The Museum is excited to welcome back Brendan Fernandes for an encore presentation of his site-specific piece, Moving Through. Originally performed this past spring, this commissioned work will be reprised throughout the galleries. Fernandes’s piece dissolves the boundaries among visual art, dancers, and audience members. The performance will take place in the Museum atrium and throughout the galleries; visitors can expect to see dancers in the galleries as they respond to a dynamic movement score composed collaboratively by students. Rather than stage a stationary performance, dancers will move through the Museum, allowing visitors to watch the fluid performance and come and go as they wish.
The work unfolds as a meditative act, inviting an extended, slow process of looking, sensing, and interpreting. Audience members may stumble upon a dancer by chance or follow their movement as they respond to an artwork—transforming observation into an immersive experience.
By integrating movement, stillness, and sonic interplay, Fernandes reimagines the Museum as a living, breathing space where art and dance converge, challenging how we see, experience, and interpret both art forms. The performance will invite audiences into an active, meditative process of seeing, experiencing, and engaging with art in new and transformative ways.
Brendan Fernandes is the 2025 artist-in-residence in the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience. The site-specific commissioned piece Moving Through is made possible through collaboration among, and support from the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity, Fernandes’s projects take hybrid forms to address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. He is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and received a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Fernandes is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have been shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal), among a great many others. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Fernandes is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), MCA Denver, The Fabric Workshop (Philadelphia), and Prospect 6 (New Orleans).
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