Featuring work by Daniel Djuro-Goiricelaya, Jayne Holsinger, Joana Ricou, Marina Ross, Nancy Baker, Patrick Farrar, Scott Robinson, Burr Dodd, Beata Chrzanowska, Christopher Tandy, Drew Van Diest, Jaynie Crimmins, Maya Meissner, Peter Hopkins, Shani Ha, Eliot Markell, Joshua Liebowitz, Margaret Lanzetta, George Horner, Vincent Stracquadanio, Brian Kenny, Jon Newman, Tom Kotik, Elizabeth Shoby, Erin Hael, Fanny Allié, Marcy Rosenblat, Michele Hemsoth, norton, Sara Jean-Baptiste, Wilson Duggan, Alyssa Maurin, Anne Gilman, Jeanne Tremel, Lynne Stone, Merav Ezer, Stephi Kix, Christopher Stout, David Packer, Linda Schmidt and Nico Dodd.

Type Indicators is an exhibition concept and research project that explores the relationship between personality, identity, and artistic self-expression using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, is a decades-old series of questions designed to assess how people interact with the world, both around them and within themselves. The questionnaire, first developed in the 1960’s and based on Jungian psychological principles, focuses on four fundamental questions. The combined response to these questions reveals a four letter score that identifies one of sixteen possible personality types.

1. Are you outwardly or inwardly focused? (Introverted or Extroverted)
2. How do you prefer to digest information? (Sensing or INtuition)
3. How do you prefer to make decisions? (Thinking or Feeling)
4. How do you prefer to live your external life? (Judging or Perceiving)

The aim of our project is to use these established psychological categories to examine the relationship between an artist’s personality and the artwork they create. Type Indicators will feature work by over 40 different artists, curated according to their Myers-Briggs personality types. The participating artists were brought together over several months, in response to an open call for participants. The exhibition will also include a presentation of the data we collect, a kind of snapshot “personality map” of artists in Bushwick and beyond.

Our aim is to start a conversation within the community about our behavioral predilections and to potentially illuminate unlikely similarities between unlikely people. With the data and art we collect from Bushwick’s generous and open community, we hope to mount an exhibition that beautifully illustrates the connections between art and the people and personalities behind it.

Black and White, and Re(a)d All Over

Angela Strassheim, Don Hamerman, Brian Gaman and Andy Graydon

February 3, 2012