Goings On: posted week of September 24, 2019
CONTENTS:
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1. Harley J. Spiller, Mary Campbell, Hector Canonge, Christen Clifford, Billy X Curmano, Irina Danilova & Hiram Levy, Laure Drogoul, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, Linda Mary Montano, Donna Henes, Esther Smith, Vernita Nemec aka N’Cognita & Verónica Peña, Jody Oberfelder, Pat Oleszko, Arlene Rush, Miriam Schaer, Priscilla Stadler, Chin Chih Yang, FF Alumns, at Art in Odd Places 14th Street, Manhattan, Oct. 17-20
2. Micki Spiller, FF Alumn, at Sukkahwood, Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan, Oct. 6
3. Agnes Denes, FF Alumn, at The Shed, Manhattan, Oct. 10
4. Deb Margolin, FF Alumn, at Lion Theatre, Manhattan, opening Oct. 17
5. RT Livingston, FF Alumn, at University of California Santa Barbara Library
6. Jay Critchley, FF Alumn, in Provincetown Banner, Sep. 11, and more
7. Nadja Verena Marcin, FF ALumn, at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany, opening Sept. 27, and more
8. Mark Bloch, FF ALumn, at Islip Art Museum, thru Nov. 2
9. Eileen Myles, FF Alumn, at 192 Books, Manhattan, Sept. 27
10. LAPD, FF Alumns, at Goethe Institut, Los Angeles, CA, Oct. 22-27
11. L. Brandon Krall, FF Alumn, at Philipse Manor Hall, Yonkers, NY, thru Sept. 30
12. Dread Scott, FF Alumn, in Lousiana, Nov. 8-9, 2019
13. Larry List, FF Alumn, at musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Oct. 16
14. Julie Tolentino, FF Alumn, fall news
15. Pope.L, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, now online
16. Verónica Peña, Nicole Goodwin, and Vernita Nemec, at Viridian Artists Contemporary Art Gallery, NY, Sep 26.
17. Verónica Peña & Hector Canonge, at Salisbury University Art Galleries, Salisbury, MD, Sept. 29
18. Frederieke Sanders Taylor, FF Alumn, at Doyle, now online
19. Hannah Wilke, FF Alumn, at Feldman Gallery, Manhattan, thru Nov. 30
20. Adrianne Wortzel, FF Alumn, at envisionartshow.com now online
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1. Harley J. Spiller, Mary Campbell, Hector Canonge, Christen Clifford, Billy X Curmano, Irina Danilova & Hiram Levy, Laure Drogoul, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, Linda Mary Montano, Donna Henes, Esther Smith, Vernita Nemec aka N’Cognita & Verónica Peña, Jody Oberfelder, Pat Oleszko, Arlene Rush, Miriam Schaer, Priscilla Stadler, Chin Chih Yang, FF Alumns, at Art in Odd Places 14th Street, Manhattan, Oct. 17-20
OCTOBER 17-20
ACROSS 14th STREET MANHATTAN
Forty-Four Projects featuring 84 Older Artists
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2019: INVISIBLE, in it’s 15th year iteration is scheduled for October 17-20 along 14th Street from Avenue C to the Hudson River. Curated by longtime AiOP artist provocatrice LuLu LoLo, INVISIBLE is vaporous and propels itself intangibly out into the air celebrating the indomitable spirit of artists who are sixty years old and older-undaunted by the passage of time-supported by their intergenerational collaborators: parent/child; mentor/ protégé; partners; lovers; and others from babies to our oldest artist who is 94 years old.
In line with the concept INVISIBLE the artists’ proposals were an actual telephone call. Their proposals were not seen, only heard. Curator LuLu LoLo questions: What drives an older artist to continue to create despite the ravages of aging, poverty, financial difficulties, and lack of recognition? And what is the invisible force of art that suddenly inspires an older person in their later years to embrace their creativity in the realm of art?
Curator LoLo says, “This festival highlights what people choose not to see: the fragility of aging, even the beauty of aging, the homeless, the plight of immigrants, detained children, gentrification, mass incarcerations, lack of compassion, cruelty, and also how the technological cocoon we live in today renders the world around us INVISIBLE. But the festival makes VISIBLE: the indomitable spirit of older artists, the beauty of intergenerational work, with a visual promenade of older artists strolling 14th Street.”
The festival consists of forty-four projects in a mosaic of disciplines with 84 artists from all over the United States and internationally engaging the public along 14th Street from river to river as AiOP has done for 15 years. Two new additions to the festival are:
The Promenade of Visual Flâneurs/Flâneuses featuring artists who will saunter and stroll with their paintings, sculptures, and costumes en mass the entire 2.2-mile length of 14th Street on Saturday, October 19 & Sunday, October 20 from 2pm-4pm.
Spoken Word: A Band of Bards/Bardesses on the Boulevard. Spoken Word artists performing from the POEMobile courtesy of Steve Zeitlin and City Lore. Sunday, October 20,14th Street (downtown) between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 4-6pm.
FACT SHEET
WHO?
ARTISTS:
Sally Apfelbaum | Perry Bard in collaboration with Walking the City SVA MFA | Matthew Burcaw and Carmen Rodriguez | Mary Campbell | Hector Canonge | Marian Casey and Anne Wallace | Billy X Curmano | Irina Danilova and Hiram Levy | Donna Maria De Creeft | Laure Drogoul | Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, Jane Clarke, Chip Conley, Julie Davey, and Linda Mary Montano | Edward Einhorn: Andrea Gallo and Jan Leslie Harding | Terry S. Hardy and Hermelindo Rabanales | Donna Henes | Eileen Hoffman and Izzy Nova |IGUANA: Bonnie Sue Stein and Sherry Erskine with Sarazina Stein, Caitlin Erskine, Emla La Rochelle, John Erskine, Michelle BeShaw and Vit Horejs | Ienke Kastelein | Michael Krasowitz | MeChelle LaChaux | Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt | Valborg Fletre Linn and Hjordis Linn-Blanford | Barbara Lubliner | Henrietta Mantooth and Nicky Draven | Linda Mary Montano, Leah Aron, Christen Clifford, Rachel Hillery, Amanda Hunt, Martina Lundstrom, Esther Smith | Arezoo Moseni | Angela Muriel | Vernita Nemec aka N’Cognita and Verónica Peña | Laura Nova and Cheryl Moch | Jody Oberfelder | Pat Oleszko | Connie Perry | Mario Petrirena | Lucio Pozzi | Claudia Prado, Solveig Gurgitano, María Nóbrega, and Irene Prieto | Ernesto Pujol, supporting the work of women artists Kate Harding, Sara Jimenez, Erin Sweeny, Joy Whalen, and Riva Weinstein | Flash Rosenberg | Arlene Rush | Gale Sasson | Miriam Schaer | Anna Marie Shogren | Harley J. Spiller | Priscilla Stadler | Eileen Standley, Mary Fitzgerald and Clare Fleury | Chin Chih Yang
CURATOR:
LuLu LoLo is a New York based international performance artist, performing in six Art In Odd Places festivals; a playwright/actor of eight one-person plays; an activist, and Board Member of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. www.rememberthetrianglefire.org
LuLu LoLo is visible in her invisibleness as an AiOP artist. In 2018 LuLu “Offered a Seat to the Elderly”. Her performance in 2015, “Where are the Women Monuments?” highlighted the lack of public monuments honoring women in New York City and was featured in the New York Times. In 2017 as “Mother Cabrini, Saint of the Immigrants,” LuLu offered compassion to the people of New York City, and Charlottesville, VA (AiOP: MATTER). Other AiOP performances: “Loretta, the Telephone Operator (2013),” “The Gentleman of 14th Street (2011),” and “14th Street NewsBoy (2009).
