Contents for March 30, 2020 (Scroll down for more information):
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1. New Franklin Furnace feature: Weekly Spotlight , New Franklin Furnace feature: Weekly Spotlight
2. Coco Fusco, FF Alumn, online at https://zoom.us/j/855730906 April 16
3. Edward M. Gómez, FF Alumn, now online at https://bit.ly/2QTAkX9
4. Eleanor Clarke, FF Alumn, online at Facebook.com March 31
5. Mark Tribe, FF Alumn, now online in The New Yorker
6. Annie Lanzillotto, FF Alumn, awarded Honorable Mention for Allen Ginsberg Prize
7. Thana Alexa, FF Member, live online April 1-7
8. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at http://vimeo.com/61214379 and more
9. Penny Arcade, Taylor Mac, FF Alumns, now online in The New York Times
10. Willi Smith, FF Alumn, now online at CooperHewitt.org
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1. New Franklin Furnace feature: Weekly Spotlight
While we wait, impatiently, for the live performances of Franklin Furnace Fund recipients to resume, we are instituting Weekly Spotlight. This new feature of our weekly Goings On eBlasts will provide a link to historic performances from our Archives. In celebration of April Fool’s Day this coming Wednesday, our first Weekly Spotlight is a video from the 1995 April Fool’s Day benefit presented at The Knitting Factory on Leonard Street in Lower Manhattan. This 1 hour and 6 minute video documents the Benefit Concert for Franklin Furnace with performances by Tom Murrin (as Newt Gingrich) & Martha Wilson (as Tipper Gore), Wanted: X-Cheerleaders, Phillip Brown (as Chantice Labea, Voodoo Queen), Cathay Che, Bush Tetras, introduced by Jim Fouratt, and Karen Finley. Enjoy and please leave your comments at this link to the video: https://vimeo.com/328236127 Thank you.
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2. Coco Fusco, FF Alumn, online at https://zoom.us/j/855730906 April 16
Coco Fusco, FF Alumn, presents
The Unbearable Weight of Utopia: Cuban Artists Confront the State
April 16, 12:30-2 pm
join this webinar on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/855730906
or on facebook live at
https://www.facebook.com/prattpps/
co-sponsored by Performance + Performance Studies Program, Humanities and Media Studies Department, Fine Arts Department, and Global South Center
event contact: Kshankar@pratt.edu
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3. Edward M. Gómez, FF Alumn, now online at https://bit.ly/2QTAkX9
Dear art lovers and media colleagues:
My article about the first-ever retrospective of the work of the Kentucky-born, African American outsider artist Charles Williams has just been published in HYPERALLERGIC.
The exhibition, The Life and Death of Charles Williams, is being presented at the Atlanta Contemporary. I recently saw the show in person, just before this independent art center in Atlanta, Georgia, closed temporarily in response to the current coronavirus outbreak. However, a so-called virtual tour of the exhibition may be viewed on the art center’s website, here: https://atlantacontemporary.org/virtual .
The exhibition was organized by Phillip March Jones, a former director of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta and the founder of Institute 193, a cultural center in Lexington, Kentucky.
Born in southeastern Kentucky’s poor, coal-mining region in 1942, Charles Williams worked as a janitor at an IBM factory in Lexington. He made mixed-media assemblages, including lamps, a large number of futuristic pencil holders, and vehicle-like sculptures. He wrote and illustrated comic strips featuring such original black superheroes as the Amazing Spectacular Captain Soul Superstar, Black Son, and Captain Thirteen. Williams died in 1998.
For the exhibition, curator Jones has brought together for the first time works representing the full range of Williams’ creativity, including his enigmatic, final collage-paintings, which exude an elegiac air.
The research and discoveries that shape this exhibition represent a significant contribution to the study of the work of African American self-taught artists of the Deep South of the United States and to that of American outsider artists in general.
You can find my new magazine article here:
I hope you’ll enjoy reading this piece.
With best wishes…
EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
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4. Elly Clarke, FF Alumn, online at Facebook.com March 31
Dear friends, family, fellow artists, fellow humans,
I hope you and those close to you are keeping well and safe in this very strange and scary time – wherever in the world you are. The idea of life lived online, which I’ve been dealing with in my work over the past two decades has been catapulted into a lived reality in a way none of us could ever have imagined.
