Contents for October 3, 2016
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1. Paco Cao, Papo Colo, Billy X. Curmano, Irina Danilova, Coco Fusco, Beatrice Glow, Alicia Grullón, Guerilla Girls, Pablo Helguera, Alison Knowles, LuLu LoLo, Linda Mary Montano, Pat Oleszko, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, Elizabeth M. Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, Cecilia Vicuña, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, at Center for Book Arts, Manhattan, Oct. 7-Dec. 17
2. Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Frank South, Valerie Tevere, FF Alumns, in The New York Times, Sept. 28
3. Cynthia Carr, Peter Cramer & Jack Waters, Mary Beth Edelson, Sarah Schulman, Julie Tolentino, Andy Warhol, FF Alumns, at Museum of the City of New York, Manhattan, Oct. 6
4. John Jesurun, FF Alumn, at BAM, Brooklyn, Oct. 3
5. Julie Ault, Sarah Schulman, Marvin Taylor, FF Alumns, at Triple Canopy, Nov. 16
6. Anna Banana, FF Alumn, at OR Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Oct. 6
7. Tim Miller, FF Alumn, fall 2016 events
8. Michelle Stuart, FF Alumn, at Parafin, London, UK, Oct. 6-9
9. Paul McMahon, Linda Montano, FF ALumn, at Emily Harvey Foundation, Manhattan, Nov. 30
10. Babs Reingold, FF Alumn, at Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, thru February 26, 2017
11. Split Britches, FF Alumns, at La MaMa Theatre, Manhattan, Oct. 6-16
12. Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Ed Ruscha, FF Alumns, at Printed Matter, Manhattan, thru Oct. 24
13. Mama Donna Henes, FF Alumn, at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, Oct. 8, and more
14. Jess Dobkin, Deb Edmeades, FF Alumns, in Cmagazine, Autumn 2016
15. Kimsooja, FF Alumn, at CAC Malaga, Spain, Oct. 7, 2016-Jan. 8, 2017
16. Betty Tomkins, FF Alumn, at EIDIA House, Brooklyn, opening Oct. 21
17. Penny Arcade, FF Alumn, in Lubin, Poland, Oct. 8, 10, and more
18. Patricia Hoffbauer, Yvonne Rainer, FF Alumns, at WeisAcres, Manhattan, Oct. 16
19. Liliana Porter, FF Alumn, at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA, opening Oct. 15
20. Cathy Weis, FF ALumn, in The New York Times, Sept. 30
21. Jeff McMahon, FF Alumn, now online at jeffmcmahonprojects.net/wordpressblogjeff
22. Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Brendan Fernandes, Alicia Grullón, Clifford Owens, FF Alumns, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Oct. 19-
23. Alvin Eng, Marie Christine Katz, Nicky Paraiso, FF Alumns, at Howl! Gallery, Manhattan, Oct. 10
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1. Paco Cao, Papo Colo, Billy X. Curmano, Irina Danilova, Coco Fusco, Beatrice Glow, Alicia Grullón, Guerilla Girls, Pablo Helguera, Alison Knowles, LuLu LoLo, Linda Mary Montano, Pat Oleszko, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, Elizabeth M. Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, Cecilia Vicuña, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, at Center for Book Arts, Manhattan, Oct. 7-Dec. 17
Enacting the Text | Performing with Words
Featured Artist Project
When: October 7- December 17
Where: 28 W. 27th St., 3rd Floor, NY, NY
Subway: N/R to 28th St, or F to 23rd St
Exhibition URL:
http://centerforbookarts.org/event/xxxxxx
Gallery Hours: M-F, 11a-6p; Sat, 10a-5p
Admission: Free
Organized by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, artist and Independent Curator
While the performative art practices often remain fleeting, a significant number of artists working in interventions, performances, and situations have produced a substantial material culture. This exhibition gives center stage to artist books, letters, notes, scripts, and texts produced along with, or in addition to, their transient gestures.
Enacting the Text |Performing with Words presents works by 25 artists/collectives who go beyond the question of ephemerality versus permanence in their time-based actions. In so doing their works escape the confines of the archive to bring forward an exciting interchange between cultural and social actions and printed matter.
From the most widely known performative/written art form, mail art, to the many and nuanced forms in which performative art and the written word can interact with each other, this exhibition offers insights on performing activism, ecology, gender, sexuality, war, and life in general.
Artists included: María Alós, Josefina Báez, Paco Cao, Papo Colo, Billy X. Curmano, Irina Danilova, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Lesley Dill, Coco Fusco, Beatrice Glow, Alicia Grullón, Guerilla Girls, Pablo Helguera, Nancy Hwang, Alison Knowles, LuLu LoLo, Linda Mary Montano, Pat Oleszko, Pedro Pietri, Praxis (Brainard and Delia Carey), Quintín Rivera-Toro, Jack Smith, Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Cecilia Vicuña, and Martha Wilson.
ABOUT THE CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS
The Center for Book Arts is committed to exploring and cultivating contemporary aesthetic interpretations of the book as an art object, while invigorating traditional artistic practices of the art of the book. The Center seeks to facilitate communication between the book arts community and the larger spheres of contemporary art and literature through exhibitions, classes, public programming, literary presentations, opportunities for artists and writers, publications, and collecting. Founded in 1974, The Center for Book Arts was the first organization of its kind in the nation.
Support for the Center for Book Arts’ Visual Arts Program is provided, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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2. Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Frank South, Valerie Tevere, FF Alumns, in The New York Times, Sept. 28
ART & DESIGN
The Plot to Put Conceptual Art on ‘Melrose Place.’ Yes, Really.
By WILLIAM GRIMES
SEPT. 28, 2016
The conceptual artist Mel Chin, who helped form a group to supply art and props with coded cultural messages on “Melrose Place.” On Friday, at the Red Bull Studios New York, 100 objects from the committee’s work go on display in an exhibition. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times
Twenty years ago, the conceptual artist Mel Chin cold-called the offices of “Melrose Place,” Aaron Spelling’s wildly popular prime-time soap opera, with a proposition. What if a task force of artists supplied free artworks and props for the show’s apartment-complex set, with coded cultural messages on pressing topics like reproductive rights, American foreign policy, alcoholism and sexual politics?
Deborah Siegel, the show’s set decorator, listened to this absurd offer and had an instant reaction. “I thought it sounded really interesting,” she said in a recent interview. “So I met with him.”
This was the beginning of a conceptual artist’s dream, an ongoing intervention into the very heart of American mass culture. In late 1995, Mr. Chin and a team of 100 mostly unknown artists, called the Gala Committee, began a two-year experiment, placing objects on the set of “Melrose Place.” They took their cues from scripts provided in advance and in some instances worked with the writers to modify plot lines and develop characters.
Heather Locklear and Rob Estes in “Melrose Place.” An episode in 1997 featured an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which included works made for the set. Credit CBS Television Studios
In it, Heather Locklear, as the hard-charging advertising executive Amanda Woodward, has just taken on the museum as a client and brings her love interest, Kyle McBride (Rob Estes), to the opening for a stimulating evening of art talk.
Much of it takes place in front of a Ross Bleckner-like painting that alludes to the American bombing of Baghdad. That work was ordered by Carol Mendelsohn, the show’s head writer. This fictional opening, filmed two weeks before the museum’s opening, was one of the great meta moments in television history.
Mr. Chin is by now a well-known figure, a skilled organizer of socially provocative works that can last for years. In a recent project typical of his approach, “The Tie That Binds,” he used native plants to create eight drought-resistant gardens along the Los Angeles River. Visitors were invited to take away a blueprint for one of the gardens and replicate it at home, furthering the cause of water conservation.
The “Melrose Place” idea began when Mr. Chin was shuttling back and forth between the University of Georgia, where he held a temporary professorship, and the California Institute of the Arts, where he was conducting a workshop. “We discussed pop culture and Hollywood,” said Valerie Tevere, one of his Cal Arts students, an artist and now a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island. “How might artists work with TV. What sort of things could happen?”
Mr. Chin had never heard of “Melrose Place.” “I was not watching much television at the time,” he said in a recent interview at Red Bull Studios.
