TUG
Collective
Who We Are
TUG Collective (Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar) braids together creativity (making of art), critique (critical reflection), and citizenship (connection to community) through interdisciplinary art practice. Fostering social cohesion among community partners invested in civic engagement, TUG creates contact zones where people can generate insights about, and produce actions around, contemporary social issues, all which manifest in diverse artistic forms including performance, multi-media installation, and site-specific interactions.
Notable large-scale projects include: Borders, Corridors, and Lines of Desire, an installation of seven works, emerging from three years of engagement with people and places along the National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail, that exposes the seams of some of the most poetic visions that US-Americans have of themselves as a country founded on the ideals of freedom, democracy, and inclusion; and sea/sky, blood, earth, you, a multi-faceted project and art exhibition in support of Freedom & Captivity, a humanities initiative for an abolitionist future, that brought together prison-reform advocates and Returning Citizens in Maine to gather some finer meaning about fragility, resilience, and the performance of care. Currently, TUG is developing Do Not Forgive My Hands, a multi-media installation that establishes pathways of associations regarding how humans twist things around them—animals, objects, emotions—toward violence.
TUG’s work has been presented in such spaces as the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Charlotte Street Foundation, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Colby College Museum of Art, Field Projects (NYC), Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology (México), Harvestworks’ Art and Technology Program on Governors Island (NYC), Holter Museum of Art (Montana), Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), Lawrence Arts Center (Kansas), the London International Screen Dance Festival (U.K.), Luminary Center for the Arts (St. Louis), Malmö Academy of Music (Sweden), the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, SoCA Armouries Gallery (Canada), SPACE Gallery (Maine), the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha), and the Center for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (Canada). The collective’s participatory, problem-based interventions related to borders, borderlands, and other fuzzy frontiers are featured in Lee Rodney's Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America’s Frontier Imagination (Routledge).
TUG is on faculty in the MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
About Gaelyn
Gaelyn Aguilar is a cultural anthropologist and artist who looks to performance as a site for both intervention and re/search. She initially explored this pivot point in the Republic of (North) Macedonia, where as a Fulbright Fellow she conducted research on dance and the cultural politics of national identity. Following almost 24 months of fieldwork in the Balkans, Gaelyn turned her attention to the borderlands of North America, a shift that dovetailed into her role as the Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of TUG Collective. Prior to becoming active as an ethnographer, Gaelyn was an independent filmmaker who produced documentaries that profiled individuals, organizations, and socio-cultural issues that lacked access to popular support and conventional media outlets. Her documentary work has appeared in National Geographic’s New Explorers Series, been distributed nationally to over 250 refugee resettlement programs, and received support from the David Bermant Foundation, the Phaedrus Foundation, and the Ohio Commission on Minority Health. Gaelyn complements her identity with work as a live performing and studio-recording artist. She worked with Grand Bell Award-winning Korean traditional musician, Won Il, on his conceptual, cross-over album, ‘Asura’ (‘Riot’) and, under the music direction of Kolleen Park, was a member of the original cast of the award-winning South Korean Musical ‘Myong Sung Whan Hu.’ Gaelyn has collaborated with modern dance choreographers in the United States and abroad, co-composing and performing music scores commissioned by Tina Yuan, Kim Young Sook, Jill Sigman, and David Shimotakahara of GroundWorks DanceTheater, with whom she worked for over 10 years, presenting several of the company’s early, seminal works. Gaelyn has worked with sound poets Jap Blonk and Tomomi Adachi, performed on reconstructions of Luigi Russolo’s intonorumori instruments, collaborated on open score performances, and joined award-winning visual/performing artist and designer, Robin VanLear, on ‘Marigold Wars,’ her large-scale, theatrical/dance response to the Rwandan Genocide, which premiered at the Cleveland Playhouse’s Fusion Festival. Her multimedia work includes performances at FrontierSpace (Missoula, Montana) and the Sound Installation Festival at The Cannery (South Penobscot, Maine. Gaelyn recently stepped down from her position as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine at Farmington and has relocated to New York City, where she remains on faculty in the MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts.
About Gustavo
Gustavo Aguilar is a performer/composer/improviser and interdisciplinary artist whose awareness and engagement with new and innovative forms of art operate and encompass a wide range of traditions and media. His work has been called "beautiful, introspective and passionate," "thought-provoking and thoroughly fresh." A Brownsville, Texas native, Gustavo has performed at major festivals and venues throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, including IRCAM's Festival Agora (Paris), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (NYC), the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (Denmark), The Getty Center (LA), the Zagreb Biennale International Festival of New Music (Croatia), the Green Mills Project (Melbourne), the Seoul Arts Center Opera House (Korea), the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella New Music Series, RedCat Theater’s Now Festival (Los Angeles), the Acousmania International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Sounds (Bucharest), and the American Composer's Orchestra Improvise! Festival (NYC). His sound works includes solo and collaborative releases on Acoustic Levitation Records, Mode Records, Circumvention Music, Edition Modern, Mutable Music, Nine Winds Records, Samsung-Ak, Sang-Joong-Ha Music, and TaRaGa. Gustavo’s solo and collaborative work has been supported by Creative Capital’s MAP Fund, Meet the Composers’ MetLife Creative Connections Grant, Arts International’s Fund for US Artist, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and the Korean Ministry of Culture among others. He has worked closely with some of the most innovative composers and creative artist of our time, including Anthony Braxton, Nels Cline, Chaya Czernowin, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Iancu Dumitrescu, Julio Estrada, Vinny Golia, Charlie Haden, Earl Howard, Kang Tae Hwan, Art Jarvinen, Anne LeBaron, Annea Lockwood, George Lewis, Mary Oliver, Liz Phillips, Roger Reynolds, and Wadada Leo Smith. He has given master classes and lectures across the United States and abroad and is the co-editor of The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist (Routledge). In addition to his role as Co-Artistic Director of TUG Collective, Gustavo is currently an Associate Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, faculty in the MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, and a member of The Forest, a cooperative percussion quartet.