CONTENTS:
Contents for March 15, 2021 (Scroll down for more information):
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1. Lorraine O’Grady, Franklin Furnace, now online at Youtube.com and more
2. Lady Pink, FF Alumn, now online at Artnet and more
3. Arantxa Araujo, Veronica Peña, FF Alumns, live online, New Latinx Art Collective, March 15
4. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumn, online with Zizhi & Babel, March 18
5. Alison O’Daniel, FF Alumn, now online at WomenandHollywood.com
6. Guadalupe Maravilla, FF Alumn, at Socrates Sculpture Park, opening May 15 and more
7. Verónica Peña, FF Alumn, at Untimely Transgressions, Haverford College, PA, March 19
8. Anna Banana, FF Alumn, now online in the Coast Reporter
9. Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Helene Winer, FF Alumns, now online in The New York Times
10. Donna Stein, FF Alumn, new publication selected for Town and Country magazine best books
11. Doug Skinner, FF Alumn, new publication
12. John Cage, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, FF Alumns, now online at Artsy
13. Simone Gad, FF Member, now online in Popular Cardigan Magazine
14. Jane Dickson, Andy Warhol, FF Alumns, live online at National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, March 24 and more
15. Barbara Ess, Glenn Branca, FF Alumns, in The New York Times
16. Brendan Fernandes, FF Alumn, now online in White Hot Magazine
17. Ron Athey, FF Alumn, now online in The Brooklyn Rail
18. John Ahearn, FF Alumn, now online in Hyperallergic
19. John Held Jr., FF Alumn, now online at Accordion Publications
20. Jenny Holzer, FF Alumn, now online in The New York Times
21. Rev. Billy, FF Alumn, now online at RevBilly.com
22. Donna Henes, FF Alumn, live online March 20
23. David Wojnarowicz, C. Carr, FF Alumns, at Film Forum, premiering March 19
24. Annie Lanzillotto, FF Alumn, live online at New Jersey City University, March 18
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Weekly Spotlight: Deborah Edmeades, FF Alumn, now online at Franklin Furnace Digital Collections and Archives
Deborah Edmeades’ solo performance “Lucy and the Beast” was presented as part of Franklin Furnace in Exile at Performance Space 122, NYC, November 1995. This half-hour performance is based on Lucy’s memoirs as woven into Hans Christian Anderson’s childrens’ tale, “The Little Mermaid.” The titular Lucy, the childhood persona of the artist, examines rebellion, inhibition, ambition and sexuality, both through the eyes of Lucy and the lens of the romantic and comical aspects of a classic fairytale. Tune in for this exciting performance joining lived experience, fairytale, and media.
For more information on Deborah Edmeades’ art please visit at:
www.deborahedmeades.com
(Text by Eve Vishnick, FF Intern, Winter 2021)
Please watch at:
https://franklinfurnace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17325coll1/id/6/rec/1
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1. Lorraine O’Grady, Franklin Furnace, now online at Youtube.com and more
Please visit this link to a film about the current Artforum cover artist Lorraine O’Grady (who mentions Franklin Furnace around the 10:06 mark):
thank you.
and please visit this link to a New York Times review of Lorraine O’Grady’s current exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum:
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2. Lady Pink, FF Alumn, now online at Artnet and more
please visit this link to Pink:
Thank you!
-and-
online at artnet – please visit this link:
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3. Arantxa Araujo, Veronica Peña, FF Alumns, live online, New Latinx Art Collective, March 15
The NEW LATINX ART COLLECTIVE was founded in 2020 by participants of the Creative Capital Taller NYC for Latinx Artists. Multidisciplinary, intercultural, and politically inclined, the NEW LATINX ART COLLECTIVE includes 70 members, and aims to create an open space for the community to come together, voice ideas, gain visibility, and explore the intersectionalities of Latinx identities in the US. @newlatinxartcollective
Monday, March 15, 2021 6:00 – 7:30 pm EST
Arantxa Araujo Multidisciplinary, Performance Artist
Bibi Flores Multidisciplinary Artist, Painting
Fernando Vieira Writer, Director, Performer
Jessica Alazraki Painter,Visual Artist
Jorge Berrios Theater, Writing, Collective Creation
Sabrina Merayo Nuñez Sculpture, Installation
Curated by Verónica Peña, moderated with Barry Kostrinsky
PAOC Performance Art Open Call in collaboration with ATOA Artists Talk On Art
Zoom URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84198882925
ATOA Artists Talk On Art: https://www.atoanyc.org/
PAOC Performance Art Open Call: https://www.facebook.com/groups/208827689191980
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4. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumn, online with Zizhi & Babel, March 18
Next tête-à-tête art talk connects Shanghai with The Bronx, New York, via zoom with Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo.
