Contents for July 20th, 2026
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Weekly Spotlight: **FIRST FIFTY VOICES**
1. Pat Oleszko, FF Alumn, receives the 2026 Bucksbaum Award
2. Ana Mendieta, FF Alumn, now online at NYTimes.com
3. Linda Sibio, FF Alumn, now online at crackedeggsmovie.com
4. Micki Watanabe Spiller, FF Alumn, at ArtSpace, Richmond, VA, opening July 24 and more
5. Helen Oji, FF Alumn, at Frosch&Co, Manhattan, opening July 16
6. Eddie Falconer, FF Alumn, at Resistancia Teknochat Festival, online thru Aug. 2
7. Buzz Spector, FF Alumn, in Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6
8. National Association of Artists Organizations launches NAAO+ Digital Archive
NAAO+ Digital Archive
9. Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, at 245 Bowery, Manhattan, July 25, and more
10. Jack Waters, FF Alumn, at Le Petit Versailles Community Garden, Manhattan, July 25
11. Yura Adams, FF Alumn, at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, thru Aug. 8
12. Rachel Stella, FF Member, at Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, France, thru Jan. 3, 2027
13. Doug Skinner, FF Alumn, July news
14. Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, now online at WhitehotMagazine.com
15. Barbara Pollack, FF Alumn, now online at Hyperallergic.com
16. Nina Sobell, FF Alumn, live on Zoom, July 26
17. George Peck, FF Alumn, summer news
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Weekly Spotlight: **FIRST FIFTY VOICES**
Sharon Lehner has run the archives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for years, holding one of the most important collections of contemporary performance documentation in the country. This past year, BAM hosted Franklin Furnace’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, giving Lehner the chance to think about FF’s history alongside her own institution’s. Writing about our relationship, she offered this:
“Feminist and queer performance did not emerge from iconic artists alone. It was sustained by artist-run spaces, experimental stages, archives, publications, documentation, back rooms, borrowed equipment, improbable invitations, and institutions willing to support work that was not yet easily legible as art history. Franklin Furnace is central to that story. … It made room for work that was live, ephemeral, political, unruly, funny, intimate, queer, feminist, risky, and often ahead of the language available to describe it.”
Some of the world’s most notable performance artists — Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Carolee Schneemann — exist in the public imagination because the Furnace said yes to work nobody knew how to describe. The artists who’ll matter fifty years from now are making work right now that isn’t legible yet.
Help us remain the arts organization that says yes to the avant-garde: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/franklin-furnace-archive-inc/first-fifty-campaign
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1. Pat Oleszko, FF Alumn, receives the 2026 Bucksbaum Award
For more information, please contact gallery@davidpeterfrancis.com
David Peter Francis
35 East Broadway #3F
New York, NY 10002
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2. Ana Mendieta, FF Alumn, now online at NYTimes.com
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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3. Linda Sibio, FF Alumn, now online at crackedeggsmovie.com
For the past few months, a documentary crew has been hard at work creating a new feature length documentary called Cracked Eggs, focusing on Linda Sibio, a schizophrenic multi-disciplinary artist. The documentary was partially filmed at Franklin Furnace and features archival performances from her time at FF. But the film’s focus goes far beyond Linda’s art, mainly examining her work with her mental health program of the same name.
The Cracked Eggs Program teaches adults with mental differences to channel their thoughts and feelings into art. Linda has touched countless lives with her workshops and helped shift the conversation about people with mental struggles. Now, this essential program needs your help.
On Wednesday July 22nd, the team is launching a Seed and Spark Campaign crackedeggsmovie.com to raise funds for Linda to continue her Cracked Eggs program. Funding will also support sending Linda to Washington DC, where she will perform an art piece in protest against Donald Trump.
The film is produced by Heath&Henshaw Productions, Pink Giant Productions, and Bezerk Productions and is executive produced by Linda Sibio.
