Contents for May 02, 2017
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Vito Acconci, FF Alumn, in Memoriam
1. Taylor Mac, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, April 26
2. Donald Sultan, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, April 27
3. Chris Daze Ellis, Anton van Dalen, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, FF Alumns, at Frieze NY 2017, Manhattan, May 5-7
4. Andy Warhol, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, May 1, 2017
5. Ray Johnson, FF Alumn, at Matthew Marks Gallery, Manhattan, opening May 4
6. Ann-Marie LeQuesne, FF Alumn, now online
7. Cathy Weis, FF Alumn, at WeisAcres, Manhattan, May 7
8. Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa , FF Alumn, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Manhatan, May 5
9. Sabrina Jones, FF Alumn, at Housing Works Bookstore Café, Manhattan, May 3, and more
10. Liz Magic Laser, FF Alumn, at CAC Brétigny, France, May 13-July 30
11. Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, FF Alumn, at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, May 6
12. Hector Canonge, FF Alumn at HEMISPHERIC Institute, Manhattan, May 4
13. Paul McMahon, FF Alumn, at Mothership BNB, Woodstock, NY May 7-12
14. Reverend Billy, FF Alumns, May events
15. RT Livingston, FF Alumn, at Architectural Foundation Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA, opening May 12
16. Yoshiko Chuma, Patricia Hoffbauer, Yvonne Rainer, FF Alumns, in the New York Times, May 1
17. Jacob Burckhardt, FF Alumn, at MIST Harlem, Manhattan, May 5
18. Beatrice Glow, FF Alumn, at NYU, Manhattan, May 4
19. Courtney J. Martin, FF Alumn, at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Manhattan, May 9
20. Barbara T. Smith, FF Alumn, at Raven Row, London, UK, thru June 11
21. Pablo Helguera, FF Alumn, at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, thru June 4
22. Mark Bloch, FF Alumn, now online
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Vito Acconci, FF Alumn, in Memoriam
Vito Acconci, Whose Poetic, Menacing Work Forms Bedrock of Performance, Video Art, Dies at 77
by Andrew Russeth
POSTED 04/28/17 10:21 AM
ARTNEWS.com
The complete illustrated obituary can be found at this link: http://www.artnews.com/2017/04/28/vito-acconci-dies-at-77/ text only follows below
“Everything I did in art was based on a hatred of art and a hatred of museums, because it was the opposite of everyday life,” Vito Acconci said in 2008, looking back on his more than 40 years of work. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, in a relentless series of performances, installations, films, sound pieces, and photographs, Acconci aimed to shatter that opposition. He followed people on the street, masturbated while hidden in a gallery, and disfigured his own body. Even among a generation of artists who were avowedly radical, he was an unrepentant outlier, pushing forms of art that were by turns lurid and abject, that made himself look pathetic and menacing, and that were absolutely exhilarating.
His death at the age of 77 brings to an end one of the most unusual, superb, and trailblazing careers in postwar American art.
Though Acconci made his name with radical performances and later reinvented himself as an outré architect, he started out as a poet, and throughout his life emphasized in interviews that writing was at the core of his practice. (On the topic of influences, he once listed Faulkner, Genet, William Carlos Williams, and Jean-Luc Godard.) In April of 1967, at the age of 27, he began publishing a journal in New York called 0 to 9 with Bernadette Mayer, which ran Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” among other radical texts.
Recalling that time years later, Acconci said that he particularly envied Aram Saroyan, whose poems regularly consisted of just a single repeated noun. “[W]hile the rest of us tried to be verbs, like everybody told us to do, he had the nerve to stop at nouns,” he once wrote of Saroyan. “Because he took a deep breath and willed himself into the self-confidence of naming.”
One might say that Acconci quickly willed himself into the self-confidence of acting. Verbs—executed precisely, even recklessly—shape his most famous works. In Following Piece (1969), he stalked after people around New York City, stopping his furtive pursuit only once they entered a building. “It was sort of a way to get myself off the writer’s desk and into the city—it was like I was praying for people to take me somewhere I didn’t know how to go myself,” he said in a line that was quoted in a profile last year in the New York Times.
Similarly discomfiting is Seedbed (1973), for which Acconci hid underneath a ramp in the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, masturbating and speaking into a microphone as people stepped atop the work. Interviewed last year by Phyllis Tuchman in these pages, Acconci said that he came up with the title before the actual work, spotting the word in his favorite book: Roget’s Thesaurus.
It would be easy to cast Acconci in the role of the unbridled, wildly self-indulgent artist, but in many pieces he courts humiliation or presents himself in positions of vulnerability. For his 1971 video Conversions, he used a candle to burn the hair off his chest and then attempted to manipulate his breasts so that they look a woman’s. For 1970’s Trademarks he bit himself viciously, documenting his action through photographs. A text for the piece (he sometimes referred to such instruction as “scripts”) begins simply, “Biting myself: biting as much of my body as I can reach.”
Acconci also enacted uncomfortable forms of power exchange, teasing out the ways in which people dominate and control one another. For Untitled Project for Pier 17, he waited for visitors at the end of a Manhattan pier at 1 a.m. in the morning, from March 27 to April 24 in 1971. “If someone comes out to the pier to meet me,” he explained, “I confess to that person something about me that hasn’t been revealed before—something that I’m ashamed of, and that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t tell a soul. In exchange for keeping the secret, the visitor can demand something from me. The visitor can blackmail me.” A problem arose with that work, he admitted a few years ago, when the Village Voice wrote it up and he suddenly had a long line of people waiting to hear his secrets each night. “Maybe there were three or four things possibly worth telling!” he said.
In Remote Control, a video from from 1971, he instructs Kathy Dillon to tie herself up with rope, and in Pryings, a video of the same year, he tries to force open Dillon’s closed eyes. The two were dating at the time, though the relationship didn’t last. The artist told the Times last year, “she thought she had to get away from me because I was taking too much of her life, which I guess I was.”
At his strangest and strongest moments, Acconci made art that seems to render the whole world terrifying and alien. He makes the bottom drop out. One particularly potent example is Turn-On (1974), a roughly 20-minute film that consists almost entirely of a closeup of his head as he hums and rambles, debasing himself for the camera.
“I’m the problem,” he says later on in the video. “It’s me. I have no conviction anymore. It’s me. It’s all in me now. I can’t believe it…I can’t find any more reason to do art. I don’t understand it anymore. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore.” The ranting continues, and he shifts his address to you the viewer. “I’ve got to wait for you to care about that. I can’t do it alone. I can’t feel it alone. I can’t bear up to it alone. I’ve got to wait for you to feel that, to feel that too—to feel that there’s absolutely no reason. I’ve got to keep waiting for you to feel that.”
Vito Hannibal Acconci was born in the Bronx on January 24, 1940. (One can’t help but pause to underscore that his middle name was that of a storied military general.) His father worked for a bathrobe manufacturer near the Flatiron building in Manhattan, where he met the artist’s future mother. A devout Catholic early on, he attended Holy Cross, where he was a member of the Marine Platoon Leaders Corps.
