November 13, 2025, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ET at Franklin Furnace's new location in LIC. We celebrated this year's 12 grant recipients from three categories: FUND, XENO Prize, and Jacki Apple Award.
[October 25, 2025. 1:00pm EST (7:00 pm CEST) streamed live from Munich, Germany] “Return to the Story That Holds You” situates performance as a site of ancestral remembrance and embodied research. Drawing on South Asian heritage and Indigenous epistemologies, the work reactivates practices of communal gathering in which ritual, storytelling, and care functioned as modes of survival and connection.
[Oct 2025—April 11, 2026] A retrospective gallery show anticipating its 50th anniversary in 2026. Included in the exhibition are works by Martha Wilson, Jenny Holzer, Tehching Hsieh, Dread Scott, and more.
[July 12 - November 2, 2025] A showcase of artists' books created in the 1970s and collected by the influential Brooklyn organization. The exhibition is guest-curated by Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art president Mark Waskow.
[July 4 (Fri) – July 19 (Sat), 2025] Pre-Exhibition for the 50th Anniversary of Franklin Furnace. It introduces the groundbreaking activities of Franklin Furnace―still relatively little known in Japan. It focuses on avant-garde and time-based art forms such as artists’ books and performance art, and highlights FF’s global efforts to support emerging artists and archive their ephemeral works.
[June 19, 2025, 6-8pm EST] Join us for a special virtual screening of Esther Newton Made Me Gay, a feature documentary that celebrated the life and legacy of cultural anthropologist, activist, and iconic butch lesbian Esther Newton. With a career spanning over seven decades, Newton has been a trailblazer in queer scholarship, shaping the foundations of LGBTQ+ and Gender Studies through her groundbreaking work on drag, lesbian identity, and the politics of representation.
[April 22, 2025, 6-7pm EST] Through salvaged artworks, travel videos, and recuperative actions, Return to Valhalla is an essay film that traces the scale of the personal against that of the epic. It has a particular sense of lost time, and of blurred boundaries between realities lived, imagined, and hypothesized. An obsession is lived out in pursuit of the elements of a 30 year old trauma: can what seems fated be rewritten through some digging in history, or language, or location?
[March 31, 2025, 5-6pm EST] a Closing hybrid event for the exhibition "Hidden in the Stacks: Digitizing Franklin Furnace Archive Artists' Books Collection," at Pratt Institute Library.
February 26, 2025, 7-8pm EST - Learn what constitutes a well-prepared grant application and ask questions about Franklin Furnace Fund programs from our staff. The session was followed by a Q&A.
[December 14, 10–11 a.m. ET] This live performance will take place in Jinja, Uganda and will be broadcast live via the Franklin Furnace LOFT. "Nabbuzana" is an exploration into the depths of African traditional rituals, particularly the hwambula ritual in Uganda, which seeks to liberate spirits ensnared by human constraints.