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4. Micki Watanabe Spiller, FF Alumn, at ArtSpace, Richmond, VA, opening July 24 and more
Micki Watanabe Spiller
Exhibit: Threads of Speech. July 24th-August 22
Opening July 24 from 6-8pm
with an artist talk on Saturday July 25th @ 2pm
ArtSpace
2833-A Hathaway Rd., Richmond, VA 23225
https://www.artspacegallery.org/micki-spiller-threads-of-speech-july-24-august-22-2026
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5. Helen Oji, FF Alumn, at Frosch&Co, Manhattan, opening July 16
Greetings Everyone!
Join me at Frosch&Co for Good Bunny!
I’m excited to be participating in this group exhibition with one of my paintings and a felted sculpture.
Opening Reception
Thursday, July 16, 2026
6:00–8:00 PM
Frosch&Co
34 East Broadway, New York, NY
On view: July 16–August 15, 2026
Hope to see you there!
Helen
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6. Eddie Falconer, FF Alumn, at Resistancia Teknochat Festival, online thru Aug. 2
Please visit this link.
Thank you.
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7. Buzz Spector, FF Alumn, in Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6
Congratulations to Buzz Spector (@buzzspector) on the publication of his newly commissioned work in “Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6: Cuts/Tears.”
@inscriptionjournal
This issue brings together newly commissioned works by artists and writers whose practices engage the book as both material and metaphor. Spector’s work is featured among this exceptional group with a contribution that extends his decades-long investigation into the life of books.
“Buzz Spector is the star of this issue. Images from fourteen of his works divide the main sections and each contribution from one another. Works of torn edges create edges or boundaries between the issue’s contents. A stroke of genius from the issue’s editorial and design team. The range of Spector’s sources also draws attention to other boundaries inherent in the body of his work and the issue’s theme: the border between high and low in art, East and West, and Art and Nature.” – excerpt from “Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6 (Tears)”
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8. National Association of Artists Organizations launches NAAO+ Digital Archive
NAAO+ Digital Archive
Browse the publications and related materials of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO) going back to the 1970s.
FEATUREd
Vince Leo’s 1990 timeline of art, culture, movement organizing & political events published by NAAO at the start of the Culture Wars.
Remembering is not enough
NAAO was a Washington, DC non-profit arts service organization. Established in 1982 and lasting about 20 years, NAAO’s first members were the founders and direct descendants of alternative art spaces. NAAO members were dedicated to creating artist generated systems of support for new work. Concretizing the New Left’s radical shift to individual freedom that ignited activism in artists, people of color, disabled people, women, and LGBTQ+ communities, artists’ organizations were determined to take action and create change in the art world and beyond.
NAAO+ owes its inception to the foresight and labor that resulted in NAAO Archives, a website originated by the late Penny Boyer; and was made fuller through the contribution of documents and materials by Anne Focke, and others.
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9. Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, at 245 Bowery, Manhattan, July 25, and more
online:
Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, is interviewed in her studio by NPR’s Paul DeRienzo, about her summer Saturday performance project along the Bowery block of the New Museum, “Homo Futurus / Provocation Card Interact, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27xsXUbT_0&t=2s
They discuss Rosenthal’s 1980s origin of the term Homo Futurus; what its use and significance in terms of human values means in art and has developed in her artworks over the years; her trademarking the term in 2023; the philosophical statements and dozen past, international interactions with the text-art Provocation Cards themselves (https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/rosenthal-about-provocation-cards-project/5485); the library editions folio; their billboards in Padua; and three possible reasons her Homo Futurus is being presented free on the (sweltering and/or rainy) sidewalk instead of within the kool museum only a stone’s throw away. The interview video is intercut with images of her works referenced in the conversation and footage of a few interactions during the first day, shot by Asal Azeri.
and
live, on the sidewalk
For the final interaction, Barbara Rosenthal’s Homo Futurus Provocation Cards will be handed to you by Wizard Puppet, July 25. https://www.facebook.com/events/1014212431059442/1014212444392774/?, as you all talk to to camera, rain or shine, Saturday, July 25, 2-4pm. “Life Has a Life of Its Own” says card #10. CLICK GOING!