LuLu has received a 2018 Puffin Foundation Grant in Theater and was a Blade of Grass Fellow in social engagement and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer in Residence. www.lululolo.com
WHAT?
Art in Odd Places 2019: INVISIBLE is the 15th annual NYC festival featuring performances, interventions, visual installations, video, sound and more in public spaces. ALL EVENTS ARE FREE. For more information about AiOP’s history and artists’ project descriptions and schedules, visit the website:artinoddplaces.org.
WHEN?
The festival will take place from October 17-20, 2019, in various locations along 14th Street in Manhattan from Avenue C to the Hudson River.
FESTIVAL RECEPTION:
Featuring a selection of the festival performers.
Friday, October 18, 6-8pm on W 14th Street (downtown side).
between Seventh and Eighth Avenues
PROMENADE OF VISUAL FLANEURS / FLANEUSES
Visual and performance artists, poets, hula hoopers, dancers, baristas, lovers, jugglers, clowns, invisible dogs, activists, chefs, anyone and everyone sixty years or older (or their intergenerational proxy) stroll and proudly share their respective creations. Promenade of Visual Flâneurs/ Flâneuse Coordinator: Valborg Fletre Linn.
Saturday and Sunday, October 19 & 20, 2-4pm across 14th Street East to West – from Campos Plaza near Avenue C to 14th Street Park at Tenth Avenue.
SPOKEN WORD: A BAND OF BARDS/BARDESSES ON THE BOULEVARD
Spoken Word artists performing from the POEMobile courtesy of Steve Zeitlin and City Lore. Joel Allegretti, Amy Barone, Phyllis Capello, Esther Cohen, Mitch Corber, Kathryn M. Fazio, Davidson Garrett, Phillip Giambri, Gordon Gilbert, Peter Kozlowski, Ron Kolm, Maria Lisella, Tsaurah Litzky, Ralph Nazareth, Karen Neuberg, Yuko Otomo, Flash Rosenberg, Jane Schulman, Lehman Weichselbaum, and Steve Zeitlin. Spoken Word Coordinator: Ron Kolm.
Sunday, October 20, 4-6pm
14th Street (downtown) between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
WHERE?
14th Street, Avenue C to the Hudson River, Manhattan, New York City
Subways: 4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R, W to Union Square; 1, 2, 3, A, C, E, F, V to 14th Street
L to First Avenue, Third Avenue, Union Square, Sixth Avenue, and Eighth Avenue
WHY?
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is an annual festival that presents visual and performance art in public spaces along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. Using 14th Street as a laboratory, this project continues AiOP’s work to locate cracks in public space policies, and to inspire the popular imagination for new possibilities and engagement with civic space. Visit the website artinoddplaces.org AiOP is a project of GOH Productions.
“The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.” – The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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2. Micki Spiller, FF Alumn, at Sukkahwood, Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan, Oct. 6
Micki Spiller to participate in Sukkahwood 2019
Sukkahwood is a free community arts festival that challenges artists and designers to produce temporary art installations in the form of a Sukkah.
Date: Sunday, October 6, 2019 in Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan (located at Pat’s Lawn which is right next to the park entrance located at the intersection of 218th Street and Indian Road.)
The event will start at 12PM and will end at 4PM.
for more info: https://www.juarts.org/sukkot
Thank you.
Micki Spiller
https://readingwritingbiking2018.blogspot.com/
http://mickispiller.com/
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3. Agnes Denes, FF Alumn, at The Shed, Manhattan, Oct. 10
Please join us for a preview and opening reception for Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates, a major retrospective of the pioneering artist’s work.
Thursday October 10, 7-10 pm at The Shed, Manhattan
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4. Deb Margolin, FF Alumn, at Lion Theatre, Manhattan, opening Oct. 17
Deb Margolin’s play IMAGINING MADOFF opens October 17th, running through November 9th, Lion Theatre, Theater Row, NYC. Tickets:
https://www.telecharge.com/Off-Broadway/Imagining-Madoff/Overview
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5. RT Livingston, FF Alumn, at University of California Santa Barbara Library
RT Livingston
911 RENEWAL/REBIRTH:
an eyewitness account
Essay and proposal now in the UCSB Library Special Collections
09.11.2019 Santa Barbara, CA
The 911 RENEWAL/REBIRTH project is my eyewitness account of the
year following the horrific events of September 11, 2001 that jolted our
nation into the new millennium.
From late September 2001 until the first anniversary of 911 on
September 11, 2002, I photographically and video graphically
documented the painstakingly slow, methodical recovery of Lower
Manhattan.
In documenting this historic, albeit heartbreaking recovery, my
intention was/is to create a large-scale installation using the photos and
video as a direct link to that tragic yet transformative time in New York.
I lived 9 blocks north of The World Trade Centers: Ground Zero. On
September 11, 2001, I was in the final stages of packing before the sale
and closing of my upstate New York farm. I had just awakened to a
magnificent early fall day, where a cloudless-blue-autumn-sky made the
world seem perfect when I received a call from a friend telling me that a
small plane had flown into one of the Trade Centers; it looked like an
accident. By the time I got to my radio another plane had plowed into
the second tower. This was no accident. This could mean war.
Those staying at my 90 Hudson Street loft had to be evacuated; they
escaped through ankle deep ash.
I didn’t get back to my loft for nearly two weeks. In doing so, I was
required to prove I lived downtown before I was allowed through the
blockade manned by army reservists.
Just prior to the sale of the farm, I sold my car. This left me without
wheels for the first time since a young woman. I took a bus back into
Manhattan. I purposely sat in the first seat on the right side of the bus
so that I could see the downtown skyline from a distance. My heart sank
when I saw the smoke rise from what looked like blank space at the
lower end of the island. Tears flowed making it hard for me to snap the
first image of that ghostly place: the first in the series.
When the World Trade Centers fell, I lost my way home. The towers,
two straight narrow rectangular needles pointing me to my Tribeca loft,
never let me down. If I got off the subway and lost my sense of direction
I would look for the trade centers for grounding. Just like that…they’re
gone: buried in a mangled jumble of steel, glass, bodily remains and
everything else that came crashing down on September 11, 2001. Toxic
smoke rose from the belly of these slain dragons. An electric smell
permeated the air. It was as if everything had been frosted, to one
degree or another, with ash. Grey: for months everything felt ashy stone
grey.
