08:15 PM : Monday Night Lecture Series @ PSU

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Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series
The public is invited (it's free, tell your friends)
Monday Nights 8:15pm Sharp!
5th Avenue Cinema Room 92
510 SW Hall St. (on the corner of SW 5TH & Hall on the PSU Campus) Portland, Oregon

Marc Horowitz: November 20th

Marc Horowitz, comedic performer and conceptual artist, has been featured on dozens of national and international radio stations, newspapers, and television programs simply because he wants to dine with strangers.

Recently he was invited by Nissan to spend seven days living in his car for their advertising campaign.

Marc wrote “Dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326” (his name and cell phone number) on a dry-erase board fixed to a desk-like piece of furniture, which was being photographed as a retail product for the Fall 2004 Crate & Barrel Catalog. He did it in hopes to have dinner with whoever calls the number from the catalog.

The catalog was distributed with his personal invitation to dinner and he remarkably received over 30,000 calls. As a result, Marc embarked on a Trans-America journey to meet with as many people for dinner as possible, calling it The National Dinner Tour.

Marc was born to Karen Meyer and Burton Horowitz, a schoolteacher and pharmacist respectively, in Westerville, OH. He spent his childhood in the Midwest and the South. From an early age, Marc was a driven and successful businessperson, entrepreneur, and organizer.

At age 8, he founded his first company - a ghost removal and cleaning service with his mom serving as scheduling coordinator. He had his first press at nine when he organized a break dancing competition as entertainment for senior citizens. Additionally, Marc created several scale model stegosaurus business suits from cardboard in an attempt to win the seat for class president.

At age fifteen, Marc left home. For awhile, he lived in an actor friend’s basement and attended high school in Paradise, Indiana, playing football, running track, and buying beer for others with his fake ID as a business venture. He moved around frequently, posing as a foreign exchange student; at age seventeen, he attended Indiana University in Bloomington, receiving his degree in Business Marketing and Microeconomics. After graduating, he traveled extensively overseas, shearing sheep and turning down offers to start various carpet businesses in Morocco. He ultimately took a job in Silicon Valley with a graphics firm. Later, he left for hopes of starting his own venture, and attended The San Francisco Art Institute for a year.

After the Art Institute, Marc and a long time collaborator, Jon Brumit, reinvented themselves as the business team of Sliv & Dulet Enterprises and opened an office in downtown San Francisco. They staffed their company with thirty artists posing as business people to help them “develop a summer line of products and services,” which eventually included a fog removal initiative for the Golden Gate Bridge, a full-service “office in a tent,” a “Swiss Army Cubicle,” and much more.

In the summer of 2004, Marc completed his Errand Feasibility Study, which included running his daily errands while riding a pack mule through San Francisco. He dropped off his dry cleaning, accompanied the mule into REI to return a stove, made photocopies, did his grocery shopping, and made a deposit at his bank.

That same year, every Saturday, Marc ran 1500 feet of extension cord from his kitchen to the local park three blocks away where he hooked up a coffee maker and served free coffee to all who visited.

Marc continues his “social research” through many other projects like The 25th Annual Sample Gum Chew-Off, The Center for Improved Living, Sapce The Spaceman, The Rabid Rabbit Run, The Human Video Game Experiment, and Free Ideas, which nearly got him arrested for handing out scrawled ideas on post-it notes. His work can be seen on his website, www.ineedtostopsoon.com.

He’d like to encase a 1969 Camaro in Lucite someday and is known to chase cardboard dragons.