selected INTERDISCIPLINARY collaborations

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS & INVITED TALKS

coney island Museum:
Ask the Experts
Toni-Lee Sangastiano

Dr. Toni-Lee Sangastiano is a sideshow banner painter and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the carnivalesque through painting, printmaking, books arts, typography and maker technology. Her interest in this theme began as a child on the boardwalks of the Jersey shore and was later fostered at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) by Professor Marie Roberts and Artistic Director Dick Zigun of Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore in 1997, when she painted her first sideshow banners.

After living and teaching graphic design in Vermont for over fifteen years, Toni-Lee had a serendipitous “homecoming” in 2019 when she painted the “Freak Show Alley” mural for the Coney Island Brewery. She continues to document and contribute to sideshow history through painted banners for performers and fans alike, classical oil paintings of show people and carnivalesque landscapes, and her doctoral dissertation, “Dialogic Dissensus: The Postmodern Sideshow” through the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

Sangastiano’s exhibitions include the Yale School of Art, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, the Shelburne Museum and Tate Modern, London. Her work was recently acquired by the Italian American Museum of Washington DC (IAMDC).

She currently lives in Virginia, is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Studio Art and Digital Media Specialist at Georgetown University and is an Adjunct Professor at her alma mater, FDU.

Recorded 4/14/21

2021 CIRCUS AND ITS OTHERS CONFERENCE (CaiO) U.C. DAVIS

Join Georgetown University Art Galleries for a conversation with performers Sara H. Bird Girl and Johnathan Lee Iverson, moderated by Prof. Toni-Lee Sangastiano. Coinciding with the exhibition Toni-Lee Sangastiano: Carnivalesque, currently on view in Spagnuolo South, Sangastiano’s artwork makes visible the people and spaces of the carnival, celebrating them in all of their wonder, glitter, grit, genius, and eccentricity.

Sarah H. Bird Girl is a performer, arts manager, Cirque du Soleil and Coney Island castmate, and Koo Koo the Bird Girl freakshow historian.

Johnathan Lee Iverson was the youngest and first African American Ringmaster in the nearly 150-year history of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.

Recorded May 19, 2022

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES PUBLIC DIALOGUE: CARNIVALESQUE

Join Georgetown University Art Galleries for a conversation with performers Sara H. Bird Girl and Johnathan Lee Iverson, moderated by Prof. Toni-Lee Sangastiano. Coinciding with the exhibition Toni-Lee Sangastiano: Carnivalesque, currently on view in Spagnuolo South, Sangastiano’s artwork makes visible the people and spaces of the carnival, celebrating them in all of their wonder, glitter, grit, genius, and eccentricity.

Sarah H. Bird Girl is a performer, arts manager, Cirque du Soleil and Coney Island castmate, and Koo Koo the Bird Girl freakshow historian.

Johnathan Lee Iverson was the youngest and first African American Ringmaster in the nearly 150-year history of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.

Recorded Jan 16, 2021

MY HISTORY

From the history advertising, graphic design, and postmodernism, to the power structures, language, and technology that create conditions of “normality,” these two snapshots capture the birth of new art forms and new theoretical lenses that have informed my creative practices and research for several decades. The specific visual history of large-scale circus advertising is documented on my other website sideshowbanners.com.

DIALOGIC DISSENSUS: THE POSTMODERN SIDESHOW

In the United States, the sideshow occupies a marginal and often controversial space in popular culture. Despite a decline of the sideshow during the early twentieth century, its postmodern reinvention in 1980 has inspired a proliferation of the aesthetics of the sideshow within mass media and culture as a highly profitable commodity. The current existence of the sideshow as a thriving genre can sometimes be met with surprise, disbelief, or disgust because of the history of sideshow and existing codes of “normality.” Although there is pre-existing scholarship on Bakhtin and the sideshow, what is missing is an exploration of Bakhtin’s dialogism in relation to the art of the postmodern sideshow. This dissertation argues that the postmodern sideshow as an art form is an example of a reinvention of intersubjectivity through Bakhtin’s dialogic and still relevant for understanding contemporary aesthetics. Furthermore, I propose that the carnivalesque is an aspect of the dialogic because the carnivalesque renews hope for a better future which reverberates through unfinalizable time. Instead, I will propose an intertextual genealogy between philosophical thought and the first-hand voices of sideshow performers and related show people in the spirit of dialogism. However, I assert that the dialogic is nearly impossible without a dissensus because of precarization and our permanent cellular connection as a result of our technological progress, which did not exist at the height of postmodernism. This new tyranny of normality has depersonalized our time, dissolved our friendships and communities, our ability to communicate, and our social consciousness to empathize with others in a fundamental shift to our notions of exploitation. A revolution of the aesthetic regime through the maternal will create a new paradigm that reorganizes our senses, our social consciousness, and the conditions for possibility in the dialogic.

Keywords: Sideshow, Bakhtin, Rancière, Baroque, Normality