Pat Oleszko: Reel Life Performantz

Floor 3, Theater

April 4 at 2 pm

Presented as part of the 2026 Whitney Biennial, the screening will present a selection of Oleszko’s moving image works, of which she produced more than 70 between the 1970s to the 2000s. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Pat Oleszko, Jovanna Venegas, Co-curator of Pat Oleszko: Fool Disclosure, and Drew Sawyer the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography.

Presented in partnership with SculptureCenter on the occasion of Pat Oleszko: Fool Disclosure running until April 27, 2026.

Duration
Approximately 90 minutes

Pat Oleszko, known as the Ms Tricks of Dis Guise, has a large body--of work. With elaborate costumes and props, she creates performances, films, installations, inflatables, spatial events with much puntification and uttered shenanigans. She has worked from the popular art forms of the street, party, parade, and burlesque house, to the forests, fields, mountains and waters. Oleszko has presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta, the Lake Placid Winter Olympics and Lincoln Center, and shown in Esquire, Ms, Playboy, Sesame Street Magazine and Artforum. For her diverse efforts she has been awarded the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a DAAD (Berlin), 5 NEA’s, 6 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowships, several Tony nominations, a Jim Henson Grant and a Bessie (the New York Dance & Theater Award for Sustained Excellence) all while doing intermittent battle with the Authorities at Large. From the personal to the political, the work is an exorcize thru humor. The truth squirts.