Language: English with Chinese live translation
To register:
Send an email to josedrummond.studio@gmail.com
or visit:
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively, through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited and performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Casita Maria, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Estévez Raful Espejo was baptized as a Bronxite in 2011.
Follow his most recent project on Instagram @interiorbeautysalon
Organized by Zìzhì and Babel.
Tête-à-tête is an open studio event where an artist or a curator is invited to present an art work or a group of works in the studio of artist José Drummond or online via zoom.
Zìzhì means homemade in Chinese and is an alternative not for profit project focusing on organizing activities and events in order to make artworks more tangible to the public.
BABEL’s mission is to generate research and learning opportunities in the fields of contemporary art, architecture and environment. BABEL is conceived as a museum without walls and aims to work between cultures and across disciplines.
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5. Alison O’Daniel, FF Alumn, now online at WomenandHollywood.com
please visit this link:
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6. Guadalupe Maravilla, FF Alumn, at Socrates Sculpture Park, opening May 15 and more
PLANETA ABUELX, A SOLO SHOW
FROM ARTIST GUADALUPE MARAVILLA,
BRINGS HOPE AND HEALING
TO SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK
Para leer en español, visite:
As the world slowly begins to recover from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, Socrates Sculpture Park further affirms its role as an essential community-centric outdoor arts space with Planeta Abuelx, a solo exhibition of newly commissioned work from Guadalupe Maravilla that addresses and applies holistic healing practices, opening May 15, 2021.
In response to a curatorial invitation to use the Park’s five-acre landscape as a sanctuary for recuperation, Maravilla is creating new work that expands upon his ongoing Disease Throwers series. Drawing on ancestral, Indigenous, and ritual practices of holistic healing, Maravilla’s sculptures are an accumulation of totemic forms; medicinal gardens; recycled and found materials; Mesoamerican symbolism; and functional sound components.
The sculptures’ coral-like texture was achieved through an experimental process of pouring aluminum in the Park’s on-site fabrication studio. The resulting forms suggest connotations of water’s curative properties as well as conjuring the vulnerability of both environmental and social ecosystems. Sounds produced by the Disease Throwers are intended to serve as restorative vibrational therapies that help to wash away anxieties and engender communal healing.
The title, expanding the idea of “Mother Earth” into the intergenerational, gender neutral, and open-ended “Grandparent Planet”, points to Maravilla’s framing of intimate familial relationships and durational time as crucial to the restorative process. The installation of works serves as an homage to our elders, not only as a group vulnerable and tragically disproportionally lost to illness including Covid-19, but also as keepers of curative ancestral knowledge passed down through generations.
Maravilla’s title not only suggests the past of forebears but the posterity of the future in the reference of Planet X. This is a theoretical planet, not yet visible or scientifically proven, but perceived and hypothesized by mathematical approaches to observed and gravitational data. While epigenetic studies reveal that the effects of trauma manifest in descendants up to seven generations, the evocation of Planet X in this context suggests the mystery and possibility of the future which lies at the outer limits of our perception.
Maravilla’s interest in healing from trauma grew out of his personal lived experiences: as a child he fled from the Salvadoran Civil War and entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant and then later in life, he fought and survived cancer. While Maravilla’s personal narrative informs his practice, his exhibition at Socrates invites the public to more broadly consider how we – as communities and individuals – begin rehabilitation and renewal from the collective traumas of the past few years including the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of white supremacist violence. Maravilla’s focus on physical and emotional health through mutual and holistic care are in harmony with the Park as a waterfront estuary, a sheltered green space, and a community hub.
