Nolan Hanson

Nolan Hanson applies an interdisciplinary approach to their practice, using existing cultural forms to directly engage with society to examine concepts of identity, power and history. Their site-specific and socially engaged projects often have collaborative, participatory, and educational components.

Nolan Hanson is an artist based in New York City. Their practice includes independent work as well as collaborative socially engaged projects and has been shown in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Portland. Nolan is the founder of Trans Boxing, an art project in the form of a boxing club that centers on trans and gender variant people. The project shifts in response to context and conditions to continuously reimagine possibilities for social engagement. They received their BFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2014. In 2021 they graduated from the Art and Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University.

Trans Boxing

Nolan Hanson

Trans Boxing: The Basics, 2021

Single channel video

00:06:25

"I met Ky-mani Davis in the winter of 2021 at Gersh Park in East New York, Brooklyn, where my boxing trainer Carl held sparring sessions on Sunday mornings. After learning that he had an interest in filmmaking, I collaborated with Jia Li, Yiwei Chen, and Kris Rios to create a participatory project that could serve to help teach Ky-mani filmmaking and editing techniques by creating a Trans Boxing instructional video.

We held an in-person filmmaking workshop, and afterwards, Ky-mani and Yiwei met in a series of virtual meetings to edit the piece collaboratively. In addition to Ky-Mani learning filmmaking and editing techniques, the project created a multi-layered educational context in which everyone involved engaged in conversations about identity, agency, representation, and media. The project provided a way for Ky-mani and me to talk about things that might not have otherwise come up during our sparring sessions, and we got to know one another in a new way. " - Nolan Hanson

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