Speaking with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Acconci discussed the abusive behavior of that marine training group with some enthusiasm, saying “If you were asked to go to the captain’s hut, you had to knock on the door. And you’d hear this voice saying, ‘Louder. I can’t hear you.’ Then you’d knock. Then he’d come and look. And if your fingers were bleeding, he would let you in. It was phenomenal.”
Acconci earned an M.F.A. in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa, and then settled in New York, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and throughout Downtown Manhattan. “Until 1968, I didn’t pay any rent that was more than 92 dollars a month,” he said.
While his work from the late ‘60s and 1970s has been canonized alongside Chris Burden, and Marina Abramovic, Valie Export, as some of the key pieces of performance art, he long resisted that term. “It sounds like it isn’t real,” he told Tuchman last year. “It conveys the idea that I’m not really doing it.” Nevertheless, his influence on that field has been profound, and his fearsome approach reverberates in practices as diverse as those of Pope.L, Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser, and Georgia Sagri, to just begin to scratch the surface.
In the late 1970s, Acconci’s interest in performance and art objects waned. Increasingly interested in public space, he took up architecture, proposing (though less often actually constructing) structures defined by sci-fi aesthetics, wry humor, and, of course, a sense of danger. Discussing his architectural practice with Jeff Weinstein for the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, he said, “I admit what I want—did I always want this in work, and maybe I didn’t know it?—but what I really want from work is, I wanted a work that can make people freer than they were before.”
Last year, MoMA PS1 in Queens presented a remarkable retrospective of Acconci’s early work. On the top floor was a transitional piece, with the wonderful title WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976, which feels perfectly emblematic of him, despite there being no violence, no blood, no leering terror. It is just a series of stools around a long wooden table whose top extends through a window and out into open air.
Copyright 2017, Art Media ARTNEWS, llc. 110 Greene Street, 2nd Fl., New York, N.Y. 10012. All rights reserved.
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1. Taylor Mac, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, April 26
The New York Times
THEATER
Taylor Mac Will Take His ‘24-Decade’ Show to West Coast and Beyond
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
APRIL 26, 2017
After surviving 24 hours on his feet in Brooklyn (often in platform heels), the performance artist Taylor Mac is now taking his acclaimed “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” on the road.
The show, a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a decade-by-decade walk through American history from 1776 to the present, told through the songs of the time, all reinterpreted through a radical queer lens. The roughly 700 people who saw the show in one continuous 24-hour marathon last October at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn will still have bragging rights. But audiences in San Francisco can see it in four segments presented between Sept. 15 and 24 at the newly restored Curran Theater there, followed by an abridged concert version at Stanford University on Sept. 27.
The entire show will be presented again next spring in six-hour segments at the Theater at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, from March 15 to 24. There will also be abridged performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington on March 6, 2018, and at Arizona State University in Tempe on April 7, 2018.
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Wesley Morris, reviewing it in The New York Times, called the marathon — which featured shared audience meals, group dance breaks and, for weaklings, a sleeping loft — “one of the great experiences of my life.”
In addition to the Pulitzer nod, the show (produced by Pomegranate Arts) won the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History.
Some of the elements, which include an adaptation of “The Mikado” set on Mars and what a news release calls “the queerest Civil War re-enactment in history,” will be restaged, depending on the design of each venue. But Mr. Mac, in a statement, said the San Francisco dates, in particular, represented a return to his roots.
“The impetus for this piece began in San Francisco, when I participated in the first AIDS walk in 1986,” he said. Combining members of his New York company with local Bay Area artists, he added, “allows the form of the creation to mirror the content of the work: a community building itself through the performance of all that history and music on our backs.”
Correction: April 27, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a prize awarded to Taylor Mac’s show. It is the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, not the Edward M. Kennedy Award for Drama Inspired by American History.
Correction: April 27, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of a Taylor Mac Show to be performed in Tempe, Ariz. It is scheduled for April 7, 2018, not April 27
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2. Donald Sultan, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, April 27
The New York Times
ART & DESIGN
Toy Boats and Teacups Are an Artist’s Treasure
Show Us Your Wall
By ROBIN POGREBIN APRIL 27, 2017
The artist Donald Sultan describes himself as something of a pack rat.
“I have sort of a penchant for old things,” he said.
Photography, pottery, drawings, prints — he started collecting during his eight years of summers working in St.-Tropez, going to French markets, acquiring what he calls “doodads.”
“I just kept buying things,” Mr. Sultan said in a recent interview at the TriBeCa home he moved into about two years ago, which doubles as his studio. The space is filled with examples of his “Disaster Paintings,” images of fire and industrial mishaps that are touring the country and go on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington on May 26.
His home includes works by Lewis Hine, Cy Twombly, Man Ray and Lotte Jacobi. Among Mr. Sultan’s obsessions are toy boats — some of which he keeps in his house in Sag Harbor, N.Y. — as well as pocketknives, shoehorns, watches and teacups.
“Everything has to be real,” Mr. Sultan said. “I don’t have reproductions of anything.”
These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What attracts you to these objects?
I like things that are handmade. I found this guy in England who makes pancheons, old-fashioned bread bowls. He’s probably the only guy in the world that makes these things and he makes them for me when I need them.
Do you use them?
Oh, yeah. I don’t make bread, but I use them as bowls — wonderful. There are very few people who can do that kind of stuff. Growing up in Asheville, N.C., I was surrounded by potters, people who made jewelry, and glass blowers — although I’ve never gotten into glass.
Have these collections made their way into your own work?
Probably not. I have used some of the pots that I collected in my paintings as vases, especially in the late ’80s and ’90s, when I was doing the big flower paintings. I used vases that people gave me or that I’d gotten in St.-Tropez. But not any more than that.
What do you keep in Sag Harbor?
I have one room that’s full of weapons. I decided I wanted to bring my grandfather’s shotgun from the ’20s. A guy gave me this very nice L .C. Smith side-by-side shotgun and another guy gave me a pump-action 16-gauge shotgun and we shoot skeet now. I found a beautiful ax at one of the antique stores; it turns out it’s called a hewing ax and it was meant for skinning logs to make log cabins. Then someone gave me a beautiful African hat made of buttons because I did button paintings. I’ve got arrows from the Maori and the Yanomami and Apaches, and straw hats from when I was in China. I have a print by Winslow Homer of a ship at sea in a storm.
Do you ever sail your toy boats?
I used to. Now I give them to my granddaughter and she plays with them in the bathtub.
Are you out on the water much yourself?
No, I don’t like to get on a boat and then not be able to get off. It’s boring, actually, and a lot of the boats that they have out there are motorboats, so you’re in a thing going rrr, rrr — it takes the fun out of being on the water.
A version of this article appears in print on April 28, 2017, on Page C18 of the New York edition with the headline: Toy Boats and Teacups Are His Treasures.
