Goings On: posted week of July 18, 2019
CONTENTS:
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1. Martha Wilson, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle, FF Alumns, at Electronic Arts Intermix, Manhattan, August 1
2. Morgan O’Hara, FF Alumn, at Haus der Geschichte, Stuttgart, Germany, July 22, and more
3. Royal Osiris Karaoke Orchestra, FF Alumn, nominated for a Bessie Award, and more
4. Moya Devine, FF Alumn, in San Diego County, CA, August 2019-December 2020
5. Kriota Willberg, FF Alumn, summer 2019 news
6. Kimsooja, FF Alumn, at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, thru Jan. 19, 2020, and more
7. David Hammons, Bob Holman, FF Alumns in The New York Times, now online
8. Bradley Eros, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Marni Kotak, M. Lamar, Jeanne Liotta, Tenzin Phuntsog, FF Alumns, at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, thru August 19
9. Mark Mendel, FF Alumn, launches new website at markmendel.com
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1. Martha Wilson, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle, FF Alumns, at Electronic Arts Intermix, Manhattan, August 1
EAI Invites: Martha Wilson
For the third installment of EAI Invites, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to welcome Martha Wilson, the pathbreaking feminist artist and founding director of Franklin Furnace. Noting that “most people are interested in sex” and the subject’s subsequent broad appeal, Martha Wilson has selected sexually explicit and audacious work from the collections of both EAI and Franklin Furnace, exploring human relations from multiple perspectives. Works screened will include Post Porn Modernist, a 1990 performance by Annie Sprinkle, along with a selection of film and video by Ellen Cantor, Barbara Hammer, Mike Kelley, Cynthia Maughan, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, and Julie Zando.
Tickets: $7 general admission, $5 for students, free for EAI members
Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades has created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City. In 1976 she founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc,, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, online and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums. Martha Wilson joined P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, and mounted a solo exhibition, “I have become my own worst fear,” in September 2011. In 2013, Wilson received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. In 2015, she received the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, administered by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; the College Art Association’s Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award; and mounted her second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W Gallery.
Thursday, August 1, 2019 at 7 PM EDT
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
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2. Morgan O’Hara, FF Alumn, at Haus der Geschichte, Stuttgart, Germany, July 22, and more
I am doing 4 upcoming Handwriting the Constitution sessions in Germany in the next weeks.
22 JULY HAUS DER GESCHICHTE, STUTTGART
23 JULY 10:00 – 12:00 KUNSTHAUS GÖPPINGEN
23 JULY 19:30 – 21:30 UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGEN CASTLE COURTYARD
24 JULY 16:00 – 19:00 KULTURHAUS SCHWANEN, WAIBLINGEN
ALSO,
British scholar Aiden Mcgarry’s book Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication will be published by Amsterdam University Press in the fall. Chapter Five is an extensive interview with me about the Handwriting the Constitution project.
ALSO,
I am in the summer group show at ANITA ROGERS GALLERY, New York 31 July – 30 August.
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3. Royal Osiris Karaoke Orchestra, FF Alumn, nominated for a Bessie Award, and more
Close ones,
We are honored to be recognized with two nominations in this year’s Bessie Awards! The Art Of Luv Part 6: AWESOME GROTTO! has been nominated for awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Visual Design. We have not been so humbled since accepting the award for Best Original Song Not Written by Thoth from the Horus Council in at the annual Opening of the Mouth Ceremony at the Temple of Khonsu in Thebes in 2057 BCE.
We are particularly grateful to the humans at Abrons Arts Center, American Realness Festival, and Creative Capital– and for our collaborators John Gasper, Hyung-Seok Jeon, Shea Leavis and Annie-B Parson for making AWESOME GROTTO! awesome.
Join us at the awards ceremony in October, and for karaoke afterwards!
Also in early October, we will tour AWESOME GROTTO! to Texas A&M University, where the people are kind, the hotel is in a town called “Bryan,” and the students are called “Aggies” for reasons we are excited to learn. If you will be in the area, let us know.
