Heritage Malta is pleased to announce that the National Museum of Fine Arts will exclusively present to the general public an international publication by Toni Sant. This new publication is themed around the arts based organization Franklin Furnace. During this event, which will be held on Friday the 8th of April, the discussion panel present at the museum shall include media presenter and art conoisseur Charles Xuereb, artist Vince Briffa and the museum’s Senior Curator Sandro Debono.
One might rightly ask, what is Franklin Furnace? Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York-based arts organization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of avant-garde art by emerging artists – particularly those whose works maybe vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content. Over more than thirty years, Franklin Furnace has presented works by hundreds of avant-garde artists, some of whom – Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Eric Bogosian, Jenny Holzer, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Annie Sprinkle, and the Blue Man Group, to name a few – are now established names in contemporary art and entertainment.
This publication by Toni Sant is a first ever comprehensive history of this remarkable organization from its conception to the present. Organised around the context of the major art genres that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century – artists’ books, live art, and digital performance – this book intersperses first-person narratives with empirical observations on issues critical to the organization’s success as well as Franklin Furnace’s many contributions to avant-garde art.
Toni Sant is Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough, United Kingdom. He has also lectured about performance and new media at New York University and the University of Malta.
This book launch will take place at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta ths Friday the 8th of April at 7pm.