In addition to his new Disease Throwers sculptures, Maravilla will also create a work for the Broadway Billboard above the Park’s main entrance as well as a large-scale ground drawing based on the Salvadoran children’s game “tripa chuca” (which translates to “rotting guts”). Maravilla’s ground drawing at the Park will be the first he has presented outdoors, his first at such large scale, as well as the first he intends to be ephemeral – dissipating over time into memory. Maravilla will collaborate with a cancer survivor to create the ground drawing – inscribing their individual journeys as two separate lines on the earth that travel and maneuver throughout the Park, but never touch.
Over the course of the Planeta Abuelx exhibition, Maravilla will activate the projects on view through a series of public programs including community workshops and therapeutic sound baths. These programs will be offered in accordance with Covid-19 safety protocols and be responsive to changing conditions.
“With his exhibition at Socrates, Guadalupe Maravilla radically expands on the concept of healing through art, creating new modes of understanding for what holistic care and recovery looks like for individuals and communities in the wake of trauma. The natural oasis that is the Park’s waterfront landscape serves to further amplify the potential recuperative properties of this body of work – literally, in the case of the sculptures’ auditory components, and figuratively, in terms of the intangible (yet very real) benefits of experiencing art in nature.”
– Jess Wilcox, Socrates’ Curator & Director of Exhibitions
“I am so grateful that Socrates has been able to remain open throughout the pandemic, providing the public with essential access to nature and art. Guadalupe Maravilla’s exhibition, Planeta Abuelx, will provide a new and important form of respite to our community as we continue to heal, physically and mentally, from Covid-19.”
– John Hatfield, Socrates’ outgoing Executive Director
ABOUT GUADALUPE MARAVILLA
Guadalupe Maravilla has performed and presented his work extensively in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bronx Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, MARTE (El Salvador), Central America Biennial X (Costa Rica), Performa 11 & 13, Smack Mellon, and the ICA in Miami (2019). His work is included in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, FL), and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and Creative Capital grant (2016). Based in Brooklyn, NY and Richmond, VA, Maravilla is currently an Assistant Professor at VCU. He is represented by PPOW Gallery in New York City where he has an exhibition, Seven Ancestral Stomachs, on view from February 26 – March 27, 2021.
SUPPORT
This exhibition is organized by Socrates Sculpture Park and curated by Jess Wilcox, Socrates’ Curator & Director of Exhibitions. The exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Jerome Foundation and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. Socrates’s Exhibition Program is funded by the Charina Foundation, ConEdison, the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Agnes Gund, Lambent Foundation, Ivana Mestrovic, and Spacetime C.C. The exhibition is funded, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
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Guadalupe Maravilla, FF Alumn, online in The New York Times
please visit this link:
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7. Verónica Peña, FF Alumn, at Untimely Transgressions, Haverford College, PA, March 19
VERÓNICA PEÑA
The Water Tank Sessions III
Durational Live Online Underwater Performance with Sound by Tara Gladden
Untimely Transgressions Forum
Performance, March 19, 2021 3:00 – 4:00 pm
Roundtable, March 19, 2021 4:30pm
https://www.haverford.edu/center-arts-and-humanities/news/untimely-transgressions
https://www.veronicapena.com
UNTIMELY TRANSGRESSIONS convenes artists, scholars, and activists whose work touches on temporal transgressions (suspension, repetition, hesitation, exhaustion, asynchrony, revival, recollection) without necessarily thinking “transgression” as something that (only) departs from standard or linear concepts of time.
Untimely Transgressions is organized by Raegan Truax as a collective happening (in seven parts). The event consists of embodied workshops, artist talks, temporal queerings, and live performance. Raegan is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the John B. Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Studies. Sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities.
THE WATER TANK SESSIONS, curated by Verónica Peña, is a new series of long-distance audio-visual collaborations that invites professional musicians, singers, and sound artists to play while being inspired by the submerged body. For the third enactment of the series, invited sound artist Tara Gladden, and underwater performance artist Verónica Peña, collaborate live online from different states of the U.S.; presenting the audience with a unique live audio-visual experience that combines hypnotic sounds with the enchanting vision of the suspended body. Hosted by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College, PA.