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10. Jack Waters, FF Alumn, at Le Petit Versailles Community Garden, Manhattan, July 25
Come to My (Avant-)Garden
On Saturday, July 25th at 8:30 p.m.,
at Le Petit Versailles Community Garden.
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative presents a program of “avant-garden” films in collaboration with Allied Productions,Inc.
Spanning 1915 to 2010 and sourced predominantly from the Coop’s collection, these films invoke vernal imagery and public spaces to comment on the distinct (yet often intersecting) issues of class, immigration, queer identity, HIV/AIDS, and capitalist exploitation.
PROGRAM:
Glimpse of the Garden by Marie Menken (1957), 5 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Stan Brakhage (1981), 3 minutes, color, silent, 16mm
Jerovi by José Rodríguez-Soltero (1965), 12 minutes, color, silent, 16mm
Broken Blossoms by Miles McKane (1992), 5 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
Out in the Garden by Vincent Grenier (1991), 15 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
Berlin/New York by Jack Waters (1986), 20 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot by Melissa Friedling (2010), 5 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
In the Park by Charlie Chaplin (1915), 15 minutes, black-and-white, silent, digital
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Gardens have long been a fixture of American avant-garde cinema. Dating back to the 1950s, artists explored and exploded the formal and aesthetic possibilities of flowers, trees, and vernal spaces within the moving image. Perhaps the best-known example is the program opener, Marie Menken’s Glimpse of the Garden (1957): a painterly foray into a public garden that captured the vibrancy of its flora and fauna at an almost microscopic level. Stan Brakhage, a key contemporary of Menken’s, was no stranger to plant life in his work. 1963’s Mothlight is perhaps his best-known film, wherein the artist glued moth wings, grass, and flower petals between two strips of 16mm splicing tape to form a vivid filmic “collage” of natural materials. 1981’s Garden of Earthly Delights — similarly created by pasting montane zone vegetation onto clear film leader as “an homage to (but also argument with) Hieronymous Bosch” — is widely regarded as Brakhage’s companion piece to Mothlight, and follows Menken’s film in this program.
While experimental filmmakers such as Menken and Brakhage established a blueprint for “avant-garden” films that favored formal elements rooted in fine art practices (color, texture, movement, materiality) over content or narrative concerns, numerous artists in their wake invoked gardens, public spaces, and natural imagery in their films as means to a political or ideological end. Jerovi (1965) by José Rodríguez-Soltero, made just two years after Brakhage’s Mothlight, recreates the Narcissus myth with a young man “clothed at first in rich brocade, but later nude… photographed lingeringly in a lush garden.” Rodríguez-Soltero was a queer Puerto Rican filmmaker and an integral yet overlooked figure of the 1960s New York underground who worked on political newsreels with the Young Lords and produced films for the United Nations Committee on Decolonization. Filmed four years before the Stonewall riots, Jerovi is notable for its unabashed and sumptuously homoerotic depiction of male nudity within a sylvan context, at a time when such imagery was often deemed “obscene” and could land its makers in legal trouble.
The 1980s and ‘90s saw a resurgence of political consciousness within avant-garde filmmaking due to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and ongoing inequities exacerbated by a widespread return to conservatism in the United States under the Reagan, and later Bush, administrations. Miles McKane’s Broken Blossoms (1992) is one such example of this trend, described by the filmmaker as “a cinematic metaphor, conceived as part of a compilation of films on AIDS.” Composed of frenetic Super 8mm footage of flowers and trees in a public garden juxtaposed against a resounding instrumental score, the film functions, in the words of McKane, as “an emotional translation of the disease.” Vincent Grenier’s Out in the Garden (1991) similarly situates a man’s HIV/AIDS diagnosis within a garden context, yet in a relatively straightforward (albeit poetic) manner. Lingering shots of silhouettes over soil, flower pots, and long stretches of green grass underscore a poignant voiceover in which the subject slowly comes to terms with his seropositive status. Grenier noted, “The film eschews the usual talking head and focuses on the peculiar occasion for examining anew as brought on by disconnectedness. In the process, questions of identity, one’s sense of reality, the day-to-day and social tyrannies end up implicating the viewer intimately as well.”
