FDIC Insured is a body of work Michael Mandiberg began in 2008 during the Great Recession after noticing that when a bank failed, the FDIC and the acquiring institution erased the failed bank’s visual identity from the internet. Mandiberg began collecting their logos in advance of their public erasure and using a laser-cutter to inscribe them into the covers of cast off investment guidebooks, with titles such as Total Money Makeover, Investing by the Stars, and Nothing Down: How to Buy Real Estate with Little or No Money Down. The project now encompasses the abandoned logos of the 527 banks that have failed to date, each emblazoned on a book. In 2010, an in-progress version the work was exhibited at Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Feldman Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices (ABD) have commissioned a book and web archive that accompany the installation and serve as the exhibition catalog.
The exhibition of FDIC Insured will open on September 15th, the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing. Visitors will enter through the building’s quintessentially corporate lobby, take an elevator to the 15th floor, and enter a recently vacated office suite, where they will encounter Mandiberg’s installation and the ghosts of hundreds of failed banks. Throughout the run of the exhibition, Mandiberg will present a series of programs related to current issues in the financial system, including artist talks, video screenings, and panel discussions. These are scheduled for October 4th, October 22nd, and November 15th.
Michael Mandiberg was born in 1977 in Detroit, Michigan, and lives and works in Brooklyn. Mandiberg’s projects have been presented at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The New Museum, Postmasters Gallery, Denny Gallery, Arizona State University Museum + Library, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, Jeu De Paume, Plug.in, Transmediale, and ZKM. His work has been written about widely, including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Mandiberg is Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2016, Mandiberg has been awarded a Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Art + Technology Lab Grant and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship.
The Art-in-Buildings Financial District Project Space is located at 40 Rector Street, Suite 1500, New York, NY. The exhibition will be open to the public during special events, on Fridays and Saturdays 1-5 p.m. and by appointment. Please bring photo I.D. to check in at reception.
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Please join us for an opening reception for Michael Mandiberg at 40 Rector Street, Suite 1500.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Walk through will begin promptly at 7 p.m.
Bring a photo I.D. to check in at reception.
Location: 40 Rector Street, Suite 1500, New York, NY
Please join us for a conversation exploring the changing landscape of curatorial practices and exhibition spaces in New York City.
Come Celebrate Closing the Book on FDIC Insured by Michael Mandiberg! Join the event on Facebook.
Eight years to the day from Lehman’s failure, artist and educator Michael Mandiberg debuted his current exhibition, FDIC Insured, which captures the extent of this financial unraveling in a clear-eyed site-specific installation tucked away in a vacant office on the 15th Floor of 40 Rector Street.
Since 2008, when the financial industry most recently reaped the whirlwind, artist Michael Mandiberg has been collecting the logos of failed banks for his “FDIC Insured” project — 527 at this point — and laser-cutting them onto the covers of discarded financial tomes.
Art of Failure Bloomberg Businessweek September 26 – October 2, 2016 Issue
Did you know that since the start of the last recession that over 527 banks have failed? How would we know? When a bank fails there’s no dying cry, no elegy written for it, no sense that it leaves a hole in the community where it once was.
Riding the R train, Mandiberg said, “I thought about this show recently as a kind of memorial. Not a memorial for these banks but a memorial for its impact upon so many people.”
In the space of a weekend, the financial books are autopsied and transferred, the website redirects, and the letterhead is shredded. “It happens for business reasons, but also from a symbolic and semiotic point of view, everything gets erased.”
This week is all about books, as Printed Matter’s beloved art book fair touches down in Long Island City, while a new satellite fair pops up in nearby Greenpoint. Plus, don’t miss the celebration of a pioneering performance series and the first retrospective for maintenance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
The 2008 recession drew attention to the destabilization of financial markets by a banking sector that skirts the edges of regulation, using purposely inscrutable financial instruments. In response, a number of artists have attempted to represent the social, political, and financial networks that comprise contemporary capitalism.
For six and a half years, from the height of the recession in 2009, the New York-based artist Michael Mandiberg woke up every Saturday, turned on his computer and discovered which US banks had failed that week.
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