LUV,
ROKE
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4. Moya Devine, FF Alumn, in San Diego County, CA, August 2019-December 2020
INNOVATIVE ART EXHIBITION CELEBRATES UNIQUE COLLABORATIONS
Artists With and Without Autism Share Perspectives on Community
Radical Inclusion Traveling Art Exhibition. This art exhibition features collaborative artwork by six young artists with autism and six professional artists.
Collaborative Artist Pairs
Katie Flores and Moya Devine,who’s work is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Arts and Disability Center at the University of California Los Angeles.”
Jack Medved and Amanda Saint-Claire
Ethan Marr and Anna Stoefen
Brendan Kerr and Joy Boe
Stevenson Sapper and Deron Cohen
Alejandra Acosta and Rich Walker
The exhibition will be on display at multiple locations across San Diego County from August 2019 to December 2020.
The artists in Radical Inclusion are matched in pairs to create a collaborative project that celebrates unique perspectives and mutual learning by recognizing the amazing narratives that are produced when different worlds meet to speak the same language. The project surrounds the theme of “community” as a stepping stone for a collective exchange of ideas and experiences.
The Radical Inclusion Traveling Art Exhibition will be on display at Sophie’s Gallery Kensington, Revision Gallery in Old Town, the Foundry Gallery in Carlsbad, Culture Brewery Encinitas, City Hall in Solana Beach, The Church at Rancho Bernardo, and Lux Art Institute in Encinitas.
For more information
Contact:
Amy Chastain
858.229.2746
amy.chastain@outlook.com
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5. Kriota Willberg, FF Alumn, summer 2019 news
Hi Everyone!
Hope you’ve had an incredible spring and that your summer is full of promise and wonder, or at least a couple picnics.
Silver Wire on Medium
This spring I finished Silver Wire. The 19-page narrative explores the histories of surgery, unethical research, and slavery, by using embroidery as the medium for gaining a little more understanding of these very intimidating subjects. In the narrative, I go to the park with my doctor-friend Mollie for a lesson about surgery and suturing techniques. As we wound and sew up fruit, they explore the histories of medical sewing and decorative sewing, gossiping and joking about the great surgeons of history. But the same techniques that Mollie uses with her patients to relieve their suffering have a dark history that affects us all.
The self-published print book can be purchased through Birdcage Bottom Books In addition to the story there are eight (count ’em, 8!) pages of citations, wry commentary, bibliography, and and images of some of my medical embroidery. It’s my best work, yet!
Now, you can read Silver Wire on Medium.com’s comics site, Spiral Bound, for free! You can access the bibliography at my blog, KriotaWelt but to get the panel by panel citations, you have to buy the print version.
GET A GRIP!
For the past year I have been writing a self-care for creatives column (G.A.G!) for The Comics Beat, online. The articles explore physical injury prevention, covering some basics from my book, Draw Stronger, and going beyond. We explore self massage with rollers and balls, look at prevention of specific muscular injuries, but there’s more! The column recognizes ANY condition that impedes creative work is an “injury”. We look at the world of graphic medicine and how it can help us understand ourselves through reading it and making it. We look at mental health comics resources. There are interviews with injured artists. You can browse the archives here.
In other news…
In April I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology to talk about graphic medicine, self-care, and embroidery! Thanks to my host, Daniel Worden’s adventurous spirit, I even taught a workshop called Exploring Aesthetics Of Medical Imagery Through Needlework to students studying comics, English, and medical illustration. Students transformed historical medical illustrations, into unique embroidered works. Awesome!
Draw Stronger, Self-Care for Cartoonists and Other Visual Artists is still selling strong! Need a copy? You can get in from Uncivilized Books.
Okay, this letter is long enough!
Thanks for reading!
-Kriota
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6. Kimsooja, FF Alumn, at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, thru Jan. 19, 2020, and more
Kimsooja: Archive of Mind
June 22, 2019 – January 19, 2020
Peabody Essex Museum
161 Essex Street
Salem, MA 01970
Kimsooja’s work transforms simple, everyday actions into moments of meditation and transcendence. Archive of Mind is a participatory installation that, with visitor collaboration, builds over the course of the exhibition. PEM presents the North American premiere of this work, where museum visitors are encouraged to sit at the large work surface, empty their minds of distraction, and sink into the essentialized experience of forming a ball of clay with their own hands. Through the course of the exhibition, thousands of clay spheres are generated through small, individual gestures that reveal the emotional traces of their makers and cumulatively generate a complex array of texture, scale, and tone. Archive of Mind is the inaugural exhibition in the Jeffery Beale Gallery, forming part of PEM’s Present Tense Initiative curated by Trevor Smith.