Equipped with only a small Olympus Stylus Epic 35 mm point and shoot
camera as well as a small 8 mm cassette Sony video camera, I wandered
the streets of Lower Manhattan day and night, often sneaking beyond
guard posts or making friends with military personnel as I documented
the surrounding areas. The imagery, often gritty and sometimes out of
focus, was quickly snapped as a means of avoiding having the film
and/or equipment confiscated. I didn’t rely on the polish of the print to
tell the tale. I relied on its guts.
I focused on the wounded section of Lower Manhattan: my
neighborhood where demolition became the new normal.
Gradually police, fire fighters, construction workers, EMT workers,
those employed downtown, those looking for the missing, those
mourning the dead plus the growing pilgrimage of tourists added
congestion to chaos. Over the course of the year every fence in Lower
Manhattan became the armature for mourners to hang their hearts.
Early images of the smoldering Trade Centers site brings the series into
stark focus with firemen suspended in cherry pickers atop enormous
hook and ladders still putting out the fires.
In all seven buildings were destroyed that fateful day.
The ‘Crystal Palace-like’ Winter Garden at the edge of the Hudson River,
directly behind and once linked to the Trade Centers, sustained damage
to its roof where glass shattered and steel struts twisted into grotesque
abstract shapes. I documented its gradual recovery.
On holidays I wandered to midtown to capture a veneer of hope.
Applause grew as the firefighters came into view marching up 5th
Avenue in the 2002 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. As they passed the
applause took a more respective somber tempo one directly connected
to the heart of every New Yorker. Two firemen holding a pole from
which hung a black felt banner with the numbers 343 in gold followed
by 343 firemen and women, in dress uniform…each carrying a large
American flag…created a moving tribute to the 343 firefighters who died
on 911. Heartbreaking.
Spring’s first buds, a reminder of nature’s death/rebirth cycle, came as
an elixir to a depressed population. The Easter Parade brought perfect
weather, punctuated by color, into a drab time. Hats, many festooned
with images of the Towers or firefighters served as a reminder of what
we had lost. American flags flew, half-mast, up and down 5th Avenue.
Christmas along 5th Avenue, in its usual brilliance, had the feel of the
first big holiday after a loved one has died. The farther north I’d
ventured, the less I felt the effects of the war zone in which I lived.
In late spring/early summer a touching parade…more a
procession…proceeded up West Street marking the occasion where the
last steel beam was taken from the site. Symbolically at least, this
brought an end to the most dangerous and toxic part of the cleanup. The
massive steel beam, placed atop a large flatbed truck with an America
flag draped funerary style, made its way to an archival repository.
Hundreds of fireman, policeman, EMTs, construction workers,
volunteers, etc. marched to bagpipes wailing and drums keeping a
mournful tatoo. This was not a big public occasion. It felt more like an
intimate gathering with neighbors lining the highway clapping
continuously as each group of rescuers marched by.
The final images date from September 11, 2002. A large official
ceremony took place adjacent to the World Trade Centers site. People
from all over the country, and world, joined the mass of New Yorkers
who came to mourn those who lost their lives just one year ago.
American flags could be seen everywhere. Individual faces still showed
signs of anguished disbelief. A single bell tolled as state and city
representatives read the names of each of the nearly 3,000 individuals
who died so tragically. The crowd dispersed as civilly as it had gathered.
The 911 RENEWAL/REBIRTH installation is ideally suited for a museum
setting.
The installation is meant to give the audience a sense of what it was like
living in downtown Manhattan where the air quality, grey for months,
never lifted; where the sounds of jackhammers, bulldozers, enormous
trucks carrying debris of every imaginable kind from the site as well as
other industrial tools rattled the streets and buildings alike; where
heavy-duty construction lights poured painfully glaring beams over
streets and into apartments; where every fence was blanketed with a
national outpouring of grief interspersed with photographs of the
missing and the dead; where the death toll from local fire and police
departments tore at our hearts as well as being a constant reminder of
our own vulnerability; where sadness prevailed; where flags flew
proudly while the nation mourned, where, through it all, hope took root.
To give a sense of atmospheric authenticity, construction and street
sounds will play throughout the exhibit, smoke machines will give the
sense of poor air quality, large industrial lights will be placed overhead
but not aimed at anyone’s eyes.
Opposite ends of the gallery walls will be draped…one side fiery orange,
the other cooling cobalt blue…in architectural protective fabric the kind
used during renovation or repair of tall buildings. The choice of color, in
this case, is twofold. It’s a reference to the actual fabric used as well as
carrying symbolic significance. The fabric will become the matrix upon
which video is projected. Video will also be projected on other surfaces
as well.
Situated several feet behind the orange and blue fabrics, at opposite
ends of the gallery, will be hundreds of 4×6 and 4×8 color prints in a
configuration imitating brick walls. Depending on the gallery space,
large prints of the memorial walls will line the remaining walls.
Sawhorses, orange cones and netting, hard hats and other construction
materials will be strategically placed throughout the space.
With the 20th anniversary of 911 coming in 2021, the
RENEWAL/REBIRTH installation could be a timely reminded of how
terrorism, and the fear it generates, has shaped our national psyche in
the new millennium.
RENEWAL/REBIRTH is also a reminder of our potential for reshaping
our country, and by extension the world, into a more forgiving, hopeful
place. The gestation period will be long and hard. Let’s hope we’re up
to it.
Bringing the 911 RENEWAL/REBIRTH installation to fruition requires
teamwork and a grant or other sources of funding. It would be an honor
and a dream come true for this to happen.
9/19/19
RT Livingston
www.rtlivingston.com
917 687 5473
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6. Jay Critchley, FF Alumn, in Provincetown Banner, Sep. 11, and more
My short film, Cure for Insomnia, has been selected for the Online New England Film Festival. Thanks to co-editor Sacha Ferrier Cohen.
Rod Serling tells the story: Ed Morgan and family go for a ride through the forest and meet Smokey the Bear. After Joanna Cassidy delivers a public service announcement, Ed starts a fire with his cigarette butt. The children plead in song for a country up in flames as the fire is engulfed by surging seas. Alfred Hitchcock provides the perfect antidote.
This editorial recently appeared in the Provincetown Banner.
Jay Critchley’s Provincetown performance
Editorial Posted Sep 11, 2019 at 9:06 AM
It’s hard to know which force has had the greater impact on the other. Has Provincetown changed Jay Critchley, a gay man raised among nine siblings in a Catholic family, or has Critchley changed Provincetown even more?
Critchley may be feeling slightly depressed this year. After 32 years running the Provincetown Swim for Life, this was the first year no one dipped a toe into Provincetown Harbor to raise money for the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod, Helping Our Women, Outer Cape Health Services and other nonprofits. And still, the charitable event Critchley founded in 1988 raised about $150,000 for nonprofits this year. It’s collected $6.5 million overall.