But if he was not watching, he was thinking, prompted by Julie Lazar, the director of experimental programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Tom Finkelpearl, a guest curator and now New York’s commissioner of cultural affairs, who approached him to take part in “Uncommon Sense.”
Mr. Chin recalled that while on a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, he looked out the window and thought “Los Angeles is in the air.” The city existed in the trillions of electronic impulses its residents sent through the atmosphere and around the world, transmitting social content and cultural symbols. “Our world is transformed by covert information, political messages,” Mr. Chin said. “How would that work if it was art?”
Back home, Mr. Chin watched as his wife, Helen Nagge, flipped the remote and stopped on an arresting image. “I saw this large blond face filling the screen, with blue eyes,” he said. It was Ms. Locklear. “When she moved, there was a painting behind her, and I said, ‘That’s the gallery.'”
Mr. Chin began assembling his troops. The name GALA fused the abbreviations for Georgia and Los Angeles, but eventually the committee absorbed dozens of artists around the country.
The team included students; professional artists; a media scholar (Constance Penley of the University of California, Santa Barbara); and an actual fan of the show, Mark Flood, an old friend of Mr. Chin’s from his native Houston.
Mr. Flood wondered aloud whether the project amounted to a sellout. Mr. Chin told him, “We’re not selling anything, we’re getting in.”
Frank South, an executive producer for the show, and Ms. Mendelsohn decided not to mention the project to Mr. Spelling or the network brass. Eventually, word leaked out. In 1997, The New Yorker ran a Talk of the Town article, “Agitprop,” timed to the opening of “Uncommon Sense.” Mr. South said, “I was busted.”
Mr. Spelling, tickled at the idea of seeing “Melrose Place” in the museum world, took the news well. “Just don’t do anything to hurt the show,” he told his charges.
In early 1996, with the series in its fourth season, the artwork began to arrive, first in a trickle, then in a flood. As a safe-sex message, committee members designed “Safety Sheets” for the manipulative, womanizing Dr. Peter Burns: bedsheets in an all-over pattern of cylindrical shapes that, on close inspection, turned out to be unrolled condoms.
When Alison Parker (Courtney Thorne-Smith) became pregnant, the GALA Committee made her a quilt appliquéd with the chemical symbol for the morning-after pill RU-486. “One of the things we wanted to do was to respond to the fact that in network TV, no matter how strong you are, you cannot have an abortion,” Ms. Penley said. “You either have the baby, or you fall down the stairs. We wanted to put reproductive choice back on network TV.”
One of the sneakier placements – the committee referred to them as “product insertion manifestations” – came from the Cal Arts workshop. When Michael Mancini, a character played by Thomas Calabro, visits a hot-sheet motel, he sees the clerk reading “Libidinal Economy,” a work by the French poststructuralist Jean-François Lyotard.
“Total Proof,” organized by Max Wolf with Candice Strongwater, takes its title from an altered photograph of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, with the damage reworked by the artists to mimic the shape of an Absolut vodka bottle. The work was initially deemed too disturbing to appear on the show, but somehow it ended up, in plain sight, on a wall at D&D Advertising, Amanda’s company.
As the television project gathered steam, the producers turned to the committee to help invent the character of Samantha Reilly, an artist who, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, heads out to Los Angeles and moves into the Melrose Place complex. Ms. Mendelsohn was flown out to Kansas City to brainstorm with 10 women on the committee who became known as the Sisters of Sam.
“We thought, she could be a Cindy Sherman, or a Kiki Smith, or a Barbara Kruger,” said Ms. Penley, who envisioned a feminist conceptualist. But the producers demanded paintings in the David Hockney mode, with bright pastels.
“They said, “‘Because the camera loves those colors,'” Mr. Chin recalled.
Hijacking the concept, the Gala Committee turned out a series of cheery-toned paintings on the theme of violence and death in Los Angeles.
The Gala Committee called it a day after the museum episode, but the series continued until May 1999. In a half-serious statement for a sale of many of the artworks at Sotheby’s, Mr. Chin summed up the great intervention as the catalyst for “a profoundly radical transformation of worldwide art, entertainment, communication and government.”
The reality was somewhat less dramatic. “We were exhausted, basically,” Mr. Chin said. “It was very stressful, producing on deadline. The potentiality and the pictorial reality had been enlarged, so we decided to stop there. It was time to release it to the world. And think of the reruns.”
Correction: September 29, 2016
An earlier version of this article misidentified the position Valerie Tevere holds at the College of Staten Island. She is a professor of media culture, not an associate professor of art.
(c) 2016 The New York Times Company
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3. Cynthia Carr, Peter Cramer & Jack Waters, Mary Beth Edelson, Sarah Schulman, Julie Tolentino, Andy Warhol, FF Alumns, at Museum of the City of New York, Manhattan, Oct. 6
Greetings,
I have an exhibition opening next Friday at the Museum of the City of New York from 5 to 7pm. It would be nice to see your faces again, please come if you can.
Best to you,
Mary Beth
Mary Beth Edelson
www.marybethedelson.com
www.storygatheringboxes.com
Join us for the kick-off of our exhibition celebrating an often-hidden side of the history of New York City.
Peter Cramer and Jack Waters at the Museum of the City of New York for the opening celebration of the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York
Thursday, October 6 at 6:00 pm.
Queer people have always flocked to New York City seeking freedom and forging close-knit groups for mutual support and inspiration. Our new exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York brings to life the LGBT artistic communities that sprang up over the last hundred years, a creative class whose radical ideas would greatly influence the definition and evolution of “modern” culture in New York City. To celebrate the exhibition’s opening, join our distinguished speakers for a lively panel discussion exploring the cultural dynamics of gay New York, past, present, and future. This program is the kick-off event for the Gay Gotham exhibition.
Harmony Hammond, feminist artist, writer, and independent curator
Sarah Schulman, novelist, playwright, and journalist
Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, artists, activists, and collaborators
Bryan Lowder (moderator), Associate Editor for Slate
Opening reception and exhibition viewing to follow! http://mcny.org/event/gay-gotham-art-culture
TICKETS
$25 for adults, $20 for students and seniors, $15 for Members – Price includes admission to the opening reception for Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York.
Museum of City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street)
New York, NY 10029
Gay Gotham
Exhibition Opens October 7
New York City has long been a beacon for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender artists seeking freedom, acceptance, and community. Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York brings to life the queer creative networks that sprang up in the city across the 20th century-a series of artistic subcultures whose radical ideas had lasting effects on the mainstream. “Out of oppression and marginalization came a lot of creativity,” said curator Donald Albrecht in an exhibition preview featured in The New York Times. Through paintings, photographs, and films, Gay Gotham highlights the work of Leonard Bernstein, Harmony Hammond, Bill T. Jones, and Andy Warhol, among other cultural innovators.
Join us for the kick-off!
Opening Night Panel: Thursday, October 6 at 6:00 pm
Join us for a panel discussion featuring artist Harmony Hammond, author Sarah Schulman, artists and activists Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, and Slate editor Bryan Lowder.
$15 for Members, $20 & up for all others
Upcoming Programs
Photography & Homoerotic Desire
Friday, Oct. 14 at 6:30 pm at the School of Visual Arts
Join MCNY and the SVA Photography Department for a conversation about the emergence of homoerotic photography in galleries and museums during the 1970s in New York City – an art historical moment rarely examined. Speakers include Vince Aletti, Cynthia Carr, Allen Ellenzweig, Philip Gefter & Robert Reid-Pharr.
Free for Members and SVA students; $12 & up for all others
I Am Jazz: Family Read Aloud
Sat., Oct. 15 at 1:00 pm
Join us for a read-aloud of I Am Jazz written by 16-year-old author and LGBT activist Jazz Jennings. A guided discussion will follow. The first 25 families to register get a free copy of the book!
Free for Museum members or with general admission
Educator Evening and Curator-Led Tour
Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 5:00 pm
Join curators Donald Albrecht and Stephen Vider for an in-depth look at this groundbreaking exhibition.
Free, registration required
Ailey Arts In Education Dance & Music Demo for Families
Saturday, Dec. 3 at 1:00 pm
Join us for a winter treat featuring percussionists from the Ailey Arts In Education & Community Programs. Learn about specific dance styles and music that inspired the iconic choreography of Alvin Ailey, a featured artist in Gay Gotham.