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3. Chris Daze Ellis, Anton van Dalen, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, FF Alumns, at Frieze NY 2017, Manhattan, May 5-7
Frieze New York 2017
May 5 – 7, 2017
Booth C1
P∙P∙O∙W is pleased to present historical and contemporary works by Charlie Ahearn, Chris Daze Ellis, Anton van Dalen, David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong.
Charlie Ahearn (b. 1951) Since the 1970s, Ahearn has documented street culture and the rise of hip hop in New York City, capturing the excitement and raw energy that infused the movement through photography, films and slideshows. His super 8 kung fu movie, The Deadly Art of Survival (1978) was shown throughout the Lower East Side, Fashion Moda, and The Times Square Show (1980). At The Times Square Show Ahearn met Fab 5 Freddy, leading him to direct his iconic film Wild Style (1982), which is recognized as the first and most beloved movie in hip hop history. For this year’s edition of Frieze New York, the gallery will premiere new silkscreen paintings by Ahearn, made from slides first shown at the Ecstasy Garage in the early 80s. The brightly colored, exuberant works offer a window into the nascent years of the hip hop community, capturing the expression and energy of a particular moment in time. After directing other films such as Bongo Barbershop and artist documentaries, in 2002 Ahearn co-authored the book Yes Yes Y’all, an oral history of the first decade of hip hop with many photos by the artist. Wild Style The Sampler by Ahearn was published in 2007 on the 25th anniversary of that movie. Ahearn has been producing documentaries such as Richard Hunt Sculptor 2010, Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer 2011 and hip hop musical shorts, his latest being All City Take It to the Bridge. Ahearn was born in Binghamton, NY, and currently lives and works in New York City. Charlie Ahearn: Scratch Ecstasy, the artist’s debut exhibition with P•P•O•W, will open on Thursday, May 18 and run through Saturday, June 24.
Chris Daze Ellis (b.1962) entered the world of art via graffiti, writing on the city’s streets and subway system in the late 1970s. In the early ‘80s, Daze turned his attention from the street to the studio, creating works on canvas that merged elements of street style with figurative painting. His first group show was “Beyond Words” at the iconic Mudd Club in New York in 1981, showing alongside artists such as Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, with his first solo exhibition following in 1982 at the seminal progressive art space Fashion Moda, in the South Bronx. At this year’s Frieze New York, the gallery will premiere recent works that depict the vibrancy and vitality of New York City, combining abstract and representational forms, using the visual culture and iconographic landmarks of New York to meditate on personal themes of memory and erasure, collective and personal, and the locus of self within the urban world. A recent retrospective of his works entitled “The City is My Muse” was mounted at the Museum of the City of New York last spring, along with a coinciding publication Dazeworld. Paintings by Daze are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Museum of the City of New York; The Groninger Museum, Netherlands; and The Ludwig Museum in Aachen, Germany. Daze was born in New York City, where he continues to live. Chris Daze Ellis’ debut exhibition with P•P•O•W will be in spring 2018.
Anton van Dalen (b.1927) immigrated to New York in 1972 and has continuously lived in the East Village, documenting the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighborhood through paintings, drawings, prints, stencils, collage, and performances. The Pigeon Car, 1987, a large-scale sculpture housing live pigeons, will be the centerpiece of our presentation at Frieze New York. One of the last remaining pigeon keepers in Manhattan, van Dalen has often used avian imagery in his work to symbolize migration, freedom and community. Beginning his career as a chronicler of the blocks immediately surrounding his studio, van Dalen has quietly captured the rapidly changing scene in the East Village, depicting evolutions in design and technology and their effects on daily life. What emerges from this consistent study is a trenchant indictment of capitalism and materialism and a celebration of natural life in the urban jungle. The Pigeon Car originally exhibited at Exit Art in Anton van Dalen’s solo exhibition “The Memory Cabinet” in 1988. He has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, and the New York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. Anton van Dalen was born in Amstelveen, Holland and lives in New York City.
David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a powerful voice and undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1980s, and early 90s. Through his volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film, and performance, Wojnarowicz’s legacy affirms the vivifying power of art in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. Our presentation at Frieze New York will focus on Wojnarowicz’s use of stencils in his paintings and works on paper, a technique that allowed Wojnarowicz to fuse his incisive symbolism to the city itself, most notably in the derelict interiors of Pier 34 on the Hudson River. Wojnarowicz’s 1982 triptych Peter Hujar Dreaming will be installed atop a large-scale storefront painting by Martin Wong, evoking the work’s public presence above the iconic gallery Civilian Warefare in the early 1980s. His artwork has been included in solo and group exhibitions around the world, at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Germany. His works are in permanent collections of major museums internationally and the subject of significant scholarly studies. Highly influential to the current generation of artists, writers, and activists, his work continues to be the subject of important exhibitions. Wojnarowicz has had three retrospectives: at the galleries of the Illinois State University in 1990 curated by Barry Blinderman; at the New Museum in 1999 curated by Dan Cameron; and his forthcoming traveling retrospective will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin.
Martin Wong (1946-1999) During the ’70s, Wong was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene and was involved with the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived, as well as to create intimate portraits of the neighborhood, placing his work in line with the early American Realist painters like Reginald Marsh and George Bellows. Through his visual diary he built a landscape of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations, and hand signals. His narratives were populated by the neighborhood’s denizens including firemen, boxers, the incarcerated, graffiti artists, and families. P•P•O•W will exhibit a large scale storefront painting from 1985 alongside figurative paintings populated by police men and graffiti writers, characters who recur throughout Wong’s two decades of painting Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Wong’s works are charged with a multitude of levels that address the artist’s personal, poetic, and social concerns, reflecting a sense of compassion and self-identification within his subjects that still resonates today. Wong’s work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). “City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection” opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013 and traveled to the Amsterdam Museum in 2016. Wong’s retrospective, “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic”, opened at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in May of 2016, and will open at the UC Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, California, in the fall of 2017.
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4. Andy Warhol, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, May 1, 2017
The New York Times
THEATER
Conversations Between Warhol and Capote to Be Adapted Into a Play
By ANDREW R. CHOW
MAY 1, 2017
Andy Warhol and Truman Capote were famously friends: The artist depicted the writer in his work several times, and the pair spent hundreds of hours in conversation (some of it published). Now pieces of those conversations will be adapted into “Warhol Capote,” a new play opening this September at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
All of the dialogue in the play will be drawn from recorded conversations between the two from the late 1970s, when they intended to create a Broadway play together. The tapes of these conversations were recently discovered and culled through by the director Rob Roth.
Mr. Roth hoped to take the play to Broadway in 2015. Instead, it will open at the American Repertory, which has hosted many recent Broadway-bound productions, including “Waitress” and “Finding Neverland.” Michael Mayer, a Tony Award winner for “Spring Awakening,” will direct.