The Cape Cod National Seashore denied him a permit to use Long Point as the jump-off for the 1.4-mile swim across the harbor due to the fear of sharks. Then, Hurricane Dorian hit. So Critchley called off the harbor swim. Even still, swimmers had already raised the pledge money, and so the nonprofits that depend on the Swim’s funds will still get donations.
As a tribute to Critchley, we hope people donate more to make up for the $50,000 shortfall of this year’s semi-swim.
Critchley arrived in Provincetown in the 1970s to take a job at the Drop-In Center. It is here where he left his marriage and began his life as a born-again artist. And he wasn’t quiet about it. His brand of performance art involved in-your-face stuff, like a Statue of Liberty gown made from plastic tampon applicators he found on the beach. He encrusted a station wagon with sand. He gleefully engaged in a three-year trademark battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which had denied his use of the flag for his condom company Old Glory Condoms. This was during the AIDS epidemic when the whole issue of the federal government taking the disease seriously was in question. The trademark ultimately got approved.
Critchley is funny. But he is a sincere person with a deeply serious streak. Take the Swim for Life as an example. There an air of silliness, with its après-Mermaid Brunch, but it’s also a daring plunge into Provincetown’s wild environment.
There is performance art within the Swim. Critchley has rituals, hats, prizes and he continues to add new elements each year. Even the unexpected challenges – the storm this year, a basking shark in the harbor years earlier – are still ways for him to do improv. But he’s always thoughtful about the risks.
The Provincetown Community Compact is another creation seemingly born out of his imagination, though there are other fiscal sponsors elsewhere in the country. The Compact provides umbrella tax exempt status that allows start-up nonprofits to develop themselves before going through the entire process of applying to the U.S. Dept. of Revenue themselves.
The Compact charges a five-percent fee for this service, which includes financial management and accounting. Thus, Critchley has been able to serve as a mentor. Many pillars of the Outer Cape community have benefited including the Provincetown International Film Festival, the Cape Cod Modern House Trust and the Provincetown Commons.
From the dunes to the town sewers – he once did a project about year-rounders living in a subterranean sewer world while the rest of the town was reserved for summer residents – Critchley makes art out of Provincetown, and the town is kinder, sillier, and just plain better because of him.
Jay Critchley
TEDx Talk: A portrait of the artist as a corporation
Join mailing list
www.jaycritchley.com
Join me on Facebook
Instagram #jaycritchley
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7. Nadja Verena Marcin, FF ALumn, at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany, opening Sept. 27, and more
NADJA VERENA MARCIN
OPHELIA at Stadtgalerie
Live Performance and Solo Exhibition
Sep 27 to Feb 16, 2020
Opening Performance on Friday, Sep 27, 2019
We cordially invite you to the opening of OPHELIA on Friday, 27.09.2019 at 7 pm.
Welcome – Thomas Brück, Head of the Cultural Department of Saarbrücken
Introduction – Dr. Andrea Jahn, Director of the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken
Live Performance – Nadja Verena Marcin
OPHELIA is an interdisciplinary performance that will take place at the
Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken as a live performance and be subsequently presented
as a video installation. The work is inspired by the painting of the same title by
Sir John Everett Millais, in which the tragic figure of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s
drama Hamlet is depicted as a dying beauty. Driven mad by grief and unrequited
love, this female figure has always exerted a strong attraction on artists, theorists,
and writers, and has appeared in many different contexts. For Nadja Verena
Marcin, OPHELIA refers to “a parallel between the historical speechlessness of
women towards male dominance and the speechlessness of society towards the
destruction of nature”. Dressed in “Ophelia’s dress” and equipped with diving gear,
the artist will climb into an aquarium trying to read underwater a text by the Russian
poet Daniil Kharms about human perception. In addition, the exhibition presents
photographic and video works in which the artist self-confidently deconstructs the
images of women in Hollywood cinema with a feminist sense of humor.
Program of Events
Public tour every Wednesday at 5 pm
Director’s tour with Dr. Andrea Jahn on Wednesday, 02 Oct / 30 Oct / 27 Nov / 11 Dec / 15 Jan at 5 pm
Night at the Museums in Saarbrücken on Friday, 15 Nov, starting 7 pm
Family breakfast with children’s workshop and guided tour on Sunday, 24 Nov from 11 am – 2 pm
Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken
St. Johanner Markt 24
66111 Saarbrücken
HOURS
Tuesday to Friday from noon to 6 pm
Saturday to Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm
OPHELIA
Monograph published on the occasion of
The OPHELIA Worldtour
By Sandstein Verlag in Dresden
Preview it Online
OPHELIA is an interdisciplinary, architectural media artwork, in which the Ophelia figure becomes central in exploring connections between the history of hysteria and the destruction of the biosphere. The artist Nadja Verena Marcin, living and working in New York and North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany), presents in her first monograph the world tour of the media artwork, with which she has been traveling since 2017 from Miami, New York, San Francisco, Cologne, Santa Cruz (Bolivia) to London, Sindelfingen to Saarbrücken. Marcin explores and deconstructs social roles using her own identity and corporeality, addressing topics such as gender, history, morality, politics, the environment, and power structures. Apart from this project, which is illuminated from different perspectives, further performance-based works by the artist, videos and photographs are included. Contributions by Ophelia Specialist Dr. Kimberly Rhodes, founding director of Sculpture Museum Glaskasten Marl Dr. Uwe Ruth, Sotheby’s Director Dr. Kathy Battista, New York-based artist and critic Susan Silas, and critic, curator and artist Liam Gillick, discuss Marcin’s multi-facetted work, which examines cultural roots, psychological conditioning through education, gender dichotomy in media presentations, sexuality, leadership models, power and the environment, and questions societal structures.
SANDSTEIN VERLAG DRESDEN
RECENT PRESS & GRANTS for OPHELIA
SWR Television | SWR Radio | Stuttgarter Zeitung | Sindelfinger Zeitung | Inka Magazine | New York Foundation for the Arts | Puffin Foundation
The successful museum premiere of Nadja Verena Marcin’s OPHELIA at SCHAUWERK received the SWR television feature Kunst im Aquarium? – Die Performance Ophelia im Schauwerk Sindelfingen, the SWR radio feature by Ophelia-Performance – Nadja Verena Marcin feiert die rebellische Frau in Sindelfingen, also Stuttgarter Zeitung review Künstlerischer Tauchgang der Ophelia – Performance im Schauwerk in Sindelfingen in addition to articles in Sindelfinger Zeitung, Inka Magazine, Kreiszeitung Böblinger Bote.
Awarded the Franklin Furnace and Puffin Foundation Grants, supported by a Kickstarter Campaign as well as funding by the Centro Cultural Simón I. Patiño Santa Cruz, Nube Gallery, and Kulturamt of Cologne, Marcin’s OPHELIA investigates the relationship between the human destruction of the biosphere, and the history of female hysteria-while speaking to the democratizing power of the meme.
