Brendan Fernandes’s “Moving Through” performance at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art is a site-specific work that dissolves the boundaries among visual art, dancers, and audience members. Taking place in the Museum atrium and throughout the Museum’s galleries, the piece will feature six dancers whose movements respond to a dynamic dance score composed collaboratively by students. Visitors can expect to come upon dancers in the galleries as everyone moves through the Museum rather than watching the performance staged in one space, and visitors can come and go as necessary during this fluid endurance performance.
By integrating movement, stillness, and sonic interplay, Fernandes reimagines the Museum as a living, breathing space where art and dance converge, challenging the ways 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.
Dancers: Katlin Bourgeois, Hanna DiLorenzo, Princess Gates, Kara Hunsinger, Brian Martinez, Morgan McDaniel
Sound: Claire Staples
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. Fernandes 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 is the recipient of 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 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 currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and 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).
Originally published at raclinmurphymuseum.nd.edu.