Free for Museum members or with general admission
Making Queer Nightlife
Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 6:30 pm
Bars and clubs have long been places where LGBT people have come together to socialize, celebrate community, and push back against social prejudice. Join a group of writers, performers, and activists, including Michael Musto, Linda Simpson, June Thomas & Julie Tolentino, as they discuss the ongoing importance of queer nightlife in New York.
$15 for Members, $20 & up for all others
LGBTQ Teen Summit
Monday, Feb. 20, 2017 9:00 am-3:00 pm
Teens ages 12-17 will come together to celebrate, learn, and discuss themes around the intersections of LGBTQ culture, history and art in New York City. Participants will tour the exhibition and enjoy hands-on workshops, a panel discussion, art-making, and dance. A keynote speaker will kick off the event and there will be a special performance. Organizations may register groups up to 10 teenagers and 1-2 supervisors.
Free, includes two meals and all materials; registration required
Family Programs in conjunction with Gay Gotham are made possible by the Keith Haring Foundation.
Copyright (c) 2016 Museum of the City of New York, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Ave
New York, NY 10029
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4. John Jesurun, FF Alumn, at BAM, Brooklyn, Oct. 3
FAUST / HOW I ROSE
written and directed by John Jesurun
Monday, October 3rd / 7 PM
http://www.bam.org|www.mexiconowfestival.org
Featuring:
Louis Cancelmi
Dawn Akemi Saito
Black-Eyed Susan
Alenka Kraigher
Everett Quinton
FAUST/How I Rose takes on a host of cultural, social, and personal politics. A high-flying diplomat, Jesurun’s Faust is susceptible to love and its inevitable pain, a vulnerability exploited by his often-sympathetic, female Mephistopheles. Bedeviled by a kind of 360-degree vision, she sees everything from every point of view, simultaneously, and is the atmospheric center of the play. This story of Faust is set in modern secular times. Secular time infers that neither God nor the Devil exist, and the piece explores Faust’s own responsibility and motivation for his work and life.
The play itself has a particular worldview: the messiness of contemporary life. Its given setting is simultaneously before, during and after our present time. It implies a precarious international panorama of eternally shifting layers of history, time and expectations.
FAUST/How I Rose was originally commissioned by The Builders Association and Theater Neumarkt in Zurich in 1996 and performed in Europe and the U.S. as Jump Cut (Faust). In 1998, it was directed by acclaimed Mexican director Martín Acosta at the National Theatre of Mexico where it ran for several months in sold out performances. After a series of other Mexican runs, it was performed at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico and BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2004. Jesurun also directed a German version of the play in Frankfurt in 1999. About John Jesurun
TICKETS: $20 Suggested Donation
Limited Space. To reserve a seat buy your tickets now
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5. Julie Ault, Sarah Schulman, Marvin Taylor, FF Alumns, at Triple Canopy, Nov. 16
We’re pleased to announce that Julie Ault will be the honoree at Triple Canopy’s fall benefit, which will take place on Wednesday, November 16, 2016. Please join Triple Canopy’s editors, Board of Directors, and Publishers Circle for cocktails, a seated dinner, and various celebrations of Ault’s extraordinary contributions to cultural life in New York and beyond. Curator and writer Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy will join poet and critic Cathy Park Hong in making remarks. Artists Sadie Benning and Danh Vō will create editions for the occasion, which will be available on a first-come, first-served basis to supporters who’ve purchased at least one pair of tickets.
A number of writers, artists, and friends will contribute to a special event program, featuring cover art by Wolfgang Tillmans and a biography by Alejandro Cesarco, including Fareed Armaly, Doug Ashford, James Benning, Jonathan Berger, Sergio Bessa, Nayland Blake, David Breslin, Andrianna Campbell, Doryun Chong, Moyra Davey, David Deitcher, Thomas Eggerer, Hu Fang, Juan Gaitán, Lia Gangitano, Jim Hodges, bell hooks, Roni Horn, Steffani Jemison, Branden Joseph, Isaac Julien, Prem Krishnamurthy, Rachel Kushner, Zoe Leonard, Lauren Mackler, Lara Mimosa Montes, Sofía Olascoaga, Tim Rollins, Andrea Rosen, Sarah Schulman, Felicity Scott, Matthew Shen Goodman, Jason Simon, Marvin Taylor, and Wu Tsang.
November 16, 20167:00-9:30 p.m.Jing Fong
20 Elizabeth Street
New York, NY
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/a-benefit-for-triple-canopy-honoring-julie-ault
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6. Anna Banana, FF Alumn, at OR Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Oct. 6
Mr. Peanut Summit
Oct. 6, 2016
Fillip is pleased to present a panel discussion at the Or Gallery on Thursday, October 6, at 7 pm, on the history and legacy of the artist networks and performative practices that developed in Vancouver in the 1970s.
Moderated by Los Angeles-based curator and art historian Zanna Gilbert, the panel will focus on the work of and collaborations between Anna Banana, Michael Morris, and Vincent Trasov. In 1972, Trasov assumed the identity of Mr. Peanut donning a handmade paper mâché replica of the mascot of the Planters Peanut Company. The legume quickly became Trasov’s cipher, an ambiguous persona that served as an almost grotesque response to the conceptual turn that called for the dematerialization of the art object. The artist soon produced The Mr. Peanut Mayoralty Campaign of 1974, a twenty-day performance developed in collaboration with members of the Vancouver arts community including Michael Morris, who developed Mr. Peanut’s P.E.A.N.U.T. platform (Performance, Elegance, Art, Nonsense, Uniqueness, and Talent), and John Mitchell, who served as campaign manager and spokesman.
Trasov’s Mr. Peanut will serve as a starting point for a discussion that addresses the diverse and interconnected practices of the panelists, touching on Trasov and Morris’s work with Image Bank, the artist correspondence network for the exchange of ideas and information by post, and Anna Banana’s own anthropomorphic performance and her work with VILEmagazine.
The Mr. Peanut Summit is organized in conjunction with Mr. Peanut Drawings, a forthcoming artist’s book published by New Documents. The event is produced by Fillip in collaboration with the Or Gallery and New Documents.
Or Gallery
555 Hamilton St.
Vancouver, British Columbia
604.683.7395
Panel Participants
Anna Banana is a Robert’s Creek-based conceptual, performance, and mail artist. In 1971, she founded the Banana Rag, a newsletter that connected her with the International Mail Art Network (IMAN). In 1973, she founded VILE magazine in San Francisco, a publication that was a parody of both LIFE magazine and General Idea’s FILE Megazine and that documented the work of international mail artists. A retrospective of her work, Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana, was recently organized at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
Michael Morris is Vancouver-based painter, photographer, video and performance artist, and curator. His work is often media based and collaborative, and his practice is involved with developing networks and the production and presentation of new art activity. He is a co-founder of the Western Front Society. With Vincent Trasov he founded Image Bank in 1969, a method for personal exchange between artists, and the Morris/Trasov Archive in 1990, currently housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver.
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7. Tim Miller, FF Alumn, fall 2016 events
Tim Miller Fall 2016 NEWSLETTER- NEW SHOW and Tour Schedule
Hi All!
Heading out to my Fall 2016 tour of performances and teaching! The Fall kicks off in Virginia premiering my new show ROOTED at Emory & Henry College and also making a mainstage piece “Home Body” with students. I am very excited about my new solo show ROOTED
MailFilterGateway has detected a possible fraud attempt from “l.facebook.com” claiming to be http://www.ehc.edu/…/guest-a…/rooted-tim-miller-perfromance/
From the world premiere at McGlothin Center for the Arts brochure….
“In his brand new performance Rooted, internationally renowned performance artist Tim Miller tells stories of family trees and the hidden LGBT histories that live in those branches. Jumping off from June 26 , 2013 when marriage equality was established in the US under Federal Law, Miller launches into an exploration of the gorgeous perversity of obsessive genealogical research; and what happens when, after long effort, we actually achieve one kind of social change (in this case, marriage equality) that allows us to launch new journeys for wider social justice. With humor and heart, in “Rooted” Miller charts the hopeful, ever-branching reach of love and citizenship in America.”