Following the US tour to CONTEXT Art Miami ’17 as special project of the Art Basel Miami Art Week, afterward as headliner of the New Ear Festival ’18 of Fridman Gallery in New York and at San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project solo show in 2018, OPHELIA’s European premiere took place with a live performance and solo exhibition at Moltkerei Werkstatt e.V. in Cologne, Germany as part of the DC Open Gallery Weekend 2018. OPHELIA was then shown at Nube Gallery in Santa Cruz in Bolivia, accompanied by a workshop at Centro Cultural Simón I. Patiño Santa Cruz and the Masterclass at the Faculty of Arts of the State University UAGRM. In 2019, the first solo museum show was held at SCHAUWERK in Sindelfingen from February to June 2019. A parallel presentation took place during Staring at the Sun, a group exhibition at the Mile End Park Art Pavilion curated by Giulia Casalini and Diana Georgiou in London in April 2019, framed by a lecture-performance at Queer Feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University. The upcoming solo exhibition is taking place at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken from September 27, 2019, to February 16, 2020.
How to Undress in Front of Your Husband
Screening at Performance is Alive
As part of Satellite Art Show New York
Oct 3 & Oct 5, 2019, curated by Quinn Duke
Marcin’s performance and video How to Undress in Front of Your Husband-highlighted by The Huffington Post’s Priscilla Frank in the Feminist Artist’s ‘How To Undress In Front Of Your Husband’ Skewers Retro Mansplaining, about the artist’s often subversive work exploring representations of women in the media-will be screened Oct 3 and Oct 5 at Performance is Alive, curated by Quinn Dukes at Satellite Art Show in Brooklyn, New York. Replicated from a 1960s ‘how to’ video, depicting the do’s and don’ts of female disrobing, whereas the original video turns this quotidian action into a performance under an authoritarian male gaze, the artist recreates the video, playing all of the characters herself in comic self-awareness, disrupting the original ‘educational’ trajectory of this narrative, while highlighting the absurdity of its creation in the first place. “‘In the video, women’s representation has been infiltrated by this male voice, as well as these male desires and fantasies,’ the artist told The Huffington Post. The male narrator quite literally invades women’s most private spaces, molding mundane errands into sexualized performances geared toward male pleasure,” Frank reports.
Also featured by Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer, the “cheeky” video is part of an ongoing investigation by the artist on the damaging effects of sexist media representations-and first appeared in Marcin’s solo exhibition Cinema Pirata – How To Undress in Front of Your Husband, receiving a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. The exhibition was spotlighted by VICE Magazine in A Sexist 1960s Film Remake Rewrites Cinema History, and considered the permitted roles and power dynamics in the production of mass media and film.
The Great Dictator in Berlin
Ongoing Solo Exhibition at ZQM
Sep 10 to Oct 11, 2019
The Great Dictator
10th September – 11th October
For the solo exhibition The Great Dictator – opening on Sep 10, 2019 at zwanzigquadratmeter as run-up for Berlin Art Week, Nadja Verena Marcin re-enacts the The Great Dictator speech (Los Angeles, 1940) by Charlie Chaplin, hence addresses the threatening rise of Neo-nationalism around the globe and the artist’s influence potential in midst of a more politicized world. As religion has lost its place as an ethical path for many, art has ultimately risen to surrogate ethical shortfalls of late capitalism and its marks. As such, The Great Dictator is not only directed to a public audience but also to the art community itself.
In his prominent speech, Chaplin plays the role of the Jewish barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel – the terrifying dictator ruler of Tomainia, a clear reference to Hitler inside of the cynical anti-Nazi film. Chaplin releases a powerful speech to the people addressing their unfreedoms, calling for peace, resistance, and change. Watching his speech isolated from the film, two factors are positively unclear – who is the author and who is he speaking to? At first sight, it looks like Hitler himself is speaking, at second glance, it’s a revolutionary seeking for peace, turn away from war and dictatorship, at third, we learn he has a worldwide audience.
Regrettably, Chaplin’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1940. Seen from the eye of a female artist, Marcin’s aims to shift the male leader’s passionate, political and military-style speech through her performance towards a more feminine version and compare the past with the present time. The way Chaplin addresses the people is rather abstract – to study, he repeatedly viewed Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” to then closely mimic Hitler’s mannerism. Thus, Marcin applies the male dictator’s mannerism onto her female body – bending gender and what physically represents authoritarianism – gestures mostly reserved to men.
Visit by appointment, please contact:
Eric Emery, Curator
info(at)zqmberlin.org
+49 (0)177 46 28 563
zwanzigquadratmeter
Petersburger Straße 73
Side wing, first floor
D – 10249 Berlin
M10 Bersarinplatz – U5 Frankfurter Tor
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8. Mark Bloch, FF ALumn, at Islip Art Museum, thru Nov. 2
MARK BLOCH
Islip Art Museum
50 Irish Ln, East Islip, NY 11730
Performance September 14, 4pm
And a series of 13 digital collages
On display September 14 – November 2, 2019
Both titled
“Excerpts From a Correspondence with Ray Johnson” by Mark Bloch
I corresponded with Ray Johnson for thirteen years-from 1982 to 1995. During that time he shared with me his “mail activity”-an exchange of secret codes and messages and ideas that were about more than “art” hanging on a wall “with nice lighting.” I know that because he specifically told me that in a phone call on February 20, 1991.
I received about 140 letters from Ray that yielded over 400 individual sides of pages or fragments of various kinds. What you see here are copies of some of that “activity,” a word he preferred to “art,” each the result of other activities, interactions with or about people we knew in common, people he introduced me to, people I had not heard of, historical figures.
I set out to tell you some stories that would be relevant to this exhibition called A BOOK ABOUT DEATH. Ray’s “book” had been sent out a few pages at a time, unbound, since 1965. He sent me pages from that “book” two different times-once in an envelope you can see here on which he mysteriously scrawled “Deathplace.” It contained pages 1,7 and 15. I received it May 11, 1984. Then on October 1, 1984, he sent me a copy of page 7 again, accompanied by an altered version of it.
One way to understand the work of Ray Johnson in particular and in general, “mail art,” the activity he inadvertently created with his “New York Correspondence School,” is to observe the correspondence between two individuals. Ray always tailored his activity to the recipient, perhaps because he knew it was inevitable. This will give you a brief glimpse into his interactions with one person: me. It was always a humbling honor and extremely exciting to find his missives in my mailbox.
Bloch will perform a tribute TO Johnson’s 1961 performance at George Maciunas’ AG Gallery. The performance will also will also include a meditation on Johnson and Buddhist impermanence in honor of the exhibition “A Book About Death” curated by LuAnne T. Palazzo at the Islip Art Museum.
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9. Eileen Myles, FF Alumn, at 192 Books, Manhattan, Sept. 27
Wednesday, September 25th, 7 PM
Eileen Myles
Evolution
Eileen Myles’ critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir) thrillingly turned our preconceived notions of what a “dog book” can accomplish inside out and upside down. Enlivened by the poet’s ear for language, hopscotching enchantingly across time and space and points of view, Myles’ writing renders great leaps of thought at an intimately personal scale. This new collection of poems by Myles, EVOLUTION finds Myles penning lines in an idiomatic, euphoric style described by the New York Times as “one of the essential voices in American poetry.”