Kimsooja: Archive of Mind was commissioned by the Peabody Essex Museum with the support of Axel Vervoodt Gallery.
Kimsooja: To Breathe and A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Kimsooja, To Breathe, 2019, Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Axel Vervoodt Gallery, and Kimsooja Studio
Kimsooja, A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir, 2019, Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Axel Vervoodt Gallery, and Kimsooja Studio
Kimsooja: To Breathe and A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir
March 30 – September 29, 2019
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
West Bretton
Wakefield, WF4 4LG, UK
With a lightness of touch, Kimsooja transforms the entire space of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Chapel and blurs expected boundaries. In the immersive installation To Breathe, the floor, covered with a mirrored surface, provides an entirely new way of seeing, seeming to open up and unfold the space, making solid surfaces and confining structures appear fluid and expansive. By placing diffraction film on all the windows, the light that enters forms a myriad of rainbow spectrums across the space, which are reflected infinitely via the mirrored floor.
Responsive to the natural environment, the installation changes according to the light quality and intensity, making every experience different and unique. A soundtrack of the artist breathing accompanies the visually spectacular and meditative installation, creating an intimate and shared encounter. What the artist describes as the “‘void’ within the skin of architecture” becomes the body of the work, and a site of communal contemplation for all who encounter it.
Kimsooja’s powerful filmed performance A Needle Woman (1999-2001) involved her standing motionless with her back to the camera amidst endless crowds of people in busy cities including Tokyo, Delhi and Lagos. Grounded, still and calm, her body became a pivot around which humankind seemed to flow. Like a compass point in the landscape, the artist’s towering sculpture A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir functions in a similar way and explores the relationship between our bodies and the wider universe beyond.
This elegant, conical sculpture has transparent panels coated with nano polymer, a material that transforms light, giving an iridescence similar to that which occurs naturally on the wings of a butterfly or a beetle’s shell. The work alters dramatically with changing conditions, the nature and angle of light that hits it, and the position from which it is viewed. Within the sculpture, a mirrored floor makes it appear to extend deep into the earth as well as reaching into the sky, and the viewer stands on the ground at the threshold between the two.
Kimsooja: To Breathe and A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory and Earth was a Souvenir was commissioned by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park with the support of Axel Vervoodt Gallery.
The Street. Where the World Is Made at MO.CO.Panacée
Kimsooja, A Homeless Woman – Delhi, 2000, Courtesy of MAXXi, Rome, Galleria Rafaella Cortese, Milan, and Kimsooja Studio
The Street. Where the World Is Made
June 8 – August 18, 2019
MO.CO.Panacée
14 rue de l’Ecole de Pharmacie
Montpellier, France
Following an initial version at the Museum of Contemporary Art, MAXXI, Rome, the exhibition at La Panacée, The Street. Where the world is made, offers substantial space to video, since it is through the screen-a sort of interface between the private and the public spheres-that we perceive the world today. Hou Hanru’s project brings together 60 artists from all over the world, itoffers a lively, poetic, and political panorama of this public arena.
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7. David Hammons, Bob Holman, FF Alumns in The New York Times, now online
Please visit this link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/nyregion/steve-cannon-dead.html
thank you.
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8. Bradley Eros, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Marni Kotak, M. Lamar, Jeanne Liotta, Tenzin Phuntsog, FF Alumns, at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, thru August 19
Friday July 19, 6:30-8:30pm
Scrapbook: Diane Dwyer, Marni Kotak, Julian Louis Phillips
Durational performances
Microscope is pleased to open the performance component of the exhibition “Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)” with an evening of simultaneous durational performances by Diane Dwyer, Marni Kotak, and Julian Louis Phillips.