Schedule:
MARCH 19, 2021
10:00 a.m. Untimely Transgressions – Raegan Truax & Erin Manning
11:00 a.m. Tavia Nyong’o & Carlos Motta: Trying to Explain Time to a Seagull
A dialogue about an unfinished collaboration (last year) as part of the Yerevan Biennial that was interrupted by the declaration of martial law in Armenia.
1:00 p.m. Eleonora Fabião: “Things that must be done”
2:00 p.m. Clare Croft & Jennifer Harge: Body Reading
In this workshop, longtime collaborators Jennifer Harge and Clare Croft will explore methods for reading with our bodies, using Audre Lorde’s poignant provocation, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” as our central text.
3:00 p.m. Verónica Peña: “Water Tank Sessions”
Live performance by Verónica Peña with sound by Tara Gladden
4:30 p.m. Concluding Roundtable with speakers from throughout the day
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8. Anna Banana, FF Alumn, now online in the Coast Reporter
Please visit this link:
https://www.coastreporter.net/local-arts/banana-stamps-out-her-very-last-batch-3515049
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9. Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Helene Winer, FF Alumns, now online in The New York Times
please visit this link:
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10. Donna Stein, FF Alumn, new publication selected for Town and Country magazine best books
The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected, and Rediscovered Modern Art, published by Skira. Town and Country Magazine lists it as #13 out of 42 best books for Spring 2021.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/g35535570/best-books-spring-2021/
Thank you, Donna Stein
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11. Doug Skinner, FF Alumn, new publication
“2 + 2 = 5” is now available from Black Scat Books! This, if you’re
doing the math suggested by the title, is my tenth translation of
France’s master humorist, Alphonse Allais.
“2 + 2 = 5” (in French, “2 + 2 = 5”), was first published in 1895.
Allais is in his prime here, spinning out dark fantasies on cycling in
Ancient Rome, the taste of tears, the economic advantages of germ
warfare, God’s dislike of Christmas, and the proper chemicals for a
chaperone’s chamberpot. The intrepid Captain Cap pitches his bizarre
inventions over cocktails, and Allais sends back notes from his travels
to North America and Southern France. At 65 stories (289 pp.), this
collection is his largest—and I’ve added two extra stories by Allais and
two by Octave Mirbeau, all on the pressing issue of ambulatory
vegetables, as well as an introduction and useful notes. Liliane Milgrom
did the lovely cover painting. It all adds up to hilarity! And you can
find it on Amazon.
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12. John Cage, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, FF Alumns, now online at Artsy
Please visit this link:
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13. Simone Gad, FF Alumn, now online in Popular Cardigan Magazine
please visit this link:
https://www.popularcardigan.com/magazine.
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14. Jane Dickson, Andy Warhol, FF Alumns, live online at National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, March 24 and more
James Fuentes is delighted to announce representation of Jane Dickson, whose powerful, glowing depictions of the American ethos have captured global acclaim. Born in Chicago in 1952, Dickson arrived in New York in 1977. The following year she began working the night shift programming animation for Times Square’s first digital billboard, running the New Year’s Eve countdown. From this after-dark vantage point, Dickson began documenting shards of the dramas playing out beneath the Square’s hallucinatory lights and shadows, where she lived and worked for 30 years. Working across photography, drawing, and painting, often utilizing industrial surfaces such as carpet, sandpaper, Astroturf, or felt—each material selected for its particular resonance to the subject—Dickson has turned her focus to many markers of Americana: suburban homes, Vegas casinos, demolition derbies, billboards, motels, laundromats, strip-malls, taco stands, parking lots, gas stations, highways, suspension bridges, and tunnels. These images, which themselves reflect the illusions of depth and surface through their material supports, address cultural ideals of mobility and independence, and the architecture of distraction and temptation that surrounds them.