The first all-new collection of poems since 2011’s Snowflake/different streets-and following Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as the volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice-here, in EVOLUTION, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that enacts-like nobody else-the way we speak (inside and out) today. From travel around the world to walks around Marfa, Texas with Honey the pit bull, from the aisles of Target to a utopian future where Myles is elected president-channeling cell phones, Shakers, Diet Coke and Fresca, EVOLUTION radiates with Myles’ characteristic vital insight, purpose, and risk.
“Eileen Myles is an estuary of a writer. The voice on the page is so fluid and expressive and unembarrassed that it makes you want to join it…. Myles’s sentences tilt and wobble like a living mind.”
-Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine
Eileen Myles-who prefers to use a gender-neutral pronoun-is the author of more than twenty books, including Chelsea Girls, Cool For You, and I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1974-2014. Myles’s many honors include four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Creative Capital’s Literature Award as well as their Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant.
Copyright (c) 2019 192 Books, All rights reserved.
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192 Books
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New York, NY 10011
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10. LAPD, FF Alumns, at Goethe Institut, Los Angeles, CA, Oct. 22-27
WORLDS OF HOMELESSNESS
CONTACT: Simone Maier Press Contact
Goethe-Institut 811 West 7th Street Los Angeles, CA 90017
E-Mail: Simone.Maier@goethe.de
Tel: 323-525-3384
Worlds of Homelessness, a project of the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, is a week long program in Los Angeles proposing an interdisciplinary and global engagement with homelessness, and its connections to inequality, gentrification, racism and migration.
The project creates a platform for local and international artists, architects, and scholars to come together to share ideas.
Discussions, music performances, and film screenings will take place from October 22 – 27, 2019 in Los Angeles at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, NAVEL, and SCI-Arc, and culminate with the Festival for All Skid Row Artists on October 26 and 27, 2019 in Gladys Park in Skid Row.
Worlds of Homelessness is a project of the Goethe-Institut that offers an interdisciplinary engagement with the issue of homelessness and its many related themes such as the gap between rich and poor, participation, inequality, gentrification, racism, and migration. Worlds of Homelessness draws on the international network of the Goethe-Institut to bring together local and international artists, architects, scholars, and others to create a platform to share ideas, thoughts, and present their work. The project also examines the wide range of strategies being employed to engage with the many questions and challenges surrounding the issue.
“Homelessness and housing precarity are worldwide issues,” says Lien Heidenreich- Seleme, Director of the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles. “While we realize that homelessness in Los Angeles is a local discussion that needs local solutions, we also believe that housing is a global phenomenon that could benefit from international discourse.”
The project is developed in cooperation with the Los Angeles Poverty Department, which has created art with and promoted the activism of Skid Row artists for decades; the Thomas Mann House, the renowned independent architecture school SCI-Arc, the
Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, and NAVEL, a collectively driven cultural organization.
The event series including discussions, music performances, and film screenings takes place from October 22 – 27, 2019 in Los Angeles at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, NAVEL, and SCI-Arc, and culminates with the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s 10th Annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists on October 26 and 27, 2019 from 1-5pm each day in Gladys Park, Skid Row.
The LA Playmakers will open Worlds of Homelessness and close the Festival for All Skid Row Artists. The band was founded 5 years ago by Joseph Warren and Stan Watson. They all were members of the Praise and Worship Team at Skid Row’s Central City Church of the Nazarene. “These accomplished professional musicians have played with a number of well-known jazz and pop music figures. They embody the creative spirit that persists in this community,” explains John Malpede, Artistic Director of the LA Poverty Department.
Day 1:
Framing the Issue: Discussion and Music Performance by the LA Playmakers
22 October
Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive, 250 South Broadway, Los Angeles
5.30-10pm
Homelessness and housing precarity are a global phenomenon on the rise. Rents and prices for homes are increasing worldwide. The impact of gentrification and the rising cost of living in places that were once considered affordable often push vulnerable communities out of their homes.
In a city like Los Angeles, the divide between rich and poor is ever-present. The saying “Homelessness is just a paycheck away” is often used to describe just how close to eviction many people are, should they lose just one month’s income.
Universities are trying to find strategies to assist those students who are able to pay their tuition but cannot afford stable housing. Meanwhile, the artists, activists, and long-term residents of Skid Row community are striving to sustain, preserve, and expand the low-cost housing and resources in the neighborhood that help people living in poverty.
In cities like Berlin, anti-gentrification experts are demanding much more drastic rent control, with some calling for the expropriation of apartments and houses that are not used by their owners. Other parts of the world are seeing a change in the perception of informal settlements as large communities call them their homes.
How are the issues of homelessness and housing precarity spoken about and addressed in different communities, cities, countries, or parts of the world? How can we understand and examine the interconnectivity and linkages between homelessness and its many related themes such as rich and poor, participation, inequality, gentrification, racism, and migration? Is housing a human right that demands stronger policies by policymakers? How can the knowledge and needs of communities become important drivers for change?
Discussion participants include: Ananya Roy is Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, home to the Housing Justice in #Unequal Cities Network, a global research endeavor at the intersection of scholarship and the politics of housing; Michele Lancione from the University of Sheffield, who has researched in Eastern Europe and started the Radical Housing Journal; Crushow Herring, aka Showzart, is a virtuoso artist who works from the streets of Skid Row; and Barbara Schönig from the Bauhaus University in Weimar, who has researched affordable housing in Germany.
Day 2:
How can artists engage with homelessness in meaningful ways?
Discussion and Film Screenings of Long Story Short by Natalie Bookchin, FF Alumn, and Ex.st by Radames Eger and Jonas Reuter
23 October
NAVEL, 1611 S Hope St, Los Angeles 3-9pm
Artists have a different way of seeing and describing the world. Art has often been political, and artists have often raised awareness for social issues through their work. How have artists engaged in a meaningful way with homelessness? What strategies have they used to engage with communities, or are they part of the communities themselves? What challenges do artists face, and how do they engage with these challenges? What types of artistic engagements with homelessness are problematic and why? What could be described as best practices?
Discussion participants include: John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, which has worked in the Skid Row Community for over three decades, realizing the Festival for All Skid Row Artists, as well as award-winning performances, exhibitions, and the biennial Walk the Talk parade; Radames Eger, who grew up in Brazil and moved to Frankfurt, Germany with a dance scholarship. He has experienced homelessness and designs and creates clothes for homeless people, including jackets that can be changed into sleeping bags, which he distributes to the community for free; Licko Turle from Brazil has worked with social movements in Brazil, including the “Movimento Sem Teto da Bahia” as well as the Theatre of the Oppressed; and Fabian Debora is an artist who served as the Director of Substance Abuse Services & Programming as well as a mentor at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles for a decade and is currently Executive Director of Somos LA Arte – Homeboy Art Academy.
