BOMB,New York Times,Hyperallergic,Montez Press Radio,New York Magazine, and WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Her work has been supported through artist residencies at Artist Alliance Inc., Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Triangle Arts Association, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and through grants/fellowships from the Graham Foundation, Artadia, NYFA, NYSCA, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. 

Strada holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and is a studio alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She has taught at RISD, Tyler School of Art at Temple University, The Cooper Union, Columbia University, and in K-12 public schools throughout NYC with Studio in a School. She was the 2024-26 Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow and is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Ģý in Brooklyn, NY.