Capturing the seductive texture of time and place, Dickson’s works stand as important cultural documents—they also inextricably reflect the artist’s own life, movements, and experiences in these places. Dickson’s works reflect the duality of collective loneliness; of the external and interior; of nature and artificiality; both urban and suburban; of American hopes and dreams, and the fears and frustrations that drive them. Beneath the soft-core haze of scumbled surfaces, Dickson’s paintings, neither nostalgic nor romantic, address memory and reflection. Located between desire and despair, attraction and repulsion, theirs is the tension of strong contradictory impulses, of ambivalence, eschewing the comfort of pat answers. Dickson often works from her own photographs, whether taken today or in decades past. A distinct, often diffused quality of light occurs through radiating neon, fluorescent, and incandescent light beams from a window, or the polluted glow of a night sky; rarely daylight. Describing the strong, momentary feeling of their scenes, Dickson’s works contain a strange sense of duration in their suspended time. As with the loop between photograph and painted image, Dickson’s decades-long output can be understood as cyclical rather than linear, in which scenes and signs might reappear and interact, reflecting their continued prevalence and renewed relevance. Through this long-term investigation and documentation, in her own words, Dickson considers painting to be a “form of research, helping to clarify areas of mixed emotion, untangling the things that are complicated—hopefully giving the viewer a space in which to reflect upon themselves as well.”
As well as being a deeply-rooted observer of street life, Dickson is an important part of New York City’s creative history, involved in connecting the downtown art and punk scenes to uptown graffiti and hip-hop subcultures. During her time working on the Spectacolor billboard, she initiated the Messages To the Public artists’ series for the Public Art Fund, culminating in inviting then-unknown friends such as Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and David Hammons to make animated works for it, a program that ran for many years to follow. While working with her husband, Charlie Ahearn, on the production of the seminal hip-hop film Wild Style, Dickson had solo exhibitions at FUN Gallery as well as at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, and was an early member of the downtown collective Colab. Since the 1980s, Dickson’s paintings and photographs have featured in many solo and group exhibitions, including the 1985 Whitney Biennial; The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1991); Creative Time (1993); Jane Dickson: Paradise Alley, curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum (1996); and most recently in the survey exhibition New York Underground: East Village in the 80s, presented at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2019, now traveling through China. Her work is in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. Her papers are in the Hip Hop Collection of Cornell University’s library. Dickson’s work can also be found at the MTA Times Sq-42 St subway station, where she completed a mosaic in 2008. Jane Dickson in Times Square was published by Anthology Editions in 2018. In 2019, James Fuentes presented two solo exhibitions of Dickson’s work, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air followed by Slot Club.
UPCOMING
Pursuing Pop: Portraits since 1960 at the National Portrait Gallery
Jane Dickson, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, Deborah Kass, Barbara Carrasco, Freddy Rodríguez, Keiichi Tanaami, and others
Related zoom program:
Wednesday, March 24, 6-8 pm ET with Jane Dickson, Rupert Garcia, Taína Caragol, and Dorothy Moss
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James Fuentes Online
Works on Paper
May 15–June 15, 2021
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Shanghai International Art
with Beyond the Streets
November 19-22, 2021
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15. Barbara Ess, Glenn Branca, FF Alumns, in The New York Times
please visit this link:
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16. Brendan Fernandes, FF Alumn, now online in White Hot Magazine
please visit this link:
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17. Ron Athey, FF Alumn, now online in The Brooklyn Rail
please visit this link:
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18. John Ahearn, FF Alumn, now online in Hyperallergic
please visit this link:
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19. John Held Jr., FF Alumn, now online at Accordion Publications
please visit this link:
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20. Jenny Holzer, FF Alumn, now online in The New York Times
please visit this link:
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21. Rev. Billy, FF Alumn, now online at RevBilly.com
The end of life as we know it is coming quickly, the pandemic an early sampler. Years? Months? We hear different dates. It makes us want to create activism that transforms.
Now it is finally warm enough to meet outside so we will be together again tomorrow learning new songs, planning actions, and supporting each other through the sorrow and anger. Love is where our survival will come from, following the path of care.
We re-enter evolution, where the symbiosis of cooperation is the creator of new life. It’s a tall order. But life always was amazing. Earthalujah!
We are happy to invite you to join our newest venture: Extinction Talk Radio – Rev Billy with Teddy Tam Tam, Astro notes by Ashley B and News From the Natural World with Savitri D. 1-3 pm EST time each and every Sunday.
Check it out at:
As always you can DOWNLOAD and LISTEN to Reverend Billy Radio at
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22. Donna Henes, FF Alumn, live online March 20
Greetings to my spirit circles!
Join me for the
45th Annual Vernal Egguinox Ceremony
On Zoom
March 20
8PM EST
Link to the Zoom below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82484778328?pwd=OHNhYlo5amVVMUo1MEdZaVBDQy9sZz09
Meeting ID: 824 8477 8328
Passcode: 793101
One tap mobile
+19292056099,,82484778328#,,,,*793101# US (New York)
+13017158592,,82484778328#,,,,*793101# US (Washington DC)
Dial by your location
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+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
Meeting ID: 824 8477 8328
Passcode: 793101
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcHRm8YEUy
Bring eggs!
Spring is Mother Nature’s wake up call. She sounds her bugle for reveille and the sun comes running back to us, light and warmth on its heels. “Rise and shine,” she orders. And it does.
The Earth awakens in the solar radiance. The living energy, which has stayed hidden underground during the long deep sleep of the dark season, now shifts and starts to stir.
The dirt thaws. The sweet sap rises. Poking and peeking, it seeks the surface, the space, the air, the light. Stretching skyward, life breaks new ground.
Bulbs burst forth from the Earth, sending up tender shoots. Buds appear, looking all pink and rosy before the sun turns them green. Seeds sprout. The first early flowers explode open, exposing their delicate centers.
The Hatching of the World Egg
If the Winter Solstice signals the birth of the sun, then the Spring Equinox exclaims the birth of the earth – the resurrection of nature from the dark death of winter. The life, which has stayed hidden, in exile or underground, during the long deep sleep of the cold season, now shifts and starts to stir. Poking and peeking, it seeks the surface. The space. The air. The light. Striving, stretching skyward, life breaks new ground. Bulbs, shoots and buds burst forth from the earth, exploding open, exposing their tender green growth. The sweet sap rises.
The birth waters break. The snow melts. The skies open. It rains, it pours, it mists, it drips fertilizing fluids from the heavens. The air is damp like a baby’s bottom. The land is soaked. The mud, like mucous, like after-birth. The defrosting sodden soil is teeming, churning with every creepy crawly thing that ever slithered out of a swamp. Hordes of birds descend, drawn by the juicy feast. Animals awaken from their pregnant hibernations, skinny and starving and suckling their young. Birds and beasts, alike, set out on a concerted feeding frenzy, gorging themselves and their ravenous, insatiable, mouths-ever-open offspring.
It is as if the great egg of the whole world has hatched.
And so it has in the collective imagination and symbolism of many cultures. The myths of the peoples of Polynesia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Greece, Phoenicia, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Central and parts of South America and Africa all describe an original cosmic egg from which the universe is born. The Latin proverb, Omne vivum ex ovo, proclaims “All life comes from an egg.” It is only natural and not so subtle to assign the birth of the world to a Great Mother Goddess who laid the egg of life. All of nature, after all, is a constant cyclical reminder of just such a fertile female force, the seed source of all generation. All life does, indeed, come from an egg.
The Egyptian goddess Hathor took the form of the Nile goose, the Great Cackler in order to lay the golden egg, which was the sun. The Egyptian hieroglyphic notation for the World Egg is the same as for that of an embryo in the womb of a woman. The Celts, too, had a Mother Goose who laid the egg of all existence. According to the Hawaiians, the Big Island was produced from the egg of a huge water bird. She was known as the Great Midwife, the Egg Mother. Knosuano was the Moon Egg of Ghana. The Druids honored the Egg of the World. In Greek Orphic tradition, The Great Goddess of womb-like darkness, Mother Night, was impregnated by the Wind, and she gives forth with the silver egg from which the earth emerges.
According to the Chinese, the first human being sprang from an egg dropped from the heaven into the primordial waters. The Chimu Indians of Peru are descended, ordinary people and heroes alike, from the original egg – the moon. The Samoan Heavenly One, hatched from an egg whose shell pieces became the earth. Prajapati, the creator of all living things in Indian mythology, was born of a great golden egg, which was first incubated in the uterine waters of eternity. The god, Brahma burst forth from a gold egg.
In time, the egg, the symbol of life, of birth, came to signify the season of spring. For it is then that the aspect of fertility and rebirth within the cycle is so overwhelmingly evident. Clearly, the egg stands for spring. The egg, in fact, stands at spring. Actually stands up on its end at the moment of the Vernal Equinox. Stands at attention as the sun crosses the equator into the northern hemisphere. Stands in salute to spring.
Eggs on End: Standing on Ceremony
A history:
Soon after I started organizing celebrations of the seasons in the city on the Winter Solstice of 1975, a friend returned from Asia with an odd bit of equinoctial information for my interest. Apparently, in pre-revolutionary China, it was customary to stand eggs on their end on the first day of spring. To do so would guarantee good luck for the entire year. How intriguing! Of course I immediately set out to prove it on American soil.
That spring I tested it out in the small park across the street from my home with an intimate band of neighbors. It worked! The following spring, I mustered all of my trust in cosmic continuity and advertised for a large public gathering to stand eggs up on the Spring Equinox at sunset in Battery Park in Manhattan.
I assumed and fervently believed that the eggs would stand again, but still, the tiniest little thrill of terror would seize me: “Please, please let it work!” Of course, if the eggs had not stood, the earth would have been sorely off kilter, and I wouldn’t have had a worry in the world!
But of course they stood. And the next morning a photo of them standing against a brilliantly lit skyscraper background appeared on the front page of The
New York Times. And the rest is history. EGGS ON END: STANDING ON CEREMONY has from the first captured the imagination of the press as well as the general public. Whatever else I have done or ever hope to do in my life, I will always remain “the Egg Lady!”
Over the years, the eggs have been covered by every major television, radio and wire service network in the world. It is incalculable just how many millions of people have been exposed to and inspired by this delightful demonstration of cosmic balance. Just seeing this phenomenon happen on TV or reading about it in a magazine sparks a zestful appreciation of the mysteries of nature.
The event itself is astonishingly simple. The site, some towering landmark megalith, an urban Stonehenge, is decorated. A circle is cast – marked in day-glo orange fabric, thus transforming a secular public space into a sacred site. Scientific and mythic information sheets are handed out along with jelly eggs. An orange laundry basket containing 360 eggs is passed among the crowd.
Everyone takes an egg and we all hold them up in the air together, pledging to walk on the earth as if we were walking on eggs. Promising, in honor of the season, to protect our fragile yet resilient planet home. We count down the minutes to the equinox. And when the time is right, we stand our eggs in unison in salute to spring. No matter how many people attend, the real event is always each single person experiencing the influence of gravity, balance and equilibrium.
Response to the eggs has been phenomenal. There is something so powerful in the experience of the egg standing upright that touches people in a very deep and primal place. Standing an egg on its end, feeling it as the yolk shifts inside to find its perfect point of balance, is like holding the entire universe in the palm of your hand. The excitement is profound and never, it seems, forgotten.
I receive notes and photos from folks from all over the world who have stood up eggs either as a participant at one of my events, or alone, with friends, family, or with an entire community. I have pictures of eggs standing on bookshelves, kitchen tables, driveways and even aboard a boat in the Caribbean. Eggs with kids, with astronomers, with physicists, with pet cats. Just go to YouTube and search for “equinox eggs” and see how many exuberant videos there are.
Stood at the first moment of spring, the egg becomes the symbol of a new season, the birth of new life. EGGS ON END: STANDING ON CEREMONY is every bit a traditional vernal fertility rite, a popular, contemporary celebration of the return of green and growth and light after the dark winter.
It is immaterial whether or not the egg can stand at any other time of the year (as some critics maintain). The important thing is to recognize the symbol, the season, the sky and the kindred souls who surround us. Cynicism magically disappears in the process of sincere participation. And, like the buds and birds, of early spring, we, too, are renewed. We feel refreshed and energetic. We can then return with re-charged optimistic resolve back to what we have come to believe is.
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23. David Wojnarowicz, C. Carr, FF Alumns, at Film Forum, premiering March 19
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24. Annie Lanzillotto, FF Alumn, live online at New Jersey City University, March 18
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