Day 3:
How can design engage with housing insecurity and homelessness and nurture thoughtful processes with communities? Discussion
24 October
SCI-Arc, 960 E 3rd St, Los Angeles 6-8pm
There is a common misconception that city planning and architecture seek to provide “solutions to end homelessness.
These solutions include various types of supportive, affordable, and shared housing as well as small scale structures providing temporary shelter. Independent of the quality of design thinking such projects and structures can be met with opposition by the communities coming from the prospective occupants and the existing community.
How can homeless communities become a part of the strategic design process that is engaging and beneficial for them? How can architects produce mutually supportive environments for houseless communities? How can community-driven processes contribute to responsible and comprehensive design solutions? How can schools of design and architecture encourage the success of such initiatives?
“SCI-Arc is known for meeting a design challenge with speculative and radical thinking, and though design alone will not solve the problem of homelessness, it might be able to identify new directions and fresh approaches for some of the many fields engaged with the crisis” comment Hernan Diaz Alonso, Director of SCI-Arc and Erik Ghenoiu, Research Coordinator.
Panelists include: LA architect Michael Maltzan, who has completed projects with the Skid Row Housing Trust; Alexander Hagner from Vienna, Austria, who has created mixed housing that brings people experiencing homelessness together with students; Anne Graupner and Thorsten Deckler from Johannesburg, South Africa, who have worked with informal settlements, community architects and students from the Johannesburg University Faculty of Architecture and Design; and Ana Elvira Vélez, an architect from Columbia, who has successfully created collective housing in Medellin.
Day 4:
Knowledge Production and Ways Forward. Discussion and Film Screening “The Advocates” by Remi Kessler
25 October
Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive, 250 South Broadway, Los Angeles
3-9pm
Homelessness is approached differently in various disciplines and among different countries. How is knowledge about homelessness generated? Can we compare homelessness and housing precarity in Germany and the US? How do issues around homelessness connect to informal settlements in the global South? How do we collect data, and how is this data used? How can the knowledge and needs of communities themselves become important drivers for knowledge production and ways forward?
“As a space for transatlantic debate, the Thomas Mann House and its fellows are committed to discuss strategies for affordable housing, which has become one of the most pressing challenges of our time,” says Nikolai Blaumer, Program Director of the Thomas Mann House.
Discussion participants include: Jutta Allmendinger from Berlin, Germany, is President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and one of the first Thomas Mann House residents who researched homelessness, particularly the working homeless in Los Angeles, continuing her research in Germany; Hilary Silver, currently Chair and Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and Public Policy at the George Washington University, has researched homelessness in the United States amongst many other related issues; Cristina Cielo, who has worked with informal settlements in Ecuador as well as questions regarding homelessness in the Philippines; and Charles Porter, a staff member of the United Coalition East Prevention Project (UCEPP) and a community activist in Skid Row.
Day 5 and 6:
The 10th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
26 and 27 October, Gladys Park, 6th Street and Gladys Avenue, Skid Row, Los Angeles 1-5pm
Worlds of Homelessness is a project of the Goethe-Institut, in cooperation with the Los Angeles Poverty Department, the Thomas Mann House, SCI-Arc, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, and NAVEL.
For the program in details, more information on the participants and related articles, please visit:
www.goethe.de/usa/worldsofhomelessness
About the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles: The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. The institute fosters international cultural cooperation and dialogue. The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles operates on a partnership basis.
For more information, please visit: www.goethe.de/losangeles
Facebook: www.facebook.com/goetheinstitut.losangeles Instagram: @goetheinstitut_losangeles
Twitter: @gi_losangeles
LOS ANGELES POVERTY DEPARTMENT https://www.lapovertydept.org/ THOMAS MANN HOUSE https://www.vatmh.org/en/tmh-mission-statement- eng.html
NAVEL https://navel.la/about/
SCI-Arc https://www.sciarc.edu/institution/about
INSTITUTE ON INEQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY at UCLA LUSKIN
challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu
For more information, images, and interview requests:
Goethe-Institut, Simone Maier, simone.maier@goethe.de
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11. L. Brandon Krall, FF Alumn, at Philipse Manor Hall, Yonkers, NY, thru Sept. 30
New Work and Installations
The Gallery at Philipse Manor Hall 29 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, NY // 914.965.4027 September 5-30 2019
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12. Dread Scott, FF Alumn, in Lousiana, Nov. 8-9, 2019
Greetings,
Join us Monday, September 30th at 2:30pm for a discussion with New York based visual and performance artist, Dread Scott and introductory remarks by Aaron Sheehan-Dean about Scott’s artistic practice and his latest collaborative project Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a large-scale, community-engaged art performance & film project reimagining the largest rebellion of enslaved people in the United States. The performance will start in LaPlace, La and conclude in New Orleans, La on November 8 -9, 2019.
Copyright (c) 2019 Slave Rebellion Reenactment, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this because you signed up for it on the website for Slave Rebellion Reenactment.
Our mailing address is:
Slave Rebellion Reenactment
3718 Saint Claude Ave
New Orleans, LA 11215
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13. Larry List, FF Alumn, at musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Oct. 16
CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
16 October 2019
TAKAKOPHONIE EVENT – Performances & Concert 16 October 2019
Performances and concert organized in the nave of the museum as part of the 400 piece retrospective exhibition of Takako Saito that has been extended until November 3, 2019.
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Performances : Canapé Chess & Wine Chess
In these two performances, Takako Saito invites the audience to revisit the rules of chess, replacing traditional chess pieces with appetizers and glasses of wine. Two interactive, convivial and participative performances will take place in which the pieces of the game created for the occasion end up being drunk or eaten by the players.
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Discussion/Performance : Sound Chess with Larry List & Dieter Daniels
Two specialists in the work of Takako Saito, Fluxus and the history of games in art will offer a verbal and sonic joust while activating Takako Saito’s large-scale Sound Chess Set & Board.
(Conducted in English only).
7:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Performance : Takako Saito, Blind Opéra
Blind Opera by Takako Saito offers an improvised musical show that requires the participation of the public. Blindfolded, you must rely solely on your ears and your tactile sense, to invent an opera and communicate with other performers.
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Concert : Apartment House, Disappearing Music
Echoing the Takako Saito exhibition and as part of the Bordeaux Arts Festival 2019, the British ensemble Apartment House will perform works by the main actors in the Fluxus movement, such as George Brecht, Alison Knowles, George Mačiunas, Yoko Ono …
For almost 25 years, Apartment House has explored the register of experimental and contemporary music through innovative and exciting performances.
