Pat Oleszko
Fool for Thought
Performance artist Pat Oleszko makes a spectacle of herself — and doesn’t mind if you laugh. With elaborate handmade costumes and props, she utilizes the body as armature for ideas in an array of lampoons that call her audience to action. From the personal to the political, her performances and installations ceremoniously exorcize through humor. Hoisting an enormous burning bra on the exterior of the Women’s Studies Research Center, the exhibition "Fool for Thought" highlights costumes and performances from a wild variety of events including Hello Folly: The Floes & Cons of Arctic Drilling, Oldilocks and the Bewares, Stalking Walking Topiary and The Pat and the Hats. Oleszko, self-identified as the Fool in question and the questioning Fool, fans the flames with rousing absurdity and maintains that she who laughs, lasts.
Selected Press
State of the Arts Magazine
Events
December 8, 2016
WSRC Scholar, art historian and museum educator, Annie Storr will lead art experiencing exercises through the Kniznick Gallery exhibition "Pat Oleszko | Fool for Thought." Storr developed Exercises for the Quiet Eye (EQE) to encourage patient reflection, appreciation, and an attempt to avoid the rush to understand or determine a set interpretation for what we see.
January 25, 2017
January 25, 2017
February 2, 2017
Guest speaker Barbara Bodenhorn will discuss two international youth exchanges (conducted in ecologically vulnerable regions of Alaska, England, Mexico and Mongolia) designed to broaden young people’s existing environmental knowledge, foster a deeper awareness of their global connections, promote future thinking and encourage a sense of engagement in that future. A discussion with some Brandeis student respondents will follow, addressing how we might effectively combine art and science to engage young people’s energies in their own futures.