I’m sending info about an online experiment I’m doing with my long term collaborator Vladimir Bjeličić next Tuesday in the place of a physical installation I was meant to do as part of my PhD research at Goldsmiths.
HOW ARE YOU? #Sergina’s Live Participatory Digital Soap Opera on Facebook, YouTube & Zoom Tuesday 31st March 17.00 GMT
In the place of Elly Clarke’s MARS installation, #Sergina (plural) presents an digital re-run of a performance she did at ONCA in Brighton last summer entitled HOW ARE YOU?, which was designed to reflect upon the aggressive, increasingly capitalist nature of this question and other questions that inevitably follow. Today these questions sound a little different.
The questions include:
What do you feel?
What are you feeling right now?
What feeling do you evoke?
How do you make others feel?
Can you be good to people?
Can you make people feel good?
Can you heal people, can you heal yourself?
Can you be reformative?
Can you be positive?
Can you be hopeful?
What is unity?
Can you make us feel in solidarity?
Can we make each other feel good?
Can we be reformative together?
The performance will take place over three acts. Your Data Will Be Gathered With Your Consent. And #Sergina would like you to join in. Observe the action live #Sergina’s Facebook Page or her YouTube Channel – form a link will be provided for some to join the Zoom chat.
Choose Your Channel. Use Your Phone. Drinks are not provided but would help lubricate the action.
The performance begins at 5pm GMT and will last an hour with time for discussion afterwards.
#Sergina is embodied this time by Elly Clarke and Vladimir Bjelicic, live streamed simultaneously from Belgrade and London.
Here is the Facebook event page. https://www.facebook.com/events/241392470365100/
It is also listed on the Social Distancing Festival website which was set up by Nick Green in response to artists losing gigs and shows as a result of COVID-19, here:
https://www.socialdistancingfestival.com/live-streams
#Sergina Merch
For Nadia Buyse’s very beautifully curated group show LOUD + CLEAR that was on show at ONCA Feb-March, in which #Airdrop played and #Sergina did a live performance, I was asked to make some merch.
All based on the Airdrop vid, there are T shirts (small & medium), 2 mugs left & one single puzzle for sale, as well as a signed limited edition print (of 25) All available for a limited amount of time £25 plus p&p. See images on #Sergina’s Instagram here. And the unsigned DATA.pdf here. Get in touch if you’re interested in buying any of these.
Keep well. Keep safe. And keep socialising – albeit online. Intimacy is possible via the internet; empathy is already apparent in the communities we are a part of. These are the things that will get us through this.
Elly x
See this email with images:
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5. Mark Tribe, FF Alumn, now online in The New Yorker
Please visit this link:
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/art/art-online-rhizome
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6. Annie Lanzillotto, FF Alumn, awarded Honorable Mention for Allen Ginsberg Prize
friends… I just found out my poem “Nerina” was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Allen Ginsberg Prize from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ.
“Nerina” will be published in Paterson Literary Review #49, 2021.
“Nerina” also appears in my new book “Whaddycall the Wind / Comesichiamo il Vento” recounting my journey through the Mezzogiorno, which I am editing/polishing now, to send to publishers.
take a read:
“Nerina”
Nerina slid right up to my leg
a little black cat, up the part of the mountain
known as San Gregorio between Messina and Palermo.
Nerina lived on a dirt road without a name
houses built right into the mountainside
olive trees growing up the steep rise.
When Nerina was born,
they thought he was a girl,
so they named him the feminine Nerina, Little Black.
In time they saw he was a boy
but by then the name stuck.
Nerina visits neighbors and paisane
across the road and up the hill.
He lives with Felicia and Zeus the dog
and Felicia’s son’s family.
Felicia I met for one hour in life.
She was ninety-four and it took me half my life
to get to Sicilia and up her side of the mountain.
Life is one brief visit
and we both knew it.
We greeted each other that way
and said good bye that way.
Felicia winked with her one good eye
and in that wink, we shared all this:
“Enjoy life my friend. How blessed I feel
to have met you for this one hour, how lucky.
You are so beautiful and I will treasure this visit.
This is an hour never to be forgotten.
You smile, in my heart now.”
She handed me a giant zucchini from her giardino
and I went on my way, back down the mountain,
although I would have loved to stay forever,
for her to take me in, like Nerina.
