[BHQFU]
Established in 2009, New York (New York), United States.
Art collective.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation is an anonymous artist collective that creates installations, videos, paintings, sculptures, performances, and exhibitions. The founding members keep their identities anonymous but are known to be a group of male artists who met while obtaining their undergraduate degrees at the Cooper Union in the late 1990s. The foundation is known for its tongue-in-cheek works, which use canonical art works as the basis for humorous, prank-style images and performances: in The Gate, Not the Idea of the Thing But the Thing Itself on New York’s Waterways (2005), the collective, in a tiny boat adorned by a replica of one of Christo and Jean-Claude’s Gates, chases after Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island (1970).
In 2009, the collective established the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), an experimental art school that offers free art classes, lectures, and workshops. The artist-taught classes offered have ranged ‘from Painting Critique’ and ‘Sex-Ed’ to ‘Humor and the Abject’ and ‘Poetic Image for the People’. The BHQFU also offers a summer residency program. The school is frequently involved in actions to protest the high cost of art education in the United States....