NEWSLETTER
Legendary performance artist in conversation with Skidmore professor of English
Thursday, April 24, 6 pm
Saratoga Springs, NY (April 8, 2025) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces the final Dunkerley Dialogue of the 2024-25 season on Thursday, April 24, at 6 pm, featuring Penny Arcade in conversation with Joseph Cermatori.
Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, is a legendary performance artist who was a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory, featured in the film Women In Revolt. She is an international icon of artistic resistance whose social practice is focused on the support of other artists and on the preservation of artist legacies, including the work of Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997) whose photographs are part of the monumental exhibition of 100 years of queer art, a field of bloom and hum. Cermatori, an Associate Professor in the English Department at Skidmore College, is a critic, editor, and historian whose work investigates the philosophical content of artistic and creative forms, with a special emphasis on drama and the arts of performance, critical theory, and queer studies.
The dialogue will take place in the exhibition a field of bloom and hum, which fills the Museum’s two floors with work by more than 160 artists in a celebration of queer identities and communities. The Tang’s upstairs gallery, the Malloy Wing, features two stages created for exhibition-related events like the Dunkerley Dialogues.
Dunkerley Dialogues pair Skidmore professors with artists in a conversation format, which is often a catalyst for new connections and understandings across disciplines, and can spark new ideas for all participants. Dunkerley Dialogues are made possible by a generous gift from Michele Dunkerley ’80.
The program will include ASL interpretation.
Admission to the museum and to events are free. For more information, contact the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit https://tang.skidmore.edu.
About the Participants
Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, is a poet, actress, essayist, spoken word, video, and theater maker who creates long form, text-based performance, a form of experimental theater that investigates the boundaries between traditional theater and performance art based on her poetic practice. Her focus on the creation of community as the goal of performance and her use of performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in international theater. She is an international icon of artistic resistance whose social practice is focused on the support of other artists and on the preservation of artist legacies. She debuted at 18 in John Vaccaro’s Playhouse Of The Ridiculous. She was a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory featured in the film Women In Revolt. Since 1999 with her collaborator of 32 years, she has co-helmed The Lower East Side Biography Project, a video oral history of downtown New York that broadcasts and streams every Monday at 11 pm. She is the author of 16 full-length works, hundreds of performances pieces, lectures, and interviews, all available online. A partial collection of her scripts and ephemera Bad Reputation was published in hardcover by Semiotext in 2010.
Joseph Cermatori is associate professor of English at Skidmore College, where he is also affiliated with the Theater Department and Gender Studies program and is current director of the Periclean Honors Forum. He specializes in drama and the arts of performance, critical theory, and queer studies. Before coming to Skidmore, he taught as a lecturer at The New School and Yale Universities. His recent book, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater, (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), won the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Prize. His other writings have appeared in PMLA, TDR, Criticism, The Brooklyn Rail, Village Voice, and the New York Times. He works frequently as a dramaturg and has been a regular collaborator with the opera director R. B. Schlather since 2010. From 2008 through 2025, he was an editor and frequent writer for the contemporary arts magazine PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Read more about him at his personal website.
About Skidmore College
Founded in 1903, Skidmore College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college of about 2,700 students located in the dynamic town of Saratoga Springs, New York. Consistently ranked as a top liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, Forbes, and more, Skidmore has also been recognized for its innovation, value, and sustainability efforts. Skidmore fosters academic and personal excellence — all driven by a belief that Creative Thought Matters. Its comprehensive array of opportunities encompasses more than 40 bachelor’s degree programs, including popular offerings in business, psychology, and the creative and performing arts; competitive NCAA Division III athletics; world-class facilities; and hands-on civic engagement and career development resources.
About the Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for college and university art museums across the country—with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas. The Museum is open to the public Tuesday–Sunday, noon–5 pm, with extended hours until 9 pm Thursday. https://tang.skidmore.edu
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Caption for image: Penny Arcade, photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders