Contents for June 11, 2020 (Scroll down for more information):
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1. Alva Rogers, FF Alumn, online at youtube.com/channel/UCUAMpPoqQbLhhS0TnI5YzfA
2. Shaun Leonardo, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, now online
3. Francheska Alcantara, Kara Lynch, FF Alumns, receive Tulsa Artists Fellowship 2020-21
4. Richard McGuire, FF Alumn, on The New Yorker, June 8, now online
5. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at http://vimeo.com/60801453
6. Dahn Hiuni, FF Alumn, online at laplaywrights.org/events.php June 21
7. Mark Bloch, FF Alumn, now online at whitehotmagazine.com
8. Kriota Willberg, FF Alumn, online on Zoom, June 16
9. Robbin Ami Silverberg, FF Alumns, now online at jafffecollection.org
10. Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer, FF Alumn, now online at magazynszum.pl
11. Lynn Book, FF Alumn, online at https://ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts June 13 & 27
12. Liliana Porter, FF Alumn, live online at facebook.com June 13
13. Billy X. Curmano & Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumns, on Zoom, June 17
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Weekly Spotlight: Doorika, FF Alumns, now online at https://franklinfurnace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17325coll1/id/41/rec/36
“Dear,” 1995, by Doorika (Erika Yeomans, Celia Bucci, Andrea Polli, Casey Spooner, Amy Galper, Marianne Potje, Ford Wright, Heather Priest, Jim Skish, Scott Fulmer, Michael Crane, Doug Huston, Matthew Kopp), is inspired by artist Chris Ware’s comic strip texts. This 47-minute film of the 1995 performance, at the original Ohio Theatre on Wooster Street in Manhattan, shares a series of story snippets reflecting on the intricacies of living, addressing everything from personal nostalgia and loneliness to memories of family and reflections on relationships. Doorika’s silhouette theater style connects the histories of comics and theatrical performance, using a stand-up comedy approach to storytelling to weave humor into expressions of feelings of loss, pain, and melancholy. Each story is driven by a pieced-together musical score combining familiar and unfamiliar sounds.
Current FF Interns Mamou Samake and Zaria George chose to spotlight this performance because friends and family cannot at this time gather to watch live performances . Mamou writes, “This piece feels as though it is bringing a live performance right to my house, one of theater, with a host of eccentric actors and characters, as well as different themes and stories to latch on to.”
Erika Yeomans’ website is erikayeomans.com and Doorika’s wikipedia link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorika
Link: https://franklinfurnace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17325coll1/id/41/rec/36
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1. Alva Rogers, FF Alumn, online at youtube.com/channel/UCUAMpPoqQbLhhS0TnI5YzfA
Dear Friends:
Miss Rogers’ Wonderful School is a project that I have been pondering for a long time, but the pandemic pushed me to expand my passion for children’s literacy out of the closed bookstore and into the homes of my storytime friends. It is a little engine that could and I would like to invite you to share it with children ages 3-6. It is free, interactive and I do not intend to have advertisements on the channel.
Thank you for your time and …”Have a WONDERFUL AFTERNOON and an even nicer tomorrow..Bye, bye now”
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUAMpPoqQbLhhS0TnI5YzfA
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2. Shaun Leonardo, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, now online
Here is a link to the complete illustrated article – text only follows below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/arts/design/moca-cleveland-shaun-leonardo.html
The New York Times
A Museum Canceled a Show About Police Brutality. Here’s the Art.
MoCA Cleveland has apologized to the artist Shaun Leonardo, whose charcoal drawings represent victims of police violence.
By Brian Boucher
Published June 9, 2020
The artist Shaun Leonardo has accused the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland of censorship after it canceled an exhibition of his charcoal drawings of police killings of black and Latino boys and men.
The show, “The Breath of Empty Space,” which includes images of Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, was to open last week. In the drawings, the victims are sometimes hazy, a blur, or a void: Rodney King appears as a white blank surrounded by officers. Mr. Garner is shown in a chokehold. Another drawing depicts the Cleveland park where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed.
The museum canceled the exhibition, organized by the independent curator John Chaich, in March after local black activists and some of the museum’s staff members objected to it. The museum shared a statement with the artist that said that “troubling community response” made the institution realize that “we were not prepared to engage with the lived experiences of pain and trauma that the work evokes.”
The museum’s director, Jill Snyder, described the complaints she was hearing — namely, that “this work stirs the trauma back up for the very community that it is intending to reach, and also that there is a way in which institutions like MoCA put that pain and trauma on display disrespectfully and somewhat gratuitously — that there is a performative aspect to our presentation of it.”
In an email to his followers on June 6 revealing the cancellation, Mr. Leonardo, 40, who has shown his work at institutions throughout the United States, and created community-based arts programs in New York, responded.
“I must make it clear that I was never given the opportunity to be included in outreach, and therefore, never had a moment to engage any community member regarding the show,” wrote Mr. Leonardo, who identifies as Afro-Latino.
“What has become evident to me,” he said, “is that after grave mishandling of communication regarding the exhibition, institutional white fragility led to an act of censorship.”
On Sunday, Ms. Snyder posted a lengthy public apology to Mr. Leonardo on the museum’s website, which reads, in part: “I would like to acknowledge our failure in working through the challenges this exhibition presented together with Mr. Leonardo. In doing so, we failed the artist, we breached his trust, and we failed ourselves.” It concludes, “The work of anti-racism involves taking responsibility and supporting risk. We did not do this. We failed. We are learning now.”
Ms. Snyder, who said the museum has undertaken diversity initiatives in the past, added that she wished that she had invited the artist into the conversation and engaged a broader African-American constituency. In subsequent conversations “with civic leaders and other members of the community,” she said, she heard “with difficulty and tough love, that the black community is not monolithic, that we should have sought other voices.”
Earlier this year, “The Breath of Empty Space” was exhibited without incident at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore — a community scarred by the death of Freddie Gray, 25, in police custody in 2015. Mr. Leonardo’s works also include “The Eulogy,” in which he delivers remarks about Trayvon Martin and other black men and boys who have been killed, accompanied by a band playing a New Orleans funeral march. It was performed in 2017 on the High Line in New York.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland did not share the names of the critics, but in an interview, Mr. Leonardo said that he had “become aware that those views against my work are not representative of a larger black community’s perspective.”
“What I take the most offense to,” he said, is that the museum leadership “was using my work to create the opening for the dialogue that should have been happening in the first place.”
Mr. Leonardo said the reason he was speaking out now, months after the show was canceled, “was in reflection of what I saw as empty messaging coming out of primarily white art institutions since the death of George Floyd.” For example, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles apologized for a May 31 Instagram post calling for “equity and fairness” that did not mention Black Lives Matter or Mr. Floyd by name.
Since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Mr. Leonardo, a Queens-born artist, has focused on social justice art, dealing with issues like the numbers of black and Latino men in prison, racial inequality, police use of force. “I Can’t Breathe” is a self-defense workshop where participants learn how to escape the chokehold that killed Mr. Garner, as Mr. Leonardo tells them that police will interpret self-defense as resisting arrest. In “Primitive Games,” enacted at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2018, Mr. Leonardo staged a nonverbal performance that brought together four groups with conflicting views on the debate over guns in America.
In the last three years, museums have become flash points for debates about racial justice after displaying artworks by white artists that address subjects like violence against African-Americans. Protests erupted over a painting based on a photograph of Emmett Till (at the Whitney Biennial in 2017) and a sculpture evoking the hanging of Dakota Indians (at the Walker Art Center the same year).
Since then, museums have sought to rebuild good will with people in the communities who feel their most painful stories are not for white artists, and museums whose leadership is overwhelmingly white, to tell. The conflict over the Cleveland exhibition reveals that even if the work is by an artist of color, an institution needs to do the proper outreach first to lay the groundwork for a sensitive show.
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3. Francheska Alcantara, Kara Lynch, FF Alumns, receive Tulsa Artists Fellowship 2020-21
Please visit this link:
https://www.kosu.org/post/kosus-allison-herrera-among-2020-21-tulsa-artist-fellows
Thank you.
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4. Richard McGuire, FF Alumn, on The New Yorker, June 8, now online
Please visit this link:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2020-06-08
Thank you.
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5. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at http://vimeo.com/60801453
TO THE GREAT BLANKNESS MAILING LIST:
FROM MY IMAGINARY COCKTAIL LOUNGE TO YOURS.
HOPING YOU ARE ALL SAFE AND WELL.
PZ, 6/4/20
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6. Dahn Hiuni, FF Alumn, online at laplaywrights.org/events.php June 21
Hi Everyone,
Every June, in honor of Gay Pride, the City of West Hollywood holds a playwriting competition.
I’m thrilled and honored to have won this year!
Of course, rather than the usual staged reading, the play will be presented on Zoom.
Though not as thrilling as live theater, it does allow for family and friends all over the world to tune in.
Please Join Us!
Dahn Hiuni
JUNE 21, 2020 at 4PM PACIFIC TIME
DIRECTED BY JOHN COPPOLA
It’s 1972. Aversion therapy survivor Ron Gold’s growing resolve to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders puts him on a collision course with the psychiatric establishment.
With humor and poignancy, early 70s music, and the ghost of Freud himself, SICK recounts a pivotal moment in gay history and affirms the power of the individual in the struggle for human rights.
WITH
Cullen Arbaugh, Carrie Lynn Certa, Frank Crim, Bill Dyer, Peter Levine, David Pevsner, Lew Temple & Nathan Tylutki
For Zoom Reservations, Please Visit:
https://pride.weho.org/wehoarts/2020/6/21/alap-pride-playreading-festival
https://www.laplaywrights.org/events.php
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7. Mark Bloch, FF Alumn, now online at whitehotmagazine.com
An amazing Brooklyn-based artist Rafael Leonardo Black, 71 died from Covid-19 complications on May 16th. He was 71 years old and showed at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art. I wrote this article about him. Please take a look at his wonderful drawings and read about what an interesting person he was. Thanks. I hope everyone is staying safe.
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/dies-from-complications-covid-19/4622
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8. Kriota Willberg, FF Alumn, online on Zoom, June 16
Hello Everyone!
I hope you and yours are safe and well.
This email is to announce a series of four graphic medicine roundtables hosted via Zoom by cartoonists Joel Christian Gill, Georgia Webber, Ben Schwartz, and myself.
The GRAPHIC MEDICINE CONFAB is a roundtable conversation focusing on challenges and techniques of making graphic medicine: comics about everything and anything to do with health, medicine, illness and our bodies. Each meeting will have a theme and a facilitator.
The GMC will meet four times this summer via Zoom, Tuesday evenings from 7-7:45 PM (ET)
NO CHARGE
June 16, Kriota Willberg – How can we make dangerous information less threatening? (And what does “dangerous” mean?)
June 30 Joel Christian gill – TBA
July 14, Georgia Webber – TBA
July 28, Ben Schwartz – TBA
Please join us to contribute ideas, ask questions, get feedback, and share resources.
Fill out this Google form to register for the series Zoom invites. (Not working? Try pasting this in your browser: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTt3Bozb4C9fn8q1dVS9dt5h79KjJ5qH_aCvmXpl9AVMmDUQ/viewform?usp=sf_link)
For a little more context, visit Kriota’s blog (Just in case: https://kriotawelt.blogspot.com/2020/06/graphic-medicine-confab-this-summer.html)
Please spread the word! These conversations are for anyone making or interested in making graphic medicine comics.
Best,
Kriota Willberg
Joel Christian Gill
Georgia Webber
Ben Schwarz
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9. Robbin Ami Silverberg, FF Alumns, now online at jafffecollection.org
From the Jaffe Center for Book Arts:
This week’s JCBA Artist of the Week is Robbin Ami Silverberg for her book “Rondo,” a poem about a typist. Sound is of immense importance to the poem and so Silverberg created a book full of sound emanating from the very paper that holds the text:
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10. Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer, FF Alumn, now online at magazynszum.pl
Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer, FF Alumn, is featured in https://magazynszum.pl/wideo-na-czasy-pandemii-subiektywny-przewodnik-od-her-docs-film-festival/
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11. Lynn Book, FF Alumn, online at https://ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts June 13 & 27
Please join me online for Vox Effusis on June 13th, 4:30 PM EST, but be sure and come for the entire concert of adventurous vocal artists starting at 3:00 PM EST. And of course, the following week will be stellar, too! I’m happy to be among such auspicious voices…. Follow the link for logging on to watch and listen. I’ll be streaming from my studio in North Carolina!
Be well, create boldly, follow the roots.
+Lynn
ESS Quarantine Concert Series
Vox Effusis
curated by Lou Mallozzi
Volume 1: June 13, 2020, 2:00PM US Central Time (8:00PM UK, 9:00PM Europe)
2:00 Ute Wassermann (DE)
2:30 Jaap Blonk (NL)
3:00 Jacques Demierre & Vincent Barras (CH)
3:30 Lynn Book (US)
Tracking Chimaera – a peripatetic guide gives voice to the sprawl of space/time/flesh in aggregations of techno-biologic complicities.