This is my “what comes next after achieving marriage equality” piece that leads me both into the past and into the future! ROOTED explores what happens when we actually achieve one kind of social change after long effort and what kind of new journey that launches us on. Somehow it all leaps out of a marriage license in 1865 in Central NY! On the day my husband Alistair and I married- Jan 26, 2013 the day the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned- I realized this was the first marriage license in my family issued in new York State since 1865. I began to imagine what my great great Grandpa William Shepherd Angell -just back from the ultimate social justice victory of the Civil War- would make of Alistair and I and our big social project. This launches me down the ancestry.cum rabbit hole with stops along the way to… hidden family histories, the Ginsbergian “cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas”, the family tree of hurting hearts, and finally a day at the Department of Homeland Security where all the ancestors gather to witness our green card interview!
Along with doing my new show ROOTED at McGlothin Center for the Arts and the Kleinau Theatre at Southern Illinois University…
http://cola.siu.edu/communicationstudi…/…/current-season.php
…there will be many residencies all over the country- and across the ocean in Scotland- where I help young artists pull their material forward in our devised ensemble projects. I am especially excited to be directing /devising a main season production for Emory & Henry College called Home Body.
http://www.ehc.edu/mca/department-events/home-body/?eID=1769
Hope to see you at one of my stops.
Tim Miller Tour Schedule 2016-17
Sept 30 Denton, TX University of Northern Texas
Oct 1-2 Dallas, TX Southern Methodist University
OCT 2-18 Emory & Henry College, VA
Oct 7 McGlothin Center for the Arts
Oct 24-27 Monmouth University, NJ
Oct 28-31 Penn State University
Nov1-6 Yale University
Nov 13-20 Southern Illinois University
Dec & Jan in AUSTRALIA!
2017
Jan 25-31 University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Feb 27- March 3 Vanderbilt University
March 12-19 University of Minnesota
March 29- April 7 Florida Gulf Coast University
April13-15 Bowling Green State University
April 17-23 Ohio Wesleyan Univ
June Scotland Residency at Paisley Arts Center
http://www.timmillerperformer.com/
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8. Michelle Stuart, FF Alumn, at Parafin, London, UK, Oct. 6-9
Parafin will be participating in Frieze Masters from 6-9 October presenting the work of Michelle Stuart in the Spotlight section.
Parafin will exhibit a group of important early works by Michelle Stuart focusing on her ground-breaking engagement with ideas of drawing and sculpture, place and memory in the 1970s and early 80s. This presentation will contribute to an ongoing critical reappraisal of this important artist, and follows recent acclaimed museum presentations of Stuart’s early work in the opening displays of the new Whitney Museum of American Art and in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Menil Collection, Houston and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the major travelling survey exhibition, Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, the Parrish Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In addition, this Frieze Masters presentation will build upon Parafin’s show of recent photographic works Michelle Stuart: Trace Memory in 2015, which was Stuart’s first show in London since 1979.
At its heart the Frieze Masters presentation will feature two of Stuart’s ground-breaking large-scale ‘scroll’ works: #12 Shandaken Veil (1974) and #16 Starmap Peterboro (1974), each almost two and a half metres high. These large unframed works, which hang with their lower edges curling out from the wall, are intended to create a very intimate experience for the viewer, an unmediated experience of pigment and ground, and by extension with site/place. These major pieces will be accompanied by a group of smaller drawings and ‘ledgers’ – sculptural book works containing earth and objects from specific sites – and an extraordinary group of small works made in England in 1979-80. Incorporating earth rubbings from around the Avebury stone circle and the ancient Ridgeway with photographic documentation, these are very rare examples of a major American Land artist making work in the UK.
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Since the 1960s, Michelle Stuart has been internationally recognized for innovative works that synthesize Land art, drawing and sculpture. Stuart’s original approach to material and process has seen her create large-scale site specific works in the landscape, sculptural installations incorporating found objects, drawings, and audio-visual elements, photographs and drawings and sculptures that bring the material of landscape – earth and rock – into the gallery. Her work articulates a profound engagement with the physicality of space and landscape and the complex entanglement of nature and culture.
Since her first solo exhibitions in the early 1970s Michelle Stuart has exhibited widely internationally. Recent important exhibitions include Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016, Hauser, Wirth and Schimmel, Los Angeles (2016), Michelle Stuart: Drawn From Nature at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, the Parrish Art Museum, New York and Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2013-14), Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Menil Collection, Houston (2015) and Land Marks at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013). She was included in the important survey exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2012 and On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Stuart’s work is in major museum collections internationally including MoMA, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld.
Parafin can be found in the Spotlight section at Frieze Masters, Booth H12.
For further information please visit www.parafin.co.uk
Full details of the works exhibited at Frieze Masters can be viewed on Artsy
Parafin
18 Woodstock Street
London W1C 2AL
+44 (0)20 7495 1969
info@parafin.co.uk
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9. Paul McMahon, Linda Montano, FF ALumn, at Emily Harvey Foundation, Manhattan, Nov. 30
uh oh!
the rock’n’roll therapist will appear in the orgy park pavilion at the Casual Art Fair in Seward Park (all the way easy on canal) at 2 on Sunday Oct 2. also paul mcmahon will sing and show a bouncy bench he made again. say, here’s a link! http://www.hesterstreetfair.com/events/casual-art-fair/
AND AROUND THE LONG CORNER:
PAUL MCMAHON and LINDA MARY MONTANO
EMILY HARVEY FOUNDATION
NOVEMBER 30
here’s a link which shows the collaboration 2007-present
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10. Babs Reingold, FF Alumn, at Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, thru February 26, 2017
Dear Friends,
I trust this email finds you well and enjoying fall.
I’m delighted to announce “The Last Tree” had a successful opening!
The exhibition is at Buffalo’s Burchfield Penney Art Center through February 26th. In honor of the 50th anniversary, on exhibit is an extensive showing of work by Charles Burchfield.
I’ve a attached a few images for your viewing.
If you are in Buffalo NY check it out!
My Best,
Babs
Burchfield Penney Link — https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/exhibitions/exhibition:09-09-2016-02-26-2017-the-last-tree-babs-reingold/
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11. Split Britches, FF Alumns, at La MaMa Theatre, Manhattan, Oct. 6-16
UNEXPLODED ORDNANCES (UXO)
06 – 16 October 2016
RETRO(PER)SPECTIVE
20 – 23 October 2016
UNEXPLODED ORDNANCES
06 – 16 October 2016
La MaMa Theatre | Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, NY, 10003
A new Split Britches in-progress project inspired by the unexploded Civil War ammunition buried in New York Harbor, the iconic Stanley Kubric film,
Dr. Strangelove and an Elders Residency on Governors Island.
Tickets Available via La MaMa
RETRO(PER)SPECTIVE
20 – 23 October 2016
La MaMa Theatre | Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, NY, 10003
A Split Britches greatest hits album for those who remember the 1980’s and a Split Britches primer for those who may have missed it!
Tickets Available via La MaMa
See Unexploded Ordnances AND
Retro(per)spective
for just $40!
Each Show: $25 Adults; $20 Students/Seniors
www.lamama.org
Call: 646-430-5374
Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) is being developed through a series of Elders Residencies.
Check out our UXO Video Diaries from our recent
Elders Residency on Governors Island!
UXO Video Diary Week 1!
By Shelby Zoe Coley
UXO Video Diary Week 2!
By Shelby Zoe Coley
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12. Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Ed Ruscha, FF Alumns, at Printed Matter, Manhattan, thru Oct. 24
Event Exhibition
Available to Everyone: Robert Jacks and Printed Matter
Opening Reception: Saturday, Sept 10, 5-7 PM
September 10 – October 24, 2016
5-7PM
Printed Matter is pleased to announce Available to Everyone: Robert Jacks and Printed Matter, curated by Peter Anderson. The exhibition presents two connected bodies of material: a survey of artists’ books by Australian painter, sculptor and bookmaker Robert Jacks (1942-2014), and an extensive selection of publications drawn from Jacks’ own collection, many of which were purchased from Printed Matter in the early years of the organization. Pieced together with correspondence and other ephemera from the Jacks archive, the material illustrates a long-term working relationship connecting the artist to Printed Matter, and also offers a view of Jacks’ developing artistic practice during a formative period. The exhibition, which spans Printed Matter’s project room and back exhibition wall, is presented on occasion of the organization’s 40th Anniversary.