Perhaps no other film from this period confronts the inherently political nature of gardens and public spaces as indelibly as Jack Waters’ Berlin/New York (1986). In this Super 8mm piece, originally used as an element in the 1985 dance/theater work A Free Ride, “ruined buildings [and] the remains of post-war Berlin are juxtaposed with similar settings in New York’s pre-gentrified mid-1980s Lower East Side.” Of the film, Waters wrote:
Much of the urban rubble shown in the New York footage is now the site of expensive residential and commercial space. While the Berlin footage shows the scars of war, the New York devastation is a result of the late ‘70s fiscal default when land owners torched and scavenged their properties as a way of draining the last possible profit from real estate, after years of deliberate neglect in the impoverished communities that contained them. The film documents such a torching shot during a gallery opening that shocked observers, even though such landlord-initiated arson was a common site. The location was eventually appropriated by the city of New York, which acquired then-warehoused abandoned real estate after a specified period of tax delinquency. It later became a community garden under the auspices of Operation Greenthumb, a community program engendered to make aesthetic, social, and organic use of these lots that became neglected eyesores and centers for drug dealing and violence. This garden contained several casitas artfully constructed by the Latino residents that, despite much duress, still inhabit the area. In 1998, it was bulldozed by the City of New York. Like the Greenthumb gardens, similarly abandoned sites were resurrected by homesteaders and squatters who are routinely evicted from these, their homes, after years of ardent labor and expense. In the film, the inclusion of the Berlin Wall’s Checkpoint Charlie takes past and present transgressions of political force from the civic into a global context. The juxtaposition of the two locations posits the contention that the cycle of abuse that results in decrepit land sites is the result of a malignant principle in capitalism.
Like Waters’ film, Melissa Friedling’s Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot (2010) explores class, urban space, a community garden, and destruction wrought by capitalism; Friedling also connects these subjects to the filmic medium. Specifically, she documents the recollections of two children in a Bangladeshi family who kept a thriving urban garden in Brooklyn that was later leveled to make room for their father’s livery car. As noted by the filmmaker:
The overhead lattice support for the garden was woven out of a 35mm motion picture film. Bits of the film that were left lying in the street after the garden was cut down for the winter were optically printed. On inspection, it turned out that the found film holding up the garden was the retro Black urban teen movie Roll Bounce (2005), the plot of which hinges around the closing of the protagonists’ local roller rink, The Gardens. In addition to their recollections of the found film in the garden, the kids disclose their preoccupations with YouTube, Selena Gomez, and Urdu-language children’s songs. The combination of pop-cultural references along with the “misused” found film is revealing of the profound and creative merging of cultural practices that transforms the contemporary immigrant experience.
Themes of class and the immigrant experience are explored nearly 100 years prior to Friedling’s film (and in completely disparate fashion) in Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 Essanay comedy short In the Park, which concludes this program and offers a witty narrative compliment to the experimental and documentary work featured. Here, Chaplin — an immigrant and a staunch Leftist whose politics led to his exile from the United States in 1952 — chronicles romantic couplings in a public park that are disrupted by a pickpocket, resulting in a stolen handbag, cigarettes, and sausages, and a series of misunderstandings. Slapstick hijinks involving Chaplin’s mischievous and anti-authoritarian “Tramp” persona play out in verdant environs, positing the park as a site of both community and class difference while highlighting the timelessly subversive potential of gardens and public spaces.
Program note by Matt McKinzie.
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Total Run Time: 80 minutes.
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All 16mm film prints sourced from the collection of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Charlie Chaplin’s In the Park is in the public domain and will be projected digitally.
Public programming by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is made possible by the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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11. Yura Adams, FF Alumn, at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, thru Aug. 8
Hello –
I am excited to announce I am part of the giant collage symposium Making Meaning on the Vassar campus with many exhibitions and interesting events.
go to: https://www.transformingcollage.com/ to read more and find out what is going on.