Tracking is as much tracing, ghosting, chasing, doubling back, losing the trail, taking a ponder, hiccup, heartburn, hiatus, or sheer jump cut.
This radically wayward’ guide’ serves as an expeditionary entreaty for returning to senses – deliriously deranged within and among body states
– solid, liquid, electric, imaginary. Book will deploy voice, processing, live sound effects, recorded materials as tools for her trek.
Volume 2: June 27, 2020, 2:00PM US Central Time (8:00PM UK, 9:00PM Europe)
2:00 Audrey Chen & Phil Minton (DE/UK)
2:30 Alessandro Bosetti (FR)
3:00 C. Spencer Yeh (US)
3:30 Pamela Z (US)
The Quarantine Concert Series is produced by Experimental Sound Studio, which directs 100% of the donated proceeds to the artists. So, when you go online to listen, don’t forget to donate! And while you’re at it, become an ESS Member to help support these and other artist-audience initiatives from an organization with 34 years of adventurous sonic community building.
https://ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts
Lynn BOOK Projects
www.lynnbook.com
(stay tuned for a new site soon!)
www.vimeo.com/lynnbook
bookl@wfu.edu
Skype: lynn.book
Zoom: bookl@wfu.edu
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12. Liliana Porter, FF Alumn, live online at facebook.com June 13
Please join us for a virtual video screening of
Liliana Porter’s The Riddle / Charada
To celebrate the closing day of Red Brush and Other Situations, Liliana Porter’s tenth solo exhibition at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, please join us for a virtual video screening.
The Riddle / Charada
[Edition 2/5 + 2 AP], 2019, digital video, 8:45 min
Saturday, June 13, 2020
12pm CST via Facebook Premiere
Visit this link to watch:
https://www.facebook.com/Sicardiayersbacino/posts/2655862054517877
Recent press on the exhibition:
(a) Your guide to Houston art galleries online, Houston Chronicle, April 20, 2020
(b) Liliana Porter Interview, La Nacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 30, 2020
(c) Liliana Porter: Dream Fixer, Interview, La Nacion, April 18, 2020
(d) Art in the Age of Coronavirus: Liliana Porter presents a work of virtual theatre filmed during the quarantine, La Nacion, April 8, 2020
A native of Buenos Aires, Liliana Porter (Argentina, b. 1941) moved to New York in 1964, where she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop. Porter’s art engages with notions of time, memory, and the human condition through the forms and movements of small flea-market figurines and found objects across austere backgrounds. Her dry wit and sophisticated sensibility carry through across media, from painting and printmaking to video and installation. Porter’s work is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA).
Sicardi Ayers Bacino
1506 W. Alabama St.
Houston, Texas 77006 USA
Tel +1 713.529.1313
info@sicardi.com
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13. Billy X. Curmano & Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumns, on Zoom, June 17
Sacred Objects
Billy X. Curmano and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo perform with a Zoom Audience
Presented online with Bronx Council on the Arts
Wednesday, June 17, 6-7 PM (New York City Time)
Two friends cloistered in their living quarters and studios, one by the Mississippi River and the other by the Bronx River, engage in a show-and-tell, more like a perform-and-tell, dealing with their creative lives from a place of isolation, but of great expansion as well. Drawing from a life-long art praxis that goes back long before they visited an art gallery or a museum, Billy and Nicolás focus on elements of their performances and their day-to-day to be with each other and those they touch in time and space. They also acknowledge the role of interruptions, shared rites of passages, and reinterpretations of hearsay and tales in their work and play. Billy and Nicolás integrate those in attendance by inviting them to share and discuss sacred objects that are part of their lives.
*** Those wishing to attend, please have with you a sacred object that you can talk about when you join this event!
To RSVP: https://www.bronxarts.org/event/sacred-objects/
Billy X. Curmano engaged in a 2,367.4-mile swim from the source of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico as a performance and environmental statement. In another performance, he fasted on juice and water for 40 days, in Death Valley, seeking visions and enlightenment.
In 2011 Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo was baptized as a Bronxite by the Bronx River, by Bill Aguado and Susan Newmark Fleminger. In an earlier experience, he traveled from the Bronx to Berlin, Germany, where he surrendered his persona before entering the Czech Republic, where he embodied the Holy Infant of Prague, full time, for 5 days.
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