PROGRAMS
Peter Anderson on Robert Jacks at the NY Art Book Fair
Sat, September 17, 3:00-4:00 PM
Peter Anderson will give a lecture on the work of Robert Jacks presented at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair. The talk is presented as part of the Classroom, on the second floor of MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101.)
Peter Anderson and Patrick McCaughey in conversation
Weds, September 21, 6:00 PM
Peter Anderson will be joined by academic and art historian Patrick McCaughey in a conversation on the life and legacy of Australian painter and book artist Robert Jacks. As a close friend of Jacks, McCaughey knew Robert during his formative time in New York in the 70’s and is familiar with many aspects of his work. As the author of JACKS: The Artists’ Books of Robert Jacks, Anderson will offer an analytical and historical take in contrast to McCaughey’s anecdotal perspective. This event will take place at Printed Matter (231 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10001).
EXHIBITION
Robert Jacks began producing artists’ books in the late 1960s around the time he left Melbourne for North America. During this period he shifted from a career primarily focused on abstract painting toward a more idea- and process-based practice. He produced and advocated for books that were cheaply-created in large editions, affordable, and made to be distributed widely – often producing permutative works that sat within the framework of minimalism and conceptualism. Interested in ephemeral modes of production, his small-format publications utilized rubber-stamp and commercial offset printing, basic binding, and other simple methods. He regularly produced stamped cards which were conceived in connection to the mail art movement, and also initiated and contributed to a number of ‘compilation’ publications.
His work Twelve Drawings (1970) presents a serial investigation around a simple grid of six squares through a sequence of drawings and photographs, while the pages of An Unfinished Work 1966-1971 present the written specifications for six sculptural works. The earlier 1-12 (1969) is focused on counting (the number sequence determined by the number of edges in a cube) with versions that use simple combinations of lines, numerals, and letters. From 1973 to 1982 Jacks produced an on-going series of twelve ‘hand stamped’ books, with rubber stamp based work continuing as a thread within his practice in subsequent decades.
Across the back exhibition space is Lines Dots (2009), an experimental folded book with hand-stamped overprinting (of lines and dots in pigment inks of various colors), which was conceived as an executable ‘wall drawing’ stretching across the gallery wall. A number of video pieces will put on view Jacks’ performative ‘readings’, in which the artist leads the viewer through some of his key books and book related works.
Upon moving to New York in 1969, Jacks found himself enmeshed in a vibrant artistic community, which included, among others, future Printed Matter founders artist Sol LeWitt and art-writer/critic Lucy Lippard. Jacks was among the first to receive a letter in 1975 from the unformed organization which stated “We are investigating the possibilities of a publishing and distributing system for artists’ books. (This does not mean catalogues).” Printed Matter’s first print catalog included a single work by Jacks, and the subsequent catalog included 12 titles from the artist.
With Jacks’ own publications selling through the Printed Matter storefront on Lispenard St., he used consignment payments to steadily amass a significant collection of artists’ books. The collected works include many of the foundational publications of artists’ book history (purchased then for a few dollars), as well as a broader selection of under-known but no less interesting examples of conceptual book works from that era. This body of “found” work is itself a unique time-capsule of New York cultural history and view of Printed Matter’s earliest days, providing a meaningful backdrop to Jacks’ shifting aesthetic concerns.
This for-sale material includes upwards of 150 artists’ books from the late 60s to early 80s, featuring an extensive selection of works by Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Jackie Ferrara, John Baldessari, Claes Oldenberg, Bruce Nauman, Alice Aycock, Daniel Buren, Carl Andre and Yoko Ono, as well as an additional selection of conceptual catalogs mostly dating from the 70s. Works from a cache of nearly 100 signed & dated cards (5 × 4.5″) produced by Jacks in New York in 1976, each with a unique multi-stamp grid work (1×1″), will also be made available on occasion of the exhibition.
Peter Anderson is an independent writer and curator. He has been actively involved in writing and visual arts practice since the late 1970s, and has published poetry and fiction, arts journalism and criticism, academic papers and numerous exhibition catalogue essays. Current projects include a PhD in creative writing at Swinburne University exploring relationships between writing and visual art, and the exhibition ephemeral traces: Brisbane’s artist-run scene in the 1980s for the University of Queensland Art Museum.
Printed Matter thanks Julienne Jacks and Peter Anderson for their work on the exhibition. Printed Matter’s exhibition program is made possible with the support of The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Available to Everyone: Robert Jacks and Printed Matter has also been generously supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation and the New England Regional Art Museum.
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13. Mama Donna Henes, FF Alumn, at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, Oct. 8, and more
Two Chances to Bless Your Animals!
With Mama Donna Henes, Urban Shaman & Poppy
Our animal friends bless us every day with their love and devotion. Here are two opportunities to celebrate their special place in your life.
Gift your animal loved-ones with sacred blessings of health, protection, gratitude, and love.
Bring your pets – on leashes, in carriers, cages, or bowls – to these non-denominational ceremonies for all your furry, scaled, and feathered friends.
Come even if you do not have a pet. These Blessings are fun, free & therapeutic!
#1
OCTOBER 8
Saturday, 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Meet at the Fountain.
2/3 train to Grand Army Plaza
For info: 718-857-1343
# 2
OCTOBER 29
Saturday, 12:00 – 3:00 PM
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd., Long Island City, Queens
For info: www.socratessculpturepark.org
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14. Jess Dobkin, Deb Edmeades, FF Alumns, in Cmagazine, Autumn 2016
Please visit this link:
http://www.cmagazine.com/issues/131
thank you.
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15. Kimsooja, FF Alumn, at CAC Malaga, Spain, Oct. 7, 2016-Jan. 8, 2017
Kimsooja, To Breathe – Zone of Zero
CAC Málaga
Kimsooja, To Breathe – Zone of Zero
October 7, 2016 – January 8, 2017
Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (CAC Málaga)
C/ Alemania, s/n 29001 Malaga Spain
The CAC Málaga is pleased to present the exhibition To Breathe – Zone of Zero by Kimsooja, the most influential conceptual Korean artist of her generation. The title of the show is an amalgam of the two works that comprise it, a site-specific intervention in the central space and a video work in Espacio 5. Both works invite us to reflect on profound aspects of the human condition and alter our perception of the world by embracing a different cultural sensibility.
The visual language of Kimsooja (b. Daegu, South Korea, 1957) is rooted in Korean cultural traditions. She has transformed and redefined the concept of painting in the course of her career, and her oeuvre ranges from installations, photographs and performances to videos and site-specific interventions. Cloths, sequences of light and sound, mirrors and the sound of her own breathing are resources that she uses and have become identifying characteristics.
In the 1980s, she began her multidisciplinary practice with textiles, creating geometric patchwork compositions by sewing scraps of used cloth together. Kimsooja uses sewing as a metaphor and as an activity in itself. The bottari, bundles stuffed with clothing and other personal belongings – very common in Korean culture and suggestive of mobility as they are used to transport household goods – are feature prominently in many of her works and are presented in many different ways. Brightly-coloured traditional Korean bed covers are another characteristic element. In the 1990s she started to document and record her performances on video. The video series A Needle Woman, begun in 1999, in which the artist filmed herself, back to the camera, on the crowded streets of some of the world’s most populous cities, brought her international fame. In it Kimsooja reverses the notion of the artist as the main actor through non-action in order to reveal a critical attitude, a mindset linked to Zen Buddhism and eastern philosophies.
Over time the artist has acquired a universal, nomadic quality. Kimsooja’s art directly addresses profound questions of human existence through reflection and self-awareness. It explores gender (women and the problems they face in different places), identity in the face of change and social flux, time, memory and the human body’s relationship with the material world. Concerned by experiences of cultural dislocation in her native land, she also reflects on socio-political issues we face today, such as migration, exile and violence, exposing art’s complicated connections to political life. The themes she addresses transcend the local context and are globally relevant.