When Warhol arrived in New York, in 1949, Capote was already a literary star there, and the artist took a keen interest in befriending him. “He used to write me these letters all the time,” Capote said of Warhol in a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone. “They were just admiring letters. He seemed a very shy, pale person, rather like he is today. Only much shyer.” When Warhol presented his first New York one-man show in 1952, he called it “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote.”
The two continued a friendship until Capote’s death in 1984, with many of their conversations published in Interview, Warhol’s magazine. In the later years, Warhol was well aware of Capote’s struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction, which would lead to his death: “He’s like a different person now, he’s very distant, not friendly,” he wrote in 1980.
In 1989, Capote’s words were adapted into the Broadway production “Tru,” with Robert Morse in the title role. A play by Calvin Levels about the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, entitled “Collaboration: Warhol & Basquiat,” ran Off Broadway at HERE last year.
“Warhol Capote” has the support of both the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. More information is at americanrepertorytheater.org.
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5. Ray Johnson, FF Alumn, at Matthew Marks Gallery, Manhattan, opening May 4
THE RAY JOHNSON ESTATE AND MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE…
RAY JOHNSON
MAY 5 – JUNE 24, 2017
MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
523 WEST 24TH STREET, NY, 10011
TEL : 212-243-0200
OPENING: THURSDAY, MAY 4, 6:00 TO 8:00 PM
Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Ray Johnson, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. Included are almost forty collages spanning nearly three decades.
Johnson is one of the more eccentric figures in contemporary art. Born in Detroit in 1929, he attended the legendary Black Mountain College, where he met and befriended many of the leading avant-garde figures of the day. He moved to New York in 1949 and began exhibiting abstract paintings. Within a few years, however, he had rejected painting in favor of collage. That medium’s combinatory principles became central to his art, which grew to encompass performance, conceptual art, and sculpture. By the late 1950s his practice of mailing collages to friends and acquaintances had become a primary artistic focus, directly giving rise to the Mail Art movement.
Johnson’s collage works, which often incorporate celebrity images cut from magazines, are considered among the earliest examples of Pop art. He exhibited them at galleries and museums in the 1960s and 1970s, but starting in the late 1970s, with only a few exceptions, he stopped showing his work publicly. He never stopped working, however, and by 1995, when he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, he had created an extraordinarily rich and varied body of work.
It was during Johnson’s reclusive final decades that he created most of the works in this exhibition, building them up in layers of magazine clippings, found photographs, and handmade marks. He worked in a nonlinear way, often setting aside a collage for years before picking it up, adding to it, and setting it aside again. This layering can be seen in the works’ content too, with images and phrases (such as “mouth of the month,” “Janis Joplin’s mother’s hat,” and “I love you Alice B. Toklas”) joined together in associative chains that are equal parts comedy and poetry.
As Johnson grew increasingly isolated, he seemed to build a world within his work, filling it with a peculiar mix of celebrities, writers, and members of the New York art world. A partial list from this exhibition alone: David Bowie, William Burroughs, John Cage, Salvador Dalí, Candy Darling, James Dean, Jacques Derrida, Agnes Gund, Arsenio Hall, Peter Hujar, Jasper Johns, Sophia Loren, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, River Phoenix, Paloma Picasso, Lou Reed, Gertrude Stein, and Shirley Temple.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 192-page catalogue with an essay by Brad Gooch.
Johnson’s work has been shown in museums across the United States and Europe, including one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo. In 1999 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized “Ray Johnson: Correspondences,” the first full-scale retrospective of his work.
Ray Johnson is on view at 523 West 24th Street from May 5 to June 24, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
For additional information, please contact Jacqueline Tran at 212-243-0200 or
jacqueline@matthewmarks.com
THE RAY JOHNSON ESTATE
34 EAST 69TH STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10021
TEL 212-628-0470
WWW.RAYJOHNSONESTATE.COM
MILARIO@RAYJOHNSONESTATE.COM
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6. Ann-Marie LeQuesne, FF Alumn, now online
Ann-Marie LeQuesne
“(Set) in train” – the 19th Annual Group Photograph is now online as a video.
The Sinking Shaft
Brunel Museum, London
http://www.theannualgroupphotograph.com
www.vimeo.com/annmarielequesne.com
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7. Cathy Weis, FF Alumn, at WeisAcres, Manhattan, May 7
For the past couple of years Cathy Weis has moved the Sundays on Broadway audience throughout the building at 537 Broadway to view performance from surprising perspectives. This spring the audience stays put in her loft; the perspectives remain surprising. Joining Weis in her new project Ghosts are Ashley Brockington, Jon Kinzel, and Dana Florin-Weiss.
All Sundays on Broadway events are free and open to the public.
All events begin at 6:00pm. Doors open at 5:45pm at WeisAcres, 537 Broadway, #3. There are no reservations. Seating is first come, first served. Keep in mind, this is a small space! Please arrive on time out of courtesy to the artists.
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8. Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa , FF Alumn, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Manhatan, May 5
The Guggenheim Latin American Circle presents performances by Amalia Pica, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, OPAVIVARÁ!
May 5, 2017, 7pm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave
10128 New York, NY
USA
On Friday, May 5, the Guggenheim Museum introduces three newly acquired artworks, performed for the first time in the United States, by Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Neuquén, Argentina), Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (b. 1978, Guatemala City), and OPAVIVARÁ!, a collective based in Rio de Janeiro. Organized by curator Pablo León de la Barra with assistant curator Amara Antilla, the evening marks the first public event supported by the Guggenheim’s recently formed Latin American Circle, a group of art patrons and collectors dedicated to raising awareness of and support for contemporary Latin American art.
Amalia Pica’s Asemble (2015) takes the form of a procession involving more than two dozen participants, the circular form of which evokes a universal emblem of assembly, and explores the challenges of democratic consensus. Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala, 2010) is a dance performed in costumes modeled after iconic Mesoamerican building typologies—a Mayan pyramid, a colonial church, a modernist block—and examines the tendency of architecture to memorialize regimes of power and exploitation. Lastly, in Kitchen Drumming (Batuque na cozinha, 2013/17) by OPAVIVARÁ!, basic kitchen tools mounted to the body become percussive instruments in a performance that fuses celebration and protest by evoking carnival parades, marching bands, and local anti-government demonstrations.
Since the 1960s, the Guggenheim Museum has presented numerous performances in the rotunda by artists including Marina Abramović, Philip Glass, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Meredith Monk, and John Zorn as well as performance-based exhibitions and installations by Matthew Barney and Tino Sehgal. Recognizing performance and time-based media as an essential aspect of art practice, and the issues it raises—regarding duration and ephemerality, the role of the document and the function of memory, the value of labor and the significance of personal interaction—the Guggenheim remains committed to the process of acquiring, maintaining and displaying ephemeral, durational works of art.
A reception and private view of the current exhibitions Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim and The Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi, Life Is Cheap will follow the performances. Advance tickets available. Special rates for members and studunts (with valid ID). Walk-up tickets for the program will be made available at the door beginning at 6:30 pm on a first-come, first-served basis.
