Sharing this nice profile from @thecooperunion on work from the last year, happy to be feeling love from the alma mater 🥰. Thanks Matthew Bower for working on this. 📸 By Jason Mandella, Maria Baranova and @christianxcarroll An excerpt from the article: “I’m interested in working with groups of individuals to look at how intimacy is created and negotiated, particularly between groups of men,” he says. Movement and embodiment are central to his practice, which spans video, performance, time-based media, installation, photography, and sculpture. “I would say that my interest in working across disciplines was something that began during my time at Cooper, even though it took many more years before I started to stitch things together in a coherent way.” Tam, who holds an MFA from the University of Southern California, arrived at The Cooper Union by way of the Saturday Program during high school. “All the instructors were current or former Cooper students, and they really impressed upon me how special Cooper was, both as an education and a community. I think the general ethos of the school, which was one that encouraged thinking fluidly across disciplines while maintaining a high level of rigor and criticality throughout, continues to inform my work.” It wasn’t until after graduating that he began experimenting in performance and video, inspired by artists such as Adrian Piper, VALIE EXPORT, and Patty Chang: “I liked the immediacy of using one’s body as a material, and the way it could very quickly address social systems and try to find ways to disrupt them." “Artists have tremendous power to start conversations and focus the public’s attention around issues like anti-racism,” he says. “I would urge us all to continue the hard work of organizing for the kinds of changes we want to see in our lives. Very often we sideline activism when things like career demands monopolize our attention, but I think this pandemic has shown that the world we occupy as arts workers is an extremely precarious one, and we really need to think about what systems we want to uphold or participate in.”