Her works show a commitment to engage with the audience and inspire solidarity and respect for others by appealing to the sense of humanity we all possess. This is apparent in her video To Breathe – The Flags (2012), in which 246 national flags are slowly superimposed, one by one, in alphabetical order, without hierarchy or political bias, all nations on the same basic level; creating a visual experience in which differences and conflicts between nations can fuse and blend together as one. The piece was originally created for the 2012 London Olympics to reflect the unifying spirit of the games, although that first version only included the flags of participating countries. The flags added later represent nations which are not accepted or officially recognised by the authorities. Overlapping the flags is a gesture of understanding, of fraternity among equals, of respect for differences.
The installation Lotus: Zone of Zero (2016) has turned the exhibition space at the CAC Málaga into a place of contemplation and meditation. Some 700 lotus lanterns cover the ceiling of the room, but instead of the circular mandala design used in previous presentations of this work, here they are arranged in a rectangular pattern. Gregorian, Islamic and Tibetan chants flood the hall and wash over spectators, inviting them to turn their thoughts inwards. Although this project was conceived in 2003 in response to the Iraq War, today it is still a relevant proposal, providing a safe haven where people of different cultures and religions can meet. This zone is a place of respect, reflection, dialogue and harmony – a place of concord.
CAC Málaga
www.kimsooja.com
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16. Betty Tomkins, FF Alumn, at EIDIA House, Brooklyn, opening Oct. 21
Betty Tompkins and Bill Mutter, “THE BETTY AND BILL SHOW” at EIDIA House PLATO’S CAVE
opening reception October 21st, Friday, 6-8pm (libations served)
http://platocave.weebly.com/
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17. Penny Arcade, FF Alumn, in Lubin, Poland, Oct. 8, 10, and more
Longing Lasts Longer in Lublin Poland http://ck.lublin.pl/en/przykladowa-strona/penny-arcade-longing-lasts-longer-2/http://ck.lublin.pl/en/przykladowa-strona/penny-arcade-longing-lasts-longer-2/
Center For Culture
October 8th 2016 and October 10,2016
22:00
http://ck.lublin.pl/en/?start_date=2016-10-10
Coming to Liverpool November 10th, Belfast November 12
American Premier Dec 1 -11th St Anns Warehouse DUMBO
Penny Arcade is a force of nature.
Longing Lasts Longer is Edinburgh’s double award-winning show from New York’s undisputed queen of the underground, which turns contemporary stand-up on its head to create a crack in the post-gentrified landscape.
Driven by her magnetic rock n’ roll energy, Arcade’s razor-sharp satire is mixed live to euphoric soundscapes inspired by four decades of pop culture.
A blow against the golden age of stupidity, this is a passionate and exuberant performance anthem where you can think, laugh and dance at the same time!
Lublin audiences remember this piece very well, as the bravura show titled Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! made a huge impact on last year’s Konfrontacje Festival. Penny Arcade returns once more with her latest show.
Penny Arcade is an internationally respected writer, poet, actress and theatre maker and an icon of artistic resistance. She is one of the very few artists in the world who practices long form performance art, a form of experimental theatre that investigates the boundaries between traditional theatre and performance. Her decades-long focus on the creation of community as the goal of performance, her use of performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in American Theatre. A former Andy Warhol Factory Superstar, featured in in the Warhol/Morrissey film Women in Revolt, Penny occupies a unique position in the American avant-garde through her long association with the architects of the American counter-culture, including John Vaccaro, Charles Henri Ford and Judith Malina, among many others. Penny is also known for her highly quotable one-liners; and the late, great Quentin Crisp named her as his soul mate and the woman he most identified with.
Penny has written over ten full-length shows and hundreds of solo performance art pieces notable for their improvisation and what Penny Arcade calls “spite-specific” nature. Her world-famous sex and censorship show, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, has been performed in over 30 cities around the world and was successfully revived for its 20th anniversary with 48 performances in London in 2012.
Recently together with artists like Philip Glass, Fran Lebowitz and Edmund White, The New York Times cited her among the artists and thinkers that define New York City in “They Made New York”, and proclaimed her a “force in Edinburgh” with Longing Lasts Longer.
creative producer: Jeremy Goldstein; produced by London Artists Projects
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18. Patricia Hoffbauer, Yvonne Rainer, FF Alumns, at WeisAcres, Manhattan, Oct. 16
October 16, 2016 at 6:00pm – Cathy Weis Projects and Sundays on Broadway present Yvonne Rainer and Patricia Hoffbauer. Yvonne Rainer will present a lecture, “What’s So Funny? Laughter and Anger in the Time of the Assassins,” and some other stuff involving the Raindears. Patricia Hoffbauer will present “Getting Away with Murder, A woman’s perspective.” Medieval Women, Mythological Bitches, Old Testament Heroines, and Wonder Woman. From Plato’s definition of the “wandering uterus,” as an angry and desirous animal inside a woman’s body, to rumors about the sufficient presence of female choreographers in the dance world, Hoffbauer works on a performance shaped by a series of interferences drawn from historical, cultural, personal references with guest interlopers Malcom Low, Peggy Gould, Charmaine Warren, among others. Images accompanying work produced by Peter Richards. All Sundays on Broadway events begin at 6:00 pm. Doors open at 5:45 pm at WeisAcres, 537 Broadway #3, New York, NY 10012. Keep in mind, this is a small space. Please arrive on time out of courtesy to the artists. Free admission. www.cathyweis.org
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19. Liliana Porter, FF Alumn, at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA, opening Oct. 15
Liliana Porter
Actualidades / Breaking News
15 October – 23 November 2016
Artist’s Reception: Saturday, 15 October, 4-6pm
Argentinian artist Liliana Porter is a master at distilling life and art to simple profundities through humorous juxtapositions of incongruous objects. For her first exhibition at the gallery in four years, Porter presents a full range of new work, including paintings, sculptural objects, installations, works on paper, photographs, and a new video, each addressing the proposition that time is non-linear and reality ungraspable.
Over the years, Porter has amassed a prodigious and eccentric collection of figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs from her global travels. These kitschy objects appear regularly in her work, inviting political, philosophical, and existential interpretation through their arrangement in unexpected situations. Each tchotchke represents a different era and cultural/historical narrative. Porter delights in manipulating time, history and reality by combining them as though in dialogue in an atemporal white space.
In her new video, titled Actualidades/Breaking News, Porter structures each scene as if it were a segment from a newscast or section in a newspaper, including “Arts and Leisure,” “Fashion and Style,” “World News,” and “Religion.” With music arranged and composed by Sylvia Meyer, each scenario becomes an evocative portrayal of the absurdities and tragedies perpetuated by poignant human surrogates in the form of shabby children’s toys, hilarious religious and political icons, and other peculiar and pathetic mass-produced objects.
Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941. In 1961 she moved to New York, where she has lived and worked since. In 1965 she founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo. Porter has shown extensively internationally, including most recently solo museum exhibitions at the Museo Caraffa, Cordoba, Argentina; Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay; MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo Rayo, Roldanillo, Colombia; Centro Cultura de España, Santiago, Chile; and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, as well as a two-person exhibition with Marcel Broodthaers at The New Museum, New York. Her work is in numerous public and private collections in Latin America, Europe and the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Daros-Latinoamerica Collection, Zurich; and Tate Modern, London
Hosfelt Gallery is located at 260 Utah St, between 15th & 16th streets. Wheelchair accessible entrance at 255A Potrero Avenue. For more information call 415.495.5454 or hosfeltgallery.com.
Hours are Tu, We, Fr, Sa 10am – 5:30 pm, Th 11am – 7 pm
Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
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20. Cathy Weis, FF ALumn, in The New York Times, Sept. 30
The New York Times
DANCE
A Choreographer’s Loft, Where ‘There’s History in the Walls’
By SIOBHAN BURKE
SEPT. 30, 2016
The easiest way to find Cathy Weis’s loft, on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets, is to use retail as your compass: Locate the signs for Guess and Lucky Brand Jeans. Tucked between those stores – on the same block as Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Uniqlo, Club Monaco and Sephora – is the much less conspicuous door to 537 Broadway.