Support for the performances is provided by Guggenheim Latin American Circle members Ximena Caminos and Alan Faena, Catherine Petitgas, and Camila Sol de Pool.
About the Latin American Circle
Formed in 2016, the Latin American Circle is a dynamic group of art collectors actively involved in contemporary art and culture in Latin America. Dedicated to advising on and advocating for the Guggenheim’s Latin American contemporary art initiatives, the group facilitates the museum’s ongoing efforts to diversify and strengthen its programming and collection through both emerging and established artists from Latin America.
About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The Guggenheim network that began in the 1970s when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, was joined by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, has since expanded to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (opened 1997) and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (currently in development). The Guggenheim Foundation continues to forge international collaborations that celebrate contemporary art, architecture, and design within and beyond the walls of the museum, including the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative.
More information about the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation can be found at guggenheim.org.
Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim is made possible by Lavazza. Major support is provided by Bank of America.
The Leadership Committee for Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim is gratefully acknowledged for its generosity. Funding is also provided by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
The Hugo Boss Prize 2016 is made possible by HUGO BOSS.
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9. Sabrina Jones, FF Alumn, at Housing Works Bookstore Café, Manhattan, May 3, and more
As part of the PEN Word Voices Festival 2017: Gender andPower
I’ll be on two panels:
Forbidden: Too Liberated
Wed. May 3rd, 6-7PM
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St, New York, NY 10012
FREE, but RSVP…
A discussion about female sexual pleasure and societal taboos surrounding sexually-empowered women. With me and other shameless hussies of the writerly persuasion.
The Radical Act of Drawing a Life
Sat. May 6, 4 – 5:30 PM
Dixon Place
161 Chrystie St, New York, NY 10002
$10
With a diverse roster of graphic novelists who all tackle biographies, our own and others’.
and/or: join me at the opening of this exhibit;
Taking it to the Streets!
The Art + Design of Posters + Flyers on the Lower East Side in the 80s + 90s
Thurs. May 4, 7-9 PM
ABC No Rio in Exile at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space
155 Avenue C (bet. 9th + 10th Streets) New York, NY 10009
Flash back to the graphics of resistance last time we were stunned by the election of a retrograde reprobate. Includes my stencils and artifacts of movements I supported with in my misspent youth.
Exhibit dates: May 4- 31, 2017
Gallery hours: Tues, Thrs, Fri, Sat, Sun, 12-7PM
Whether or not you actually make it to any of the above, I hope you enjoy being informed, invited, and feel no obligation to attend or explain your absence.
BUT I sincerely hope you have nothing better to do than come cheer me with your presence.
Sabrina
Visit www.sabrinaland.com to learn about Our Lady of Birth Control and more.
More thoughts on Sanger, comics and birth control here.
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10. Liz Magic Laser, FF Alumn, at CAC Brétigny, France, May 13-July 30
Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé, The ABCC of CACB, 2017.
Liz Magic Laser
Discours primal
May 13–July 30, 2017
CAC Brétigny
rue Henri Douard
91220 Brétigny-sur-Orge
France
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 2–6pm
T +33 1 60 85 20 78
info@cacbretigny.com
One of the movie scenes that has impressed me the most over the last years features Julianne Moore, alias Havana Seegrand, struggling with her coach, Stafford Weiss, played by John Cusack, in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, which was adapted from the cult book by Bruce Wagner.
The woman is lying on her stomach on a gym mat, the man, positioned behind her, is directing her to scream to root out the anxiety and fears surrounding her past and present relationship with her mother, a famous actress who is deceased. We see the actress, her face streaming with tears, yelling out words of welcome to the ghost of a mother, “Mi casa es tu casa!”
The therapy mockingly practiced by Stafford Weiss is known as “Primal Therapy.” Very popular in the 1970s and developed by the American psychologist Arthur Janov, the therapy involves helping the patient regress to her or his earliest childhood in order to produce a scream from this so-called primal period. Liz Magic Laser resuscitated this practice in its integrity in 2017, in the context of the American and French presidential elections.
In Primal Speech, Liz Magic Laser films a group of people confined in a padded isolation chamber. Directed by a coach, each of them looks within to delve deeply into the foundations of their connections with the male and female politicians who may potentially lead them. In a reversal akin to Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, the artist lays bare our most subjective, infantile motivations as citizens.
Primal Speech continues the artist’s projection of our ambiguous and conflictual sociopolitical relations. The exhibition features several of her previous works either translated into French or dubbed for the event. My Mind Is My Own and The Thought Leader, performed by child actors, depict individuals using a range of personal development methods to engage in and critique popular forms of public speech. Several pieces show the system of oratorical expression codified by François Delsarte, a singer, teacher and theoretician of movement and voice in France. The exhibition is also conceived as a practical space where visitors themselves can get down to work and exercise their voices.
Discours primal is the American artist Liz Magic Laser’s first solo show in France.
–Céline Poulin
Related events
Workshop: Political Therapy
April 30
with Adèle Jacques, coach and actor. Registration is required at reservation@cacbretigny.com.
Opening
May 13, 5–9pm
Free shuttle bus from Paris on registration at reservation@cacbretigny.com.
Press file available here.
Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981, New York) is a video and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany (2016); Mercer Union, Toronto (2015); Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2015); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2015); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013) the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas (2013); and Mälmo Konsthall, Mälmo, Sweden (2012). Her work has also been shown at Swiss Institute (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art (2015); Le Mouvement: 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition ESS SPA (2014); Lisson Gallery, London (2013); the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011); the Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2011); and MoMA PS1, New York (2010). Laser is the recipient of grants from Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation (2013), the Southern Exposure Off-Site Graue Award (2013), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2012) and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2010). Running parallel with Discours primal, Laser has a upcoming solo show at Jupiter Artland (Scotland) in May 2017. She is represented by the Various Small Fires Gallery, Los Angeles and by the Wilfried Lentz Gallery, Rotterdam.
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11. Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, FF Alumn, at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, May 6
IDENTIFY
Performance Art as Portraiture
IDENTIFY: Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz
Pietà
Saturday, May 6, 4 p.m.
Great Hall
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s REINAS (Queens) series considers female archetypes who have shaped her identity and worldview. Expanding on her previous work and reflecting on her perspective as a mother, Ortiz responds to the human cost of gun violence through the lens of Michelangelo’s Pietà. The performance, accompanied by live music, provides a meditation on the universal theme of loss and mourning and offers a symbol of resilience. IDENTIFY is the National Portrait Gallery’s performance art series, which focuses attention on activism, visibility, and experimentation through portrayal. Support for the IDENTIFY performance art series has been provided by an anonymous donor and The Skanby + Gould Foundation.
Photograph courtesy of Dominic DiPaolo.
IDENTIFY
Performance Art as Portraiture
Artist Statement
In this latest iteration of my REINAS (Queens) series, which is anchored in trauma and anxiety, I investigate the fear of losing a child to violence or intolerance. I fear the inherent injustices my family will endure based on their skin, and grieve for the mothers of fallen children. This performance is a metaphor of grief, realization, and resilience, as we continue to rise and press onward. This is not just a performance about social justice, but a moment to collectively grieve.