The three physical performances – which include Julian Louis Phillips repeatedly trying to hit baseballs in a restrictive batting cage, Marni Kotak sewing a revised, personal American flag, and Diane Dwyer assuming the role of a frantic town crier in scuba gear – offer astute critiques on cultural, historical, and political signifiers in this country from the flag, to sports, and the President.
More information about each of the performances follows below.
Diane Dwyer
“Official Climate Change Response Team / Equipo Oficial de Respuesta al Cambio Climatico”
Durational performance, 2019
“Diane the American Swimmer”, inefficiently covered in “protective” gear, leads the US government’s Official Climate Change Response Team, while a recording of Trump’s voice intermittently echoes this directive: “Don’t worry about it… Just don’t worry about it.”
While this performance is framed by the ridiculous and absurd in appearance, it strives to create space for conversations about our responsibilities, including our civic responsibility to demand that we, and our government leaders, truly address this crisis.
“For this performance – as in my recent performances at a fracking site in Pennsylvania, the waterfront of Miami, and an island in Boston Harbor – I am considering the local context, New York City. Like most waterfront cities, NYC faces dire threats from Climate Change, not just from storms, but also rising sea levels, and temperature increases.” – DD
Marni Kotak
“Sewing My Herstory American Dream Flag”
Durational performance, 2019
The performance features the artist sitting in rocking chair and hand-sewing elements from her home and personal life onto the U.S. flag to create a personal “Herstory American Dream Flag”. “My Herstory American Dream Flag has nothing to do with referencing war or political or economic power, but instead the valuing of human life”. Kotak states “The colors of the traditional American flag are said to symbolize: red, toughness and bravery, and often the blood that was shed by soldiers to win America, white, innocence and purity, and is often religious; and blue, justice, which is often noted to come at a hard price. My red symbolizes love and passion; gold, the value of human life above all else; and blue, the oceans, mother earth and peace”.
Julian Louis Phillips
“1518”
Durational performance, 2019
1518 is a durational performance that investigates the labor that goes into being the “first” of a demographic. Inspired by Jackie Robinson and what he endured as the first to integrate the game of baseball. During the performance, the audience is invited to count my hits and they can decide what counts as a hit, continue or restart the count at any time. When I reach 1,518 hits the performance is finished. 1518 is a reference to Robinson’s career hits in major league baseball. The audio in the video documentation was not included in the live performance. It is Robinson and Dick Cavett discussing the changes to baseball since his retirement.
Sculpture used in the performance:
“Batting Cage #1”, 2019
wooden bat, baseball, galvanized steel, chain link fabric performance
72 x 72 x 72 inches
Batting Cage #1 is the sculpture and setting for the performance “1518”. Its size is meant to constrict my swing, to where I can hit the ball but not fully extend my swing and reach my full potential. As I perform with this sculpture it changes. The chainlink walls become imprinted with my many hits and my desire to escape its confines can be seen when I am not present inside.
Suggested Donation $8
Diane Dwyer grew up in New England. She now live in Brooklyn where she hosts Diane’s Circus and cloying PARLOR, two projects in her home addressing, in part, the negotiation of public and private space, as well as the labels amateur and professional. Through private performances, public interventions, and developed personas she investigates a range of subjects, from the experience of alienation, to the seduction of power. New York presentations of her work include Panoply Performance Lab, The Itinerant Performance Festival at the Queens Museum, Bullet Space, MINY Media Center by IFP, Parallel Performance Space, Wild Projects, and Performanx hosted at the Bronx Museum of Art. Her work has screened in Bulgaria, Cuba, England, Ireland, Montenegro, Russia, and Venezuela, and has been included in new genres festivals and exhibitions in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, DC, Las Vegas, and Miami. She received her BFA from The Museum School/Tufts and an MFA through a teaching fellowship at the University of Connecticut. She teaches at Parsons School of Design.
