Down by Law
Joan Kee, Karen Finley, & Howie Chen In Conversation
October 21, 2026 6:30pm
New York University Pless HallA conversation with Karen Finley and Joan Kee, examining art, law, and symbols in the present, moderated by 80WSE curator, Howie Chen.
Check-in begins at 6:15PM
Visitor Access & Registration
RSVP is required—please register to attend this event. For attendance without an active NYU ID card, RSVP by Tuesday, October 20 to guarantee building access.
Please join us for a conversation on the occasion of Incendiaries: The People’s Flag Show 1970, featuring artist Karen Finley and art historian and attorney Joan Kee with 80WSE curator Howie Chen. Taking the exhibition and its use of the American flag as a point of departure, the conversation will consider questions of political expression and artistic agency. Together, they will examine the intersections of art, law, and symbols in the present.
Karen Finley is an artist, performer, and author. Born in Chicago, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Finley was the named plaintiff for the Supreme Court case National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) that challenged the decency provision in government grants to artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been presented internationally such as the Barbican in London, Lincoln Center, New York City, the Bobino in Paris amongst others. Finley is interested in freedom of expression concerns, visual culture, art education and lectures, and gives workshops widely.
She is the author of ten books, including COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco (City Lights, 2025), Je n'etais pas censee etre talentueuse: Ecrits 1985-1994 (Editions du Seuil, 2025), Grabbing Pussy (OR Books, 2018) and the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment (City Lights, 2015). She has recently exhibited her work at Miami Art Basel and a solo survey exhibition with Freight + Volume. A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is an arts professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University.
Follow her on Instagram @the_yam_mam
Joan Kee is an attorney and an art historian who studies how artists work with the law. She is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and an Affiliated Faculty member at NYU School of Law.
Her book Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (2019) examines how artists from the late 1960s onward engaged openly with the legal system, treating law as a recognized source of authority and as a tool for social critique. Artists turned to legal frameworks to signal a recuperation of integrity that civic, political, and cultural institutions had compromised. Another work in progress asks what happens to an artist's meaning once the artist can no longer defend it. Drawing on cases from Hong Kong, Dakar, Australia, and New York, and among Uyghur communities, it follows artists and their communities as they invent their own ways of passing work on, from family networks that act as informal foundations to the deliberate destruction of work. She is also working with the Keith Haring Foundation on a related project about artist legacies.
Other publications include The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity (2023), winner of the 2024 Robert Motherwell Book Award, and Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), which helped spark worldwide interest in twentieth-century Korean art.
Visitor Access & Registration
RSVP is required—please register to attend this event. For attendance without an active NYU ID card, RSVP by Tuesday, October 20 to guarantee building access.