8th and F St. NW • Washington, DC • npg.si.edu
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12. Hector Canonge, FF Alumn at HEMISPHERIC Institute, Manhattan, May 4
Thursday, May 4th, 6:30 pm
Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York City, NY 10003
“Temporal Incidence and Continuous Dissidence in Contemporary Hispano-American Performance Art”
This presentation outlines the work of artists who participated in the program organized and curated by Hector Canonge, “Temporal Incidence and Continuous Dissidence,” during the Hemispheric Institute’s Xº Encuentro that took place in Santiago, Chile (July 17-23, 2016).
As members of the transcontinental network, ARTerial PERFORMANCE LAB (APLAB), created by Canonge in 2013, selected artists explored issues related to traversed identities, constructed sovereignties, peripheral domains, and territorial rootedness. The indoor and outdoor performances brought local voices who raised questions about the present state of Artivism (art + activism) in the region.
Participating artists:
Daniel Acosta (Argentina), Neda Godoy (Chile), Adrían Gómez (Cuba), Isabel Jordán Bruno (Bolivia), Clara Macias Carcedo (Mexico), Rossella Matamoros (Costa Rica), Ana Carolina Izquierdo(Peru), Graciela Ovejero Postigo (Argentina), Veronica Peña (Spain), Wagner Rossi Campos(Brazil), Leonardo Salazar (Chile), and Leyneuf Tines (Colombia). Photography: Gonzalo Tejeda(Chile). Organized and curated by Hector Canonge(United States).
ARTerial Performance Lab (APLAB) was initiated in 2013 by NYC-based, interdisciplinary artist Hector Canonge. Since its inception, the project’s mission has been to connect Latin American artists whose practice involves and explores Live Action Art. As a collective, APLAB, and its continental network, has organized presentations in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. In 2016, APLABpresented a special program for the Xº Encuentro in Santiago, Chile, featuring artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and the United States.
More information: www.hemisphericinstitute.org
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13. Paul McMahon, FF Alumn, at Mothership BNB, Woodstock, NY May 7-12
paul mcmahon will be showing a new series of yellow paintings at the mothership bnb, 6 hillcrest ave, woodstock, ny 12498. on view sunday april 30 and sunday may 7 6-8 pm and by appointment until may 12: email paulmcmahon108@gmail.com
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14. Reverend Billy, FF Alumns, May events
Harley —
It is the darkest of times, it is the brightest of times. A mentally ill President slouches toward the nuclear suitcase to mistake a Twitter feed for the big one. But he can see in the windows of the Oval Office, out in streets, the 99% and the Black Lives and the Kayaktivists and the Pussy Power and the Dreamers and the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.
What these uprisings all have in common is something we need to know by heart. They all share a quality of vigorous generosity. A miracle hiding in plain sight!
April 29 at 9pm: Brooklyn Folk Festival performance
May 9 at noon: Rev and The Stop Shopping Choir perform at Trump Tower with 350.org and Climate Nexus. Stop Shopping in 45’s vertical super mall!
May 14 at 2pm: Original Badass Mother’s Day Show at Joe’s Pub
May 20: The Church of Stop Shopping travels to March Against Monsanto Bayer in Miami
We have got this gratitude!
Earthalujah!
Reverend Billy
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15. RT Livingston, FF Alumn, at Architectural Foundation Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA, opening May 12
IT’S ABOUT TIME
RT Livingston’s
kinetic installation underscoring the illusive nature of time
May 20 to June 21 2017
Architectural Foundation Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, May 12th, 5-7 pm
participatory opening:
TIME ON YOUR HANDS
please wear a watch with hands…compare time’s uneven path
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present IT’S ABOUT TIME, a kinetic installation underscoring the illusive nature of time by conceptual artist RT Livingston.
IT’S ABOUT TIME is a visual metaphor demonstrating how our perception of time, with its accordion-like expansion and contraction, is constantly changing while systematically going around in circles.
Livingston observes that: “The notion of time begins in our guts then moves to our heads before entering the space of our lives.” Like time itself, the phrase ‘it’s about time,’ is elastic. It’s most often used with exasperation and weary anticipation behind it. The installation ITS ABOUT TIME goes further and shows us time as a visual metaphor.
Like the Earth spinning every 24 hours in its yearly rotation around the sun, a clock with hands follows the earth’s movement as it makes its rounds. Earth and clock move in sync giving us a poetic connection to the cosmos and the space-time continuum where notions of time travel, memory and déjà vu boggle the mind.
Together with video and sound, IT’S ABOUT TIME consists of some eighty 4X4 inch square battery powered clocks with the words ‘time is a man made Illusion’ handwritten on each. Several layers of iridescent paint obscure the writing while creating movement through the play of light. The uniformity of
the squares creates a structural matrix in which each clock runs at its own pace, not unlike the movement of our own lives.
In the Fine Arts Department at Daemon College, Buffalo, New York, Livingston studied painting with Elizabeth Murray. Graduate work in the History of Photography took her to Princeton where she studied with Peter Bunnell. While working on her Ph.D. in Art History at Rutgers University, she joined the curatorial staff at the University’s Zimmerli Art Museum. In New York, Livingston sat on the Boards of Franklin Furnace and was a charter member of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival Producers’ Council.
In 2003, after 30 years living and working between her Lower Manhattan, Springs-East Hampton and Woodstock, New York studios, Livingston came to California when commissioned to created several large outdoor installations. Other projects kept her coming back until 2006 when she finally made the move to Santa Barbara where she continues to spin ideas and make art.
The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House on the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday to Friday, 10 am to 2 pm, and by appointment. 805-965-6307
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16. Yoshiko Chuma, Patricia Hoffbauer, Yvonne Rainer, FF Alumns, in the New York Times, May 1
The New York Times
DANCE
La MaMa Moves! Crowdsources Works in ‘#Here to Dance’
By JOSHUA BARONE
MAY 1, 2017
This year, the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival is breaking out of its small downtown theaters and onto the internet.
The festival, which runs May 18 to June 4 and has a reputation for tapping into timely topics like climate change and gender, will crowdsource choreography for “#Here to Dance,” an online project about human rights.
Three local dancemakers — Annie-B Parson, Raja Feather Kelly and a third choreographer to be announced — will provide direction for dancers around the world to submit one-minute works in response to human-rights abuses. Those will be shared online, then screened during the festival’s Dancing in the Street Block Party on May 20.
Nine world premieres, two United States premieres and one New York premiere are on tap for the festival. Highlights include “My Memory,” choreographed and performed by the Cambodian dancer Rady Nget, which shares a program with Yoshiko Chuma’s “PI=3.14…Dead End, Hey! All Women!,” a new work featuring a changing cast including Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick and Irene Hultman. Also on that bill is Orlando Zane Hunger Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine’s “how to survive a plague,” about the AIDS epidemic.