Marni Kotak is a multimedia and performance artist presenting everyday life being lived. She has received international attention for her durational performance installation / exhibitions including “The Birth of Baby X” (2011) in which she gave birth to her son as a live performance and “Mad Meds” (2014) during which the artist slowly withdrew from psychiatric medications prescribed for postpartum depression. Kotak’s works have also appeared at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile, Artists Space, Exit Art, Momenta Art, English Kills Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, among others. She has performed extensively in the US and abroad. Kotak has been featured in ArtFCity, Artforum, Blouin Artinfo, Art Pulse, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Studio International, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Washington Post, among many others. She has also appeared on Good Morning America (ABC), CBC Radio, NPR, and other broadcasts. Grants include Franklin Furnace Fund Award (2012-13) and the Brooklyn Arts Council among others. She received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
Julian Louis Phillips is a Brooklyn born artist. After attending Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Phillips earned his MFA at Social Practice Queens at Queens College. He has exhibited at performed throughout the Northeast and has received fellowships and residencies from More Art, Jamaica Center of Arts and Learning, and NARS Foundation. Phillips work uses sculpture, performance, video, and text to explore relationships between social structures and personal narratives. Julian Louis Phillips is based in New York.
Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)
Zoe Beloff, Bill Brand, MV Carbon, Diane Dwyer, Bradley Eros, foci + loci, Morrison Gong (w/ J. (Jialing) Shih), Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Marni Kotak, M. Lamar, Le’Andra LeSeur, Jeanne Liotta, Simon Liu, Bruce McClure, Julian Louis Phillips, Tenzin Phuntsog, Raha Raissnia
July 12 – August 19, 2019
Opening Friday July 12, 6-9pm
Microscope is very pleased to present the group exhibition “Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)” featuring New York-based artists known for their work in live performance mediums including expanded cinema, sound, performance art, and others.
The exhibition – the title of which references Jonas Mekas’ recent “Scrapbook of the Sixties”, featuring among others the artist’s meticulous diary entries, Village Voice columns, and other texts and materials about the events, happenings, expanded cinema, intermedia and many other performances in the city during that decade – is interested in connections, relationships, and the community among artists currently working in mediums that are often overlooked, considered unrelated, and frequently defy traditional categorization.
“Beck-Malina theatre, environment, music (sound), and light-motion art. The edges of where a specific work of art begins and where it ends are blurred out.” – Jonas Mekas, 1965
The exhibition consists of a broad range of moving image works on video and 16mm film projected daily in the gallery, as well as a schedule of live performances by each artist. Works dating from 1971 to the present tend toward the personal, whether diaristic or dealing with broader subject matter such as race, identity, sexual orientation, climate change, gentrification, or formal artistic concerns.
Performance works take various forms, from political and/or feminist durational performances to expanded cinema, from individual experiences with the viewer wearing a “movie head box” to communal ones with the audience surrounded by a circle of screens, from open air actions documenting the sun’s effect on the artist’s skin to digital performances activated by playing modified Playstation games.
A related program of moving image works by each of the artists will be on view during the gallery’s regular hours. Additionally, visitors to the gallery may find artists setting up, preparing for, or otherwise interacting with elements of their performances.
Performances will take place on Fridays and Mondays, beginning with the first on Friday July 19th and ending on Monday August 19th.
The complete schedule of performances will be posted shortly on our website.
“Scrapbook (or Why Can’t We Live Together)” opens Friday July 12 and continues through August 19. For further information please contact the gallery at inquiries@microcopegallery.com or by telephone at 347.925.1433.
MICROSCOPE GALLERY
1329 Willoughby Avenue, 2B
Brooklyn, NY 11237
Hours: Thurs to Mon, 1-6pm
or by appointment
T: 347 925 1433
info@microscopegallery.com
www.microscopegallery.com
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9. Mark Mendel, FF Alumn, launches new website at markmendel.com
Hi all,
We¹ve made some changes. Thanks for your suggestions. maybe still some typos but we¹re done. Website is out there.
markmendel.com
Mark
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
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send an email to info@franklinfurnace.org
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Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
80 Arts – The James E. Davis Arts Building
80 Hanson Place #301
Brooklyn NY 11217-1506 U.S.A.
Tel: 718-398-7255
Fax: 718-398-7256
mail@franklinfurnace.org
Martha Wilson, Founding Director
Michael Katchen, Senior Archivist
Harley Spiller, Administrator
Dolores Zorreguieta, Program Coordinator