Since 2005, Ms. Weis, a choreographer and video artist, has lived and worked in that 148-year-old building, a former garment factory that became an artists’ cooperative in the 1970s. Walking up the creaky stairs and into her expansive studio, where she began rehearsing in the ’90s, can feel like slipping back in time to a less densely commercial period of SoHo’s evolution, closer to the one Ms. Weis encountered when she moved to New York in 1983.
“There’s history in the walls,” she said recently at the loft, looking glamorous for a Monday morning with glitter-dusted eyebrows (from an appearance with Circus Amok! the night before). “It’s like they’re giving you ideas from the past.”
Ms. Weis was discussing the coming season of her free weekly salon, Sundays on Broadway, which resumes Sunday, Oct. 2. The series, in its third year, is a grab bag of performances, film screenings, discussions and other events that reflect her desire to let artists (herself included) “try things out” in a low-stakes setting. New York has other such opportunities for dance makers – like Movement Research at Judson Church and gatherings hosted by the groups Aunts and Catch – but none that combine intimacy and formality, and being attuned to the present and the past, quite like Sundays on Broadway.
Ms. Weis’s programming has featured everything from a Skype chat with the postmodern dance pioneer Steve Paxton to works in progress from a younger generation of innovators, like Jon Kinzel, Jodi Melnick and Yasuko Yokoshi. The place was packed – not an empty chair, rug or throw pillow in the house – for a conversation last fall between the modern-dance luminaries Sara Rudner and Carolyn Brown. This season brings a lecture by the ever rebellious Yvonne Rainer; a presentation about Robert Rauschenberg performances by the filmmaker Julie Martin; and a duet by the look-alike dancers Vicky Shick and Eva Karczag.
Then there’s Ms. Weis’s work, which the choreographer Lisa Nelson, one of her longtime collaborators, aptly describes as both sober and carnivalesque. Ms. Weis learned she had multiple sclerosis in 1989, and since then she has been exploring relationships between technology and the body, how each can extend the other. She includes some of her own investigations in each season’s lineup.
“This very wide stretch of current work next to more historical works,” Ms. Nelson said in a phone interview, “it’s a very special meal she can prepare.”
Ms. Weis has developed a loyal audience of old friends and new faces, mostly artists and writers, large enough to make her 1,500-square-foot studio, known as WeisAcres, feel full on a regular basis. A welcoming but not effusive host, she introduces most evenings with a short history of 537 Broadway, which stands on the site of P. T. Barnum’s second American Museum. The current building went up after the museum burned down in 1868.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, George Maciunas, the founder of the neo-Dada artists’ collective Fluxus, converted 16 of the neighborhood’s neglected industrial buildings into artist co-ops, or Fluxhouses. Among these were 537 Broadway and the adjacent 541, both of which had unusually wide dimensions and no pillars: ideal for dancing. Thus emerged an enclave of choreographers’ lofts, occupied by experimentalists like Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Douglas Dunn and David Gordon (at 541) and Frances Alenikoff, Elaine Summers and Simone Forti (at 537). It was Ms. Forti’s loft that Ms. Weis bought in 2005.
Many of those artists were part of Judson Dance Theater, the 1960s collective that imbued dance with a radically democratic ethos, breaking with the modern-dance establishment. By their rules, or lack thereof, any space could be a stage and any movement could be dance, like the game of gestural telephone staged by Ms. Brown in “Roof Piece” (1971), which unfurled across a smattering of SoHo rooftops.
“The history of this building is the history of the city and the history of the country,” Ms. Weis said. “It’s good to know what your bones are made of.”
Dance carries on at 537-541 Broadway beyond WeisAcres, at the studio Eden’s Expressway and at Mr. Dunn’s loft, where he hosts his own more intermittent salons. Mr. Dunn said he appreciated Ms. Weis’s spirited, multigenerational audience and the casual tone she cultivates, which is similar to the atmosphere at his place.
“It’s like the old days more,” he said, “where people just sat in the loft and watched what was there, and there’s no attempt to make things fancy or theatrical.”
Yet he’s wary of romanticizing that era. “It’s not a nostalgia trip that she and I are involved in,” he added. “These are our present lives, and we want to be as vital, even though we’re tired, as we were when we were younger.”
Lately the building itself has become a character in Ms. Weis’s multimedia installations. In “Time Travel With Madame Xenogamy” last spring, she led visitors through the rooms of her home, projecting footage from her vast video archive of New York’s 1980s downtown dance scene. Inside a white tent, audience members could peer into a crystal ball and learn about the future by way of dance’s past.
Ms. Weis’s interest in architecture goes way back, according to Ms. Nelson, who recalled their days as students at Bennington College in Vermont. “It must have been ’68 or ’69 when Cathy, with a visual artist, transformed the bowels of an ancient Victorian stone mansion into the insides of a human body and had the audience roam freely through this crazy mix of events and visual experiences.”
Over three Sundays in November and December, Ms. Weis will offer “The Walls Began to Weep,” which takes place on multiple levels of her building.
“In this one, I think of the building as the star,” she said, “and the audience is like the blood, flowing from floor to floor.”
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21. Jeff McMahon, FF Alumn, now online at jeffmcmahonprojects.net/wordpressblogjeff
Jeff McMahon reflects on the recent death of Edward Albee, and his time at Albee’s Center for Creative Persons in Montauk, at at his blog
http://www.jeffmcmahonprojects.net/wordpressblogjeff/
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22. Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Brendan Fernandes, Alicia Grullón, Clifford Owens, FF Alumns, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Oct. 19-
Please Join Us for
Artist Conversations and Performances
Related to the Exhibition
Enacting Stillness
at The 8th Floor
We’re pleased to announce a series of artist conversations and performances to accompany the exhibition Enacting Stillness. The programs will be led by the Foundation’s Artistic Director Sara Reisman. All events are free, open to the public, and located at The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, NYC, where the exhibition is on view through January 13th, 2017.
Please RSVP to media@sdrubin.org for all events.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Wednesday, October 19, 6 to 8pm
Carlos Martiel: Maze
Carlos Martiel’s new performance Maze reflects on the current system of mass incarceration and racial discrimination in the United States, where a disproportionate number of the imprisoned are African Americans and Latino immigrants. Focusing on forced labor within the prison system, and the threat of loss of privileges and solitary confinement for prisoners who refuse to work, Martiel takes a position of stillness and draws parallels between current prison policies and conditions in the US and historical systems of oppression in European history.
This performance includes mature content and may not be suitable for children.
Thursday, October 27, 6 to 8pm
Clifford Owens and Carlos Martiel in Conversation
Following Martiel’s performance Maze, Clifford Owens and Carlos Martiel will discuss their performance-based artistic practices, connecting racial histories in the United States and Cuba, respectively. The conversation will center on artworks featured in the exhibition: Owens’ Anthology (2011), with scores provided by Maren Hassinger and William Pope.L, and Martiel’s Ruins and Expulsion (both 2015).
Saturday, November 19, 6 to 8pm
Rehan Ansari: Unburdened
The 8th Floor will present a staged reading of Rehan Ansari´s play Unburdened, which is featured in Enacting Stillness as an installation of performance ephemera. The play is set in the time around President Obama’s first inauguration. A journalist from Toronto travels to Karachi, where he becomes consumed with our inability to truly comprehend what it is to live inside a war. He glimpses the enemy’s point of view: we see an argument for militancy that has a global audience. We observe the protagonist’s struggles through his partner’s eyes as he feverishly communicates with her over the phone and Skype. In Karachi he stays with his elderly aunt and uncle who have lived with a terrible secret over the course of their 60-year relationship that began amidst the Partition of India.
Monday, November 28, 6 to 8pm
Lucia Nimcova: Khroniky
Organized in collaboration with Rubin Foundation grantee Triangle Arts Association, Lucia Nimcova will present a lecture-performance related to her ongoing project Khroniky, which functions as an archive of photography, video, and sound recordings from western Ukraine. Nimcova describes the work as a folk opera: a collection of songs, stories, music, performance, and field recordings, existing somewhere between an ethnographic document and musical theatre.