I am exhibiting with a terrific group of artists in the exhibition: Shapeshifters: Collage to Form
at the James W. Palmer III Gallery, Vassar College
July 2 – August 8
Reception: Thursday, July 23, 5 – 7 PM
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 8:30 am – 5 pm
Free and open to the public
Hope to see you there!
Yura Adams
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12. Rachel Stella, FF Member, at Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, France, thru Jan. 3, 2027
Please visit this link:
https://mamc.saint-etienne-metropole.fr/en/exhibition/frank-stella
Thank you.
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13. Doug Skinner, FF Alumn, July news
Happy July! Here’s some recent news:
My article “Project Hermes,” on the attempt by sci-fi buffs to build
telepathy machines in the ‘50s, graces the second issue of “The Hidden
Door.” This pretty little journal is published in a limited edition in
Australia; there are a few issues left: hiddendoorrecords (dot) com/
The 15th issue of “TYPO” is now available from Black Scat Books. I
contributed a portfolio of travel sketches as well as translations of
short pieces by Alphonse Allais and Paul Valéry: blackscatbooks (dot)
com
I’ll be joining Matt Marble, director of the American Museum of
Paramusicology, for a presentation on the music of the Spiritualist
movement. It will take place on Thursday, July 23, in Shannon Taggart’s
annual symposium at the Assembly Hall in Lily Dale, NY: shannontaggart
(dot) com/events
Lastly, I’ve learned that Tibo Polleunis, a drummer in Belgium, has
compiled a five-hour playlist based on my book “Music From Elsewhere”:
open (dot) spotify (dot) com/user/wrontler
Keep out of the sun!
Doug Skinner
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14. Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, now online at WhitehotMagazine.com
Joseph Nechvatal’s Future Ruins / Diamond Seas review of Robert Hobbs’s Chris Dorland art book Future Ruins and the Sonic Youth / John Oswald’s Diamond Seas vinyl LP https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/s-diamond-seas-vinyl-lp/7940
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15. Barbara Pollack, FF Alumn, now online at Hyperallergic.com
Please visit this link:
https://hyperallergic.com/marc-spiegler-got-it-all-wrong
Thank you.
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16. Nina Sobell, FF Alumn, live on Zoom, July 26
This is a zoom planned for July 26 at 7:15 from the Various/Artists Gallery 19 Essex Street, Manhattan. The panelists will be original collaborators on BeainWave Drawings -Mike Trivich, Dick Heise , ParkBench- Emily Hartzell, Naoko Tanese, GammaTime, Ed Bear, Lucinda Jacobson , Allen Riley -moderator. The last iteration of GammaTime will take effect 5-7 pm directly before the Zoom. The gallery is open for the last day of the show from 3-8 pm. Zoom meeting link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82471468533
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17. George Peck, FF Alumn, summer news
Dear Friends,
This past spring was a momentous season for me and for Hungary. On May 8th, I landed in Budapest with a large group of friends to celebrate the opening of my exhibition From White to Black to White. We arrived just in time for Peter Magyar’s historic inauguration as prime minister–the real grassroots, democratic ousting of Victor Orbán’s mafia government after 16 years of cronyism. The energy in the city was electric. It was an exhilarating environment to commemorate just two days later the art action I performed in 1968 rejecting of the rigidity of the Soviet regime. The exhibition was a celebration of a young artist forging his own daring path, just as Hungary is forging a new path to the future. It was an amazing synchronicity.
Now back in the quiet and beauty of Upstate New York, I have put together some memories and images of this significant moment that I was lucky to share with my loved ones. You can read the Studio Update in the link below.
I will be back soon with more updates from Buskirk, New York.
Wishing you all a wonderful summer,
George
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For subscriptions, un-subscriptions, queries and comments, please email mail@franklinfurnace.org
Join Franklin Furnace today:
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Rohan Subramaniam, Archivist
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