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Vanity Project (Heather Besemer-Schulz & Jeff Schulz)

@vanityproject_studio

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An interdisciplinary art practice
Art, objects, interventions & cultural critique
Brooklyn, NY

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Our project, 10 Billboards, is part of a huge group photography show at The Greenpoint Gallery (390 McGuinness Blvd., Brooklyn). The opening is Friday, October 16, from 8 PM to midnight. If you’re out and about, pop round and say hi! @greenpointgallery @vanityproject_studio by @vanityproject_studio

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Our final #HotPickThursday of the 2025-26 season, meet Vanity Project, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary art studio founded by the husband-and-wife artist duo Heather Besemer-Schulz and Jeff Schulz.

Positioned at the intersection of architecture, image-making, and cultural critique, the studio privileges hybridity over fixed disciplinary boundaries, evolving into a practice defined by agility, experimentation, and critical intent.

Their name, Vanity Project, serves as both provocation and manifesto: a reclamation of “vanity” from its dismissive connotations and a pointed affirmation of the value of creative labor. Here, making is not indulgence but necessity, a deliberate act shaped by the tension between play and purpose, conviction and curiosity. Through this lens, their work becomes a way of navigating the layered terrain of identity, desire, care, and mediated experience.

Image: Vanity Project, Harm To Ongoing Matter (packaged newspaper), 2024, Newspaper, plastic bags, black ink, 11" x 15" packaged by @vanityproject_studio

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18 days ago

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One Thousand Lottery Tickets
2026
Lottery tickets, red string, gold beads, and metal ring
42” x 12” diameter

Hope is not the conviction that another future will come, but the refusal to stop imagining one. It persists beyond its own rational justification, even when experience gives us little reason to expect circumstances to change. Hope creates the space between what is and what could be, allowing us to act, resist, make, care, and try again without certainty of what will follow.

One Thousand Lottery Tickets draws on the Japanese origami tradition of Senbazuru, in which folding a thousand paper cranes is believed to bring good fortune or fulfill a wish. Each losing lottery ticket once carried an imagined future and now serves as a material record of possibility confronted by fact. Folding these tickets into cranes does not undo their losses; it turns what has already been foreclosed toward possibility again. To know the outcome and continue to hope is at once stubborn, necessary, and deeply human.

The work does not resolve whether hope without sufficient cause is irrational or indispensable. It asks instead what hope is worth once evidence can no longer justify it. Perhaps hope is least justifiable precisely when it becomes most necessary. To imagine otherwise is to refuse the inevitability of what exists and the limits the present would place on what can still be imagined. by @vanityproject_studio

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by @vanityproject_studio

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Our project “Star Registry” was selected for an exhibition called “Mock” and there couldn’t be a more fitting show for it! Opening next Saturday night in PA. @ejectaprojects by @vanityproject_studio

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a month ago

New project coming soon. @vanityproject_studio by @vanityproject_studio

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2 months ago

Got this email yesterday. Wasn’t sure how to break the news that our work isn’t exactly giving Christmas. @jeffschulzcreative @besemer_schulz by @vanityproject_studio

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2 months ago

NEW PROJECT: STAR REGISTRY
2026
20 framed certificates
11" × 14" each

Star Registry assigns twenty star names drawn from the vocabulary of adolescent sexual humor. Each is fixed to astronomical coordinates, assigned a registration number, certified by signature and embossed seal, and professionally framed. The language is juvenile. The apparatus surrounding it insists otherwise.

The premise is already an impossible one: that something as remote and unpossessable as a star might be claimed through an act of naming. Yet Star Registry treats the claim with absolute administrative seriousness. The documents meticulously certify names that have no recognized astronomical status. Nothing about the proposition becomes more true as it moves through this machinery. It simply acquires the signs by which legitimacy is recognized.

The work emerges from Trump-era America, where salesmanship, masculine bravado, and the performance of authority have become increasingly difficult to separate. The locker room and the institution no longer appear as opposites. Star Registry locates itself inside this collapse. Here, vulgarity does not diminish authority; it becomes one of the ways authority is performed in a political culture where the confidence of a claim can carry more weight than its relationship to fact.

The stars remain indifferent.

www.internationalstellarregistry.com @vanityproject_studio taken in Brooklyn, New York by @vanityproject_studio

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2 months ago

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STAR REGISTRY
2026
20 framed certificates
11” × 14 “ each

Star Registry assigns twenty star names drawn from the vocabulary of adolescent sexual humor. Each is fixed to astronomical coordinates, assigned a registration number, certified by signature and embossed seal, and professionally framed. The language is juvenile. The apparatus surrounding it insists otherwise.

The premise is already an impossible one: that something as remote and unpossessable as a star might be claimed through an act of naming. Yet Star Registry treats the claim with absolute administrative seriousness. The documents meticulously certify names that have no recognized astronomical status. Nothing about the proposition becomes more true as it moves through this machinery. It simply acquires the signs by which legitimacy is recognized.

The work emerges from Trump-era America, where salesmanship, masculine bravado, and the performance of authority have become increasingly difficult to separate. The locker room and the institution no longer appear as opposites. Star Registry locates itself inside this collapse. Here, vulgarity does not diminish authority; it becomes one of the ways authority is performed in a political culture where the confidence of a claim can carry more weight than its relationship to fact.

The stars remain indifferent.
⠀
www.internationalstellarregistry.com @jeffschulzcreative @besemer_schulz by @vanityproject_studio

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2 months ago

Star Registry, 2026. No. 001. Vanity Project. @vanityproject_studio @besemer_schulz @jeffschulzcreative by @vanityproject_studio

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2 months ago

Star Registry, 2026. No. 007. Vanity Project. @vanityproject_studio @besemer_schulz @jeffschulzcreative by @vanityproject_studio

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2 months ago

Vanity Project’s HARM TO ONGOING MATTER (2025) has been included in Art and Politics: The Politics of Absence, an exhibition presented by Site:Brooklyn, on view June 13 - July 13, 2026.
Curated by Guusje Sanders, the exhibition brings together artists whose work examines what has been erased, excluded, forgotten, controlled, or rendered invisible.
Thrilled to be included in this conversation.
@sitebrooklyn @guusje_sanders @vanityproject_studio vanityproject_studio by @vanityproject_studio

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4 months ago