Nerina visits Stefania the neighbor, who says:
“Fuori! Fuori!” when he climbs the fence.
“Outside! Outside!”
“Si vieni dentro, vuoi il latte, si offro il latte,
vuoi cibo, si offro cibo, sempre ritornerà!”
“If you come inside, you want milk,
if I give milk, you want food,
if I give food, you will return forever.”
How much I feel like Nerina!
Strangers call me “Sir” though I am a girl.
Children refer to me as “he.”
So quickly they are conditioned
as to what a girl should present like,
and I do not look to them this way.
But when the word “he” is spoken in a child’s voice,
I can’t help but feel they perceive my true nature.
I am not feral.
I am not stray.
Like Nerina, I too have a name.
I used to live in a house with a family
but that is all in the past
Now
the people have died or moved on
and I walk alone in this world.
I have keys to a door.
The windows I leave open so a wind can enter
and shake me loose.
From place to place I wander
into friends’ houses, where I sit at tables
and visit with their families.
My species organizes themselves
into these tiny groupings called families.
Perhaps I need to change species.
Find one that organizes more broadly.
An unlocked door, warmth inside emanating from the hearth,
a woman who waves me in, saying:
“Come in. Take off your shoes.
We’ve been waiting for you.
The kettle’s on. Stay as long as you like.
There’s a job you can do.
You are one of us now. This is your hive.”
This is what I dream of. To belong. To have a role.
Friends welcome me, but the clock too
is always always there and the calendar tallying goodbyes.
I sleep on couches and floors, on porches and in beds
in spare rooms. I am offered basements and attics.
But something always gives.
Like Nerina, I sidle up to places and people
hoping someone someplace sticks.
copyright 2020 Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
Maria Gillan built a strong community of poetry that reverberates around the world, and each year celebrates her friendship with Allen Ginsberg. Paterson’s history of poetry is legendary.
Eternal thanks to all of you who got me to Italia by supporting the “Bafanabla Campaign” of 2018. Especially Stan Pugliese who invited me to come read poetry in Napoli and points south! Shouting you out Stan!
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7. Thana Alexa, FF Member, live online April 1-7
Live From Our Living Rooms Music Festival & Fundraiser
April 1-7
Chick Corea, Joe Lovano & Judi Silvano, Linda Oh & Fabian Almazan, Becca Stevens, Bill Frisell, Christian McBride, Antonio Sanchez & Thana Alexa, Owen Broder, Sirintip among others to perform in Support for New York City Musicians
Work for NYC’s musicians has come to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic as performances have been cancelled and venues have closed indefinitely. Live From Our Living Rooms Music Festival and Fundraiser will help to fill in the gap for struggling musicians by bringing the joy of music live-streamed from artists’ homes in NYC to viewers anywhere in the world. Viewers will have the opportunity to donate online, raising critical funding to help out of work musicians.
Presented by NYC musicians Sirintip, Thana Alexa, Owen Broder and their nonprofit partner MusicTalks, the festival is proud to present a stellar lineup of artists contributing their time and talents to this cause. As we’re all doing our part to stay safe and help prevent the spread of the virus, performers are soloists and small groups living under the same roof.
We are soliciting tax deductible donations from our audience and institutional funders to provide relief support to NYC musicians who apply for aid. Leadership support has been secured from the Heathcote Art Foundation.
All performances are free for viewers, but every dollar counts, so please give what you can.
www.livefromourlivingrooms.com
About MusicTalks:
MusicTalks offers uniquely personal and informal concerts featuring a wide range of musical styles performed by the finest artists in New York. MusicTalks aims to break down the barriers between musicians and audiences by infusing engaging and interactive conversation into the concert experience. Audiences will form new connections to the music and have an experience that truly makes Music Talk.
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8. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at http://vimeo.com/61214379 and more
TO THE GREAT BLANKNESS
MAILING LIST:
HOPING YOU ARE ALL SAFE AND WELL.
TWO SHORT VIDEOS FROM “MISTER ROGERS FOR ADULTS:”
PZ, 3/26/20
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9. Penny Arcade, Taylor Mac, FF Alumns, now online in The New York Times
please visit this link:
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10. Willi Smith, FF Alumn, now online at CooperHewitt.org
please visit this link:
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/willi-smith-street-couture/
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