Khroniky proceeds from Nimcova’s previous work on both the female experience in Eastern Europe and the contested histories of her native Rusyn minority. This work similarly seeks to show how the past influences the present. In the end, it is an attempt to navigate a polyphony of subjectivities, in the context of Ukraine’s unstable situation, both historically and in present day. Nimcova participated in Triangle Arts Association’s studio program in late 2015.
Thursday, December 8, 6 to 8pm
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: A More Convenient Season
Kameelah Janan Rasheed will present a new performance/lecture on constructions of racial progress in America, opening up a discursive space to examine the tensions between perceived and actual progress. Rasheed will draw on texts from her new series of prints, on view in Enacting Stillness, which are based on lyrics and writing by Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and other Black figures who consider the temporal politics of liberation. Following her performance, Rasheed will invite the audience to participate in an open discussion using a series of prompts which will be made available in advance of the program.
Thursday, December 15, 6 to 8pm
Brendan Fernandes and Jess Wilcox: Still Move
A book launch for Brendan Fernandes’ forthcoming publication Still Move will feature a conversation between Fernandes and curator Jess Wilcox, followed by a reception. For the last five years, Fernandes has explored how stillness and static gesture can be powerful tools of resistance. Informed by his training in ballet and modern dance, Fernandes routinely explores the role of the body within social and political spaces, questioning and breaking down the notion of hegemony. Inspired by choreographic vocabularies relating to labor and endurance, the work demonstrates the artist’s interest in responding to histories of avant-garde dance and its relationship to visual art. Fernandes takes on numerous forms, building on an effort to negotiate a complex sense of both individual and cultural identities within performative acts.
Wednesday, January 11, 7 to 9pm
Rehan Ansari and Ping Chong + Company: Theatrical Duet
Rubin Foundation grantee Ping Chong + Company will present an excerpt of its recent performance project Beyond Sacred: Muslim Voices in dialogue with artist Rehan Ansari whose play Unburdened is featured in Enacting Stillness. Ping Chong’s Beyond Sacred is part of Undesirable Elements, an ongoing series of community-specific interview-based theater works examining issues of culture and identity, for individuals who are outsiders within their mainstream communities. Presented as a chamber piece of story-telling, a “seated opera for the spoken word,” these performances are tailored to suit the needs and issues facing specific communities. With his background in investigative reporting, Ansari’s play Unburdened was developed through research methods stemming from journalistic practice. The evening will feature readings from each script, followed by a panel discussion.
Friday, January 13, 6 to 8pm
Nicolás Dumit Estévez and Alicia Grullón in Performance: Sounds of Slowness
Two artists in the exhibition, Nicolás Dumit Estévez and Alicia Grullón, use slowness and silence in their staged interventions in public spaces in New York City. Their performances engage issues of gentrification, labor conditions, immigration, and the role of art in civic life. Estévez and Grullón each employ a combination of gravitas and humor to raise questions that relate to the complex cultural landscape that is New York City. Their evening of performances will mark the closing of the exhibition Enacting Stillness.
About The 8th Floor
The 8th Floor is an exhibition and events space established in 2010 by Shelley and Donald Rubin, dedicated to promoting cultural and philanthropic initiatives and to expanding artistic and cultural accessibility in New York City. The 8th Floor is located at 17 West 17th Street and is free and open to the public. Schools groups are encouraged. Viewing hours are Tuesday through Friday, 11am to 6pm and Saturday by appointment. the8thfloor.org
About The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation
The Foundation believes in art as a cornerstone of cohesive, resilient communities and greater participation in civic life. In its mission to make art available to the broader public, in particular to underserved communities, the Foundation provides direct support to, and facilitates partnerships between, cultural organizations and advocates of social justice across the public and private sectors. Through grantmaking, the Foundation supports cross-disciplinary work connecting art with social justice via experimental collaborations as well as extending cultural resources to organizations and areas of New York City in need. sdrubin.org
For further information, please contact:
William Furio
The 8th Floor
646.839.5903
media@sdrubin.org
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23. Alvin Eng, Marie Christine Katz, Nicky Paraiso, FF Alumns, at Howl! Gallery, Manhattan, Oct. 10
Howl! Arts Presents
A work-in-progress benefit reading
THE IMPERIAL IMAGE
A new dramatic triptych by Alvin Eng
Featuring
IMRAN SHEIKH, LULU FOGARTY,
MARIE CHRISTINE KATZ and NICKY PARAISO
Directed by Wendy Wasdahl and Alvin Eng
Monday, OCTOBER 10, 2016 @ 7 PM
Howl! Gallery, 6 East 1st Street, NYC
917.475.1294
Presented as part of 2016 WRITERS BLOCK Staged Reading and Performance Festival
Benefitting Actors Fund’s “Howl! HELP” Program (more info. follows)
The Imperial Image is a new dramatic triptych by Alvin Eng that explores how portraits of political leaders and royalty have come to hold a powerful place in societal structures and rituals. The triptych spans three different regions and eras beginning in Mughal era India. There, we see a tipping point interaction between Emperor Akbar and Basawan, a renowned Imperial Atelier artist. The second section is a monologue from Marie Antoinette’s court portraitist, Élisabeth Vigée LeBrun, in exile in the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg. (Mme. Vigée LeBrun recently had a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) The play concludes with a re-imagining of the circumstances surrounding Shepard Fairey’s creation of the ubiquitous “Hope” poster for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The cast will feature Imran Sheikh, Lulu Fogarty, Marie Christine Katz and Nicky Paraiso. The reading will be directed by Wendy Wasdahl and Alvin Eng.
The Imperial Image is the third work of Eng’s Portrait Plays cycle of historical dramas about artists and portraiture. Last June, the second Portrait Play, 33 & 1/3 Cornelia Street, was presented at the Howl! Gallery’s Beat & Beyond Festival, featuring Bowery Poetry founder Bob Holman as Joe Gould and the legendary Mink Stole-who has been featured in all of John Waters’ films-playing iconic painter Alice Neel. Three Trees, the first Portrait Play, about the haunting relationship between Alberto Giacometti and Isaku Yanaihara, premiered Off-Broadway with the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and was also presented as a workshop reading with Center Stage in Baltimore and the Moving Parts Theatre in Paris.
TICKETS: $20 Suggested Donation
Limited Space. To reserve a seat buy your tickets now
The staged readings series is a benefit for the Actors Fund’s Howl! HELP, providing emergency financial assistance and social service support to artists who have made or continue to make their careers in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side arts communities. Howl! HELP is administered by the Actors Fund and 100% ticket sales benefit the Actors Fund.
COMING NOVEMBER 18
THE CITY AS MUSE: Louise Nevelson’s New York
A book discussion with Laurie Wilson,
Author of “LOUISE NEVELSON: LIGHT AND SHADOW”
Friday, November 18th, 7 pm
City Lore Gallery, 56 East 1st Street, NYC (212) 529-1955
$5 on Eventbrite or citylore.org
City Lore, in collaboration with playwright/performer Alvin Eng and director/dramaturg Wendy Wasdahl, proudly introduces “City As Muse,” a new quarterly reading, performance, discussion series on the influence of New York City on artists’ works and subject matter.
The series will debut with art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson reading and presenting slide images from her new book, Louise Nevelson: Light And Shadow, the first biography of this major artist to be published in 25 years. Nevelson struggled in poverty on the fringes of the NYC art world for thirty years before she was finally “discovered” at age 59. By 1980, she had been celebrated with two retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her massive steel sculptures appeared in public spaces in seventeen states. The story of Nevelson’s artistic, spiritual, even physical transformation (she developed a taste for outrageous outfits and false eyelashes made of mink) is dramatic, complex, and inseparable from major historical and cultural shifts of the twentieth century, particularly in the art world.
Wilson, Eng, and Wasdahl, along with the audience, will explore this uniquely New York story by focusing on the impact of NYC as a physical and cultural presence in both Louise Nevelson’s work and Wilson’s own writing. The event culminates in a book signing.
Copyright (c) 2016 Alvin Eng, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Alvin Eng & Wendy Wasdahl
67 Hudson Street, Apt. 5A
New York, NY 10013
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