The 2016 Bessie Award-winning choreographer Ephrat Asherie will present “Odeon,” a work set to music by the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth. And Patricia Hoffbauer’s “Getting Away With Murder,” about the history of abuses against women, will have cameos by performers including the choreographer Yvonne Rainer.
The full lineup and tickets will be available at lamama.org.
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17. Jacob Burckhardt, FF Alumn, at MIST Harlem, Manhattan, May 5
Dear Friends,
THE SARA SPENCER WASHINGTON STORY by Royston Scott, which I shot, edited, and associate produced, is going to have a screening THIS FRIDAY MAY 5 AT 9:50 PM at the Harlem International Film Festival in New York. The Harlem screening takes place at MIST Harlem, 46 West 116th Street. Website: HarlemFilmFestival.org
It will also unspool in Berlin, on Saturday, May 13 at 8PM, as part of Black International Film Festival Berlin. Website: http://www.blackinternationalcinema.de
Attached is a poster, and below are links to a couple of articles that just came out about it.It’s already been in three other festivals!!
Roy and I will be at the Harlem screening. Hope to see you there.
Jacob
Here’s a Description:
THE SARA SPENCER WASHINGTON STORY
Directed, Written and Produced by Royston Scott
Camera, Editing, Associate Producer Jacob Burckhardt
Original Music by Matt Chiasson
28 minutes – USA www.sswmovie.com
Interviewees recall the life of a black woman who
became a phenomenal success selling her line of
hair products door-to-door in 1920s Atlantic City,
New Jersey. A business that lasted through
The Great Depression. A business that became a
million dollar empire. A business that gave tens
of thousands of black women the opportunity to
become self-sufficient. She called the business
Apex, and they called her
Sara Spencer Washington.
And here are links to a couple of articles:
http://www.newjerseystage.com/articles/getarticle.php?titlelink=royston-scotts-enlightening-documentary-film-the-sara-spencer-washington-story-premieres-at-the-new-jersey-film-festival-on-february-11#.WJkHYurLqks.email
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18. Beatrice Glow, FF Alumn, at NYU, Manhattan, May 4
Thursday May 4, 6:30 PM-8:30 PM
A Tale of Two Islands:
Reporting Back from the Banda Islands
Please join me for my final program as the
2016-17 Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU!
“Beatrice Glow returns from Rhun, a volcanic Indonesian island in the Banda Sea, to present her final public program as the A/P/A Institute Artist-in-Residence. During her residency, Glow investigated the social history of plants via spice routes and botanical expeditions, focusing on the historical relationship between two islands on opposite sites of the world: Mannahatta and Rhun. The islands, which were traded by the British and Dutch during the 17th century spice wars, are connected by both a botanical and colonial legacy. Glow shares her findings and the immersive tech experiences she is creating in collaboration with Highway 101, ETC as part of her ongoing, multi–platform project Rhunhattan.” Please RSVP here.
• When: Thursday May 4th, 6:30 PM -8:30 PM
• Venue: Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, 8 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
– R S V P –
Thursday May 11, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
My current solo exhibit Beatrice Glow: Spice Roots/Routes at the James B. Duke House with NYU Institute of Fine Arts is on view March 22 – June 19, 2017. Please join me, along with some illustrious guest speakers on Thursday May 11th at 6:30 PM for “Empire of Tobacco: the Legacy of Tobacco” ! Please RSVP here.
• Smudge at the entrance of the James B. Duke House
• Introductions by curators Kristen Gaylord and Kathleen Robin Joyce
• Opening remarks by George Stonefish
• “Spice Roots/Routes,” a performance/lecture by Beatrice Glow
• “Tobacco, tobacco! Sojourns, Symbols, and Slaves in the Shaping of the Modern World,” a talk by Prof. Gunja SenGupta
– R S V P –
George Stonefish is a First Nation member [American Indian] who is 1/2 Delaware; 1/4 Ottawa; 1/8 Ojibwa; 1/16 Pottawatomi; 1/16 Miami from Ontario, Canada. However, he was raised in NYC and has spent most of his life working for the First Nation [American Indian] community on both a national and local level. He started his activism at an early age when he went to the takeover of Alcatraz by First Nation students in 1969 with his Grandmother and Uncle. Since that time he has participated in the defense of Native Nations as a member of their warrior societies and by promoting their struggles though media, as he had the first weekly radio program on Native issues on WBAI 99.5 FM in NYC from 1978 to 1983. He was also raised in the tradition of his people, which has helped him to organize Native Nations’ governmental structures in preparation for federal recognition. He is a well-known traditional dancer and singer.
Gunja SenGupta is Professor and Chair of the History department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her current interests lie in 19th-century U.S. and slavery/abolition in the Indian Ocean; sectional conflict; African American and women’s history. Her first book, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas (1996), dealt with sectional conflict and consensus. In From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (2009), she explored welfare debates as sites for negotiating identities of race, gender, and nation. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals including the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (African American) History, Civil War History, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Her current projects, co-authored with Awam Amkpa, and funded by Melon, Whiting, Wolfe, and Tow fellowships/grants, include one on 19th-century United States and slavery/abolition/empire in the Indian Ocean; and another on the history, memory and films of the Black Atlantic.
Thank you for your ongoing support and enjoy a creative day!
Warm wishes,
Beatrice
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19. Courtney J. Martin, FF Alumn, at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Manhattan, May 9
A conversation with artist William T. Williams A ’65, F ’71, ’73, ’78 and Courtney J. Martin
Tuesday, May 9th
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
100 11th Avenue at 19th Street, New York, NY
Artist William T. Williams was a student at Skowhegan in 1965, and returned as faculty three times during the 1970s. Courtney J. Martin is assistant professor in the department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, and the newly appointed Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Dia Art Foundation.
Conversation will begin promptly at 6:30 PM. Seating is limited.
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20. Barbara T. Smith, FF Alumn, at Raven Row, London, UK, thru June 11
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane
Until 11 June 2017
For this exhibition ‘home’ is imagined as a space for social, sexual and political agency, and the ‘domestic’ as a stage on which kinship and self are formed and transformed through acts of love, cruelty and indifference.
A group of works from the recent past and present has been gathered for 56 Artillery Lane alongside a weekly live programme. Visual vocabularies range from bodily waste and bacterial growth to intimate self-imaging. Sculptural forms make reference to temporary shelter and collective occupation, while films are diaristic, improvised and quasi-fictional. The archive is invoked as a ‘homemaking’ space. For instance, photographic ‘genomegrams’ by Fiona Clark describe a personal response to trauma, Ingrid Pollard’s film reflects on her parents’ correspondence and Barbara T. Smith’s books comprise Xerox impressions of the artist’s body and images of her children. Installations by Martine Syms and Ben Burgis & Ksenia Pedan work directly with the buildings’ fabric, while a film by Jenna Bliss – commissioned for the exhibition – explores the class, race and gender dynamics of drug use within domestic contexts in Puerto Rico and New York. Colonial legacies and indigenous activism are explored as well as gentrification and familial histories. The exhibition provides a partial map of the domestic as an unstable zone.
