OUR HISTORY
INVERSE began as a collaboration between two artists, Cynthia Post Hunt and Emma Saperstein, in late Fall 2015. The festival ran in 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Northwest Arkansas and in 2017 on the Central Coast of California. Totaling 17 unique locations and venues and more than 115 artists, the festival hosted live in person and streamed performances from all around the world.
Following the third year of festivals, INVERSE began to develop ideas around additional models for performance programming. INVERSE continued to individually program nights of performance in both regions.
In 2019, INVERSE developed a three week student focused performance art residency program, hosted by the Harold J. Miossi Gallery at Cuesta College. This residency provides students the opportunity to learn and explore performance as a medium, and culminates in a performance art exhibition in Downtown San Luis Obispo, California. It is comprised of individual meetings, intensive group sessions with visiting artists and guest critiques, and workshops led by professional artists along with public-facing performances. This residency continued in 2020 with a virtual iteration.
In 2020, the Arkansas extension of INVERSE began to be supported by the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas. Included in this incubation, INVERSE began to exist as a platform within the new contemporary art space. The programming for 2020 included INVERSE Lab, INVERSE Spring Residency, and INVERSE Digital Performance Art Festival. The California extension of INVERSE continued to be hosted and supported by the Harold J. Miossi Gallery in San Luis Obispo, California.
In 2021, INVERSE developed an eight month cohort and program in direct response to our 2020 year, what we learned, and how we grew, both as a platform and as a community of performance artists. The program culminated in the INVERSE Symposium at the Momentary in December 2021.
INVERSE 2022 was a three-day performance art festival at the Momentary. Employing liveness, experimentation, and radical approaches to the important issues of our moment, the festival featured 14 artists and projects who practice constant interrogation of material, form, and gesture to offer new ideas and perspectives on how we experience the world.
INVERSE 2023 was a four-day performance art festival at the Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art featuring over 50 artists.
INVERSE 2024 continues in Bentonville, Arkansas at the Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — coming soon — November 21 - 24, 2024.
MEET THE CURATORS
EMMA
SAPERSTEIN
Emma Saperstein is a curator, educator and arts administrator based in San Luis Obispo, CA. Her diverse experience includes serving as studio manager to internationally recognized artist Titus Kaphar and nearly a decade of administrative, editorial and curatorial projects in alternative arts and publishing communities, specifically with the Public Media Institute, Never the Same Archive, and Organize Your Own. For the past four years she has worked as the Global Portal Curator for Shared_Studios and managed complex dialogue-based programming projects with the UN, BBC, the Obama Foundation, WGBH and more. She has served as an editor and curator for the feminist collective HYSTERIA and has guest juried exhibitions and public arts projects in California and beyond. Emma holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership with a thesis focused on the gallery as a teaching space access in the educational gallery. Presently, she is the curator at the Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery at Cuesta College and is the guest curator of a major public arts initiative at the the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. She is currently pursuing a second M.A. in Curatorial Studies at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
CYNTHIA
POST HUNT
Cynthia Post Hunt is a curator and artist based in Northwest Arkansas. A graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cynthia is the Curator of Performance at The Momentary. She is deeply invested in the research and presentation of Live Art. Cynthia maintains a research based performance practice. Cynthia holds a Masters in Curating with a thesis in artist run practices influencing institutional spaces from the University of Aarhus in Denmark.