A publication has been made for the exhibition in which Amy Tobin builds a picture of a little-documented exhibition titled A Woman’s Place, made in 1974 by a group of artists in a squatted house and women’s centre in South London.
The live programme of performances, screenings, workshops and an off-site project extends the exhibition to include, amongst other concerns, co-housing, modular architecture, non-monogamy, the domestic in narrative film and fiction, living with illness and health activism.
Participants in 56 Artillery Lane include Chantal Akerman, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Soofiya Andry, Dr Meg-John Barker, Khairani Barokka, Pandora Blake, Phoebe Blatton, Jenna Bliss, Rizvana Bradley, Daniel Brathwaite-Shirley, Ben Burgis & Ksenia Pedan, Autumn Chacon, Channels, Adam Christensen, Fiona Clark, Lucy Clout, Fran Cottell, Phoebe Davies & Nandi Bhebhe, Jemma Desai, Fenixº, Alex Fleming, Keira Fox, Richard Fung, Harry Giles, Carry Gorney, Alice Hattrick, Candice Hopkins, Juliet Jacques, Nazmia Jamal (Sisters Uncut), Alice Jones, Jacob V Joyce, Bhanu Kapil, Morag Keil & Georgie Nettell, Sarah Kent, Las Nietas de Nonó, Gail Lewis, Rudy Loewe, Suzy Mackie (See Red Women’s Workshop), Hamish MacPherson, Mira Mattar, Zinzi Minott, Merata Mita, Irenosen Okojie, Lucy Orta, Meera Osborne, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Ingrid Pollard, Steve Reinke, Su Richardson, Christine Roche, RUSS, Stanley Spencer, Barbara T. Smith, Martine Syms, Anna Szaflarski, Nina Wakeford, Kate Walker, Darcy Wallace, Ed Webb-Ingall, Ria Wilson, Anicka Yi and Rehana Zaman.
The exhibition is curated by Amy Budd and Naomi Pearce, with input from Amy Ball, Gail Chester, Althea Greenan, Lucie Kinchin, Alexandra Kokoli, Imogen and Catriona Laing, Robert Leckie, Suzy Mackie, Sue Madden, Bernard G Mills, Ciara Moloney, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Su Richardson, Alex Sainsbury, Amy Tobin, Mercedes Vicente and Ed Webb-Ingall.
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS
T +44 (0)20 7377 4300
info@ravenrow.org
www.ravenrow.org
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21. Pablo Helguera, FF Alumn, at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, thru June 4
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Pablo Helguera: Club Americano
April 22–June 4, 2017
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
02115 Boston, MA
United States
Hours: Monday–Sunday 10am–5pm,
Wednesday–Friday 10am–10pm
T +1 617 267 9300
New York–based artist and educator Pablo Helguera (b. 1971, Mexico City) cordially invites you to Club Americano, the culminating project of the artist’s residency at the MFA. This intimate one-room exhibition and shared space explores the historic foundations and contemporary definitions of American identity. Here, the term “American” is understood in the Pan-American sense: its Spanish translation, “americano,” can refer to anyone or anything from either North or South America. Helguera takes aesthetic inspiration from 19th century Bostonian university clubs and gentlemen’s lounges—exclusive gathering spaces for elite groups of one gender and race—but breaks with tradition by welcoming people of all backgrounds.
At the center of the gallery is a 19th century dining table, surrounded by paintings, photographs, prints, textiles, and decorative arts from the Museum’s world-renowned collection of art from the Americas. Selected by Helguera in collaboration with MFA curators, these artworks serve as the subject of three performances that examine their histories through a present-day lens. Modeled on the tradition of the 19th century “after-dinner speech,” each program features a range of voices, including local academics, artists and activists, as well as members of the MFA’s Teen Arts Council. Additionally, the MFA has invited select community advocacy groups to organize public events in the space on Wednesday evenings, when admission to the Museum is free. We welcome you to gather, lounge, read, experience the performances, and participate in the community-organized events. For a complete schedule, visit the exhibition website.
Performance series
What Is a Club?
Friday, April 21, 6:30pm
Worldly and Otherworldly Perspectives
Friday, May 19, 6:30pm
Inventing América
Friday, June 2, 6:30pm
Organized by Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Special Initiatives, position supported by Lorraine Bressler; with Dennis Carr, Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture; and Layla Bermeo, Kristin and Roger Servison Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas.
Performance Art at the MFA is supported by Lorraine Bressler.
Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art, and performance. Drawing from his experience as an educator, Helguera’s artistic projects often incorporate pedagogical devices such as the classroom setting and lecture format. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. Helguera is the author of Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2007), among numerous other publications, and is the maker of Artoons, a series of cartoons poking fun at the art world. He has exhibited widely in museums and biennials internationally, most recently at Manifesta 11 in Zurich, and is currently the subject of a mid-career survey at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City.
Performance Art at the MFA
The MFA is one of the first encyclopedic museums in the US to integrate performance art into its collection, exhibitions, and programs. Performance art at the MFA encompasses a spectrum of live and participatory experiences and features a range of works by international, national, and local artists. Since the opening of the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art in 2011, the MFA has acquired three performance-related artworks for its permanent collection and organized dozens of performance-based events, including works that unfold in the Museum’s galleries and engage with its collection, performances that form part of multimedia contemporary art exhibitions, and fleeting interventions that appear in unexpected spaces inside the Museum or outdoors. Further information and documentation of past works can be viewed through the Performance Art Archive.
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22. Mark Bloch, FF Alumn, now online
Mark Bloch online:
Reflections on a Century of Dada with “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” at Museum of Modern Art
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/reconstructed-at-museum-modern-art/3636
In Paris in late 1920, almost five years after the movement had been initiated, Tristan Tzara, co-founder of what had become Dada, created a proposal for an ambitious anthology–a book to be called “Dadaglobe,” commercially published in an edition of ten thousand copies, 300 pages of photographic self-portraits, photographs of artworks, original drawings, and designs for book pages combined with prose, poetry and other verbal “inventions” to be collected by him from the widespread “dadas” themselves spread across the world.
It makes sense that this Do It Yourself anti-art movement wanted to create such a large project documenting its activities for an unsuspecting public, but it is even more fascinating that not only did the endeavor never happen, but that despite a century of art scholarship, this promised grand self-portrait of the absurdist movement remained almost completely unknown and was mentioned only a handful of times—until last year.
“Despite the unplanned secrecy of Tzara’s Dadaglobe effort, mail art has always been heavily influenced by Dada, regardless, and so it is ironic and fitting that this exhibition of Dadaglobe is, in fact, evidence of the earliest example of a project initiated and executed by mail. The works seen at MoMA—all having emerged from envelopes—show what happens when artists in many countries join together around a common vision to collectively create for the same, imagined project.”
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