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14. Julie Tolentino, FF Alumn, fall news
Upcoming this Fall
REPEATER, 2019
-exhibition + 108 hours of performance
Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA
Sept 21-Nov 2
Phobias, 2019/video in group show: Taboo
Vinyl-onVinyl, Manila Philippines; curated by Ling Quisimbing
Sept 5-November 15
…soft as a lion, wet as the night, 2019/large installation in group show: Soft & Wet/
EFA Project Space, New York, NY; curated by Sadia Shirazi
Sept 18-Nov 11
Slipping Into Darkness, 2019/solo performance installation + one-to-one performances – 2019 commission
Performance Space, New York, NY; curated by Pati Hertling
Dec 7-13
I’m in a group MFA show at New Wight Gallery at UCLA “Circadian Region” curated by fellow students: Sydney Acosta, Cherisse Gray, and Sam Richardson
(It’s a movement-inspired sculpture offering slide takeaways and an unfinished essay on touch and opacity for their catalog)
Opens on September 26 – October 10, 2019.
The show is curated based on a selection of MFA students from the Southern California area.
Also debuted recently:
-Conrad Ventur’s Altered After catalogue / Participant Inc show for Visual AIDS
-the Visual AIDS Duet book with Kia Labeija
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15. Pope.L, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, now online
Please visit the complete illustrated article linked here (text only follows below):
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/arts/design/popel-crawl-whitney-moma.html
Pope.L’s Group Crawl: Protest, Pathos, Provocation
A communal performance through Greenwich Village kicks off explorations of the artist’s career at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.
By Hilarie M. Sheets
Sept. 22, 2019
“Crawlers, come to the line – please don your blindfolds,” said William Pope.L, the multidisciplinary artist, serving as master of ceremonies before a large crowd who assembled Saturday in a Greenwich Village playground.
Five men and women, each missing a shoe and encumbered with a flashlight in one hand, came belly down to the ground. They began to crawl along the gritty, unsavory New York City sidewalk, led by a marshal perfuming the air and sweeping the ground before them – and serenaded by a trumpeter playing melancholic riffs. The procession stopped traffic and drew people out of shops and restaurants, wondering what was going on.
Over the next five hours, some 140 people participated – wide-ranging in ages, ethnicity and physical ability – by dragging their bodies block-by-block, relay-style, along a 1.5 mile route through the Village. They traversed past the AIDS Memorial on Greenwich Avenue and under the Washington Arch. Then the collective action culminated at Union Square, with all the participants streaming up the steps, en masse, as the trumpeter and a drummer played “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The arduous, rebellious, absurdist spectacle was the largest group performance orchestrated by Mr. Pope.L, the Chicago-based veteran of more than 30 international “crawls” over the last four decades. He has used this willful gesture of vulnerability to explore race, class and power.
“Giving up one’s privilege in order to debase oneself is an act that you don’t have to do,” Mr. Pope.L said before the event, called “Conquest.” He is interested in what people can learn by doing – and witnessing – such an action.
Organized by the Public Art Fund, the performance kicked off an exploration of Mr. Pope.L’s career beginning this month, adding exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (opening Oct. 10) and the Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 21).
The Modern’s exhibition consists of 13 seminal performances and related videos and objects by Mr. Pope.L, from 1978 to 2001, which were recently acquired by the museum. At the Whitney, which had bestowed the 2017 Bucksbaum Award and its accompanying $100,000 to the artist, Mr. Pope.L will offer a new immersive sound and sculptural installation, titled “Choir, ” its roots in the water crisis in Flint, Mich. An upside-down water fountain evoking Jim Crow-era segregation will intermittently gush 800 gallons of water into a tank, its sound amplified and mixed in with 1930s field recordings of African-American choirs singing spirituals.
“The idea of the public fountain as a point of congregation echoes with what’s literally happening on the street,” said Christopher Lew, the curator of the Whitney’s show, during the performance of “Conquest.”
This trifecta of performances and exhibitions places the work of Mr. Pope.L, a provocateur who’s long worked in the margins of New York’s civic spaces, at the nerve center of the art world.
“There’s this image of struggle and contradiction I’m interested in,” said the affable, rangy 64-year-old artist, during a walk last month along part of the crawl route. He chose the Village, now among the most expensive and exclusive neighborhoods in the city, for its layered history – the place where blacks could intermarry and own land as far back as Dutch colonization; where artists and poets and musicians congregated in its more bohemian era; where the tragedy of the AIDS crisis was localized.
“Pope.L sees the paradox of this abjection happening in the context of Greenwich Village,” said Nicholas Baume, the director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund. He conceded that a performance centered on denigration could “sound like a pretty un-fun day out.” But the theatricality and community achieved along the path, Mr. Baume said, created “a wonderful mix of protest and pathos and humor and humanity.”
Born in Newark, Mr. Pope.L attended graduate school at Rutgers in the late ’70s, with an interest in experimental theater. He was first inspired to do a crawl by the prevalence of homeless people sleeping on city streets and in tunnels, including members of his own family at the time. He imagined “all those folks, who seemed inert and unwilling to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, starting to move as one.” By stubbornly refusing to give up their horizontality, he said, they “have this energy of moving forward.”
Early on, he was unable to convince others to join him. “I didn’t realize it was going to be such a big ask,” he said.
The MoMA exhibition will open with an image of the artist in a business suit striking out alone on his hands and knees in his first crawl through Times Square in 1978.
“People got pissed off because I’m black,” said Mr. Pope.L, who drew the curiosity and consternation of passers-by and authorities. “If you’re not drunk, if you’re not ill, if you’re not crawling to Jesus, what are you doing?”
A documentary video of his 1991 crawl around the perimeter of Tompkins Square Park – by this time, the artist had shifted to a more grueling, military-style crawl using just his forearms – shows a young African-American man, also in a suit, becoming irate that another black man would intentionally put himself in such a position. It led to a very intense, almost violent exchange.
For “The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 5 years, 1 Street,” Mr. Pope.L crawled the length of Broadway from the tip of Manhattan to the Bronx, in segments, from 2001 to 2009, wearing a Superman costume. “He’s constantly putting pressure on these symbols of success and aspirational behavior,” said Stuart Comer, the chief curator of MoMA’s department of media and performance, who organized the museum’s upcoming show.
As an observer on Saturday, Mr. Comer pointed out that “‘Conquest’ plays with how polarized the country is at this moment and what it means to try to create a space of assembly.” He added, “It’s about togetherness and the falling apart of the social fabric at the same time.”
The artist designed T-shirts substituting the S in the Superman logo with a backward C as part of the costume for the participants in “Conquest.” He incorporated the blindfold and flashlight used in his 2011 group crawl in Göteborg, Sweden, and introduced music, scent and the relay format for the first time. “It sets up the individual-group dynamic much more vividly,” he said.
More than 480 people responded to the Public Art Fund’s open call, from which the artist selected 140 with an eye to the greatest possible diversity. Several people crawled with their wheelchairs in tow. When 6-year-old Silas Kraus, who crawled with his grandfather, completed his segment, he excitedly asked the artist what the prize was.
“The prize can be a little bit elusive,” Mr. Pope.L responded with amusement.
Daniel Blanco Melo, a 33-year-old scientist from Mexico, heeded the artist’s instruction to each participant to choose a style of crawling that would be most challenging. Mr. Melo started on his back and did a kind of elbow crab walk; he finally flipped over, drenched in sweat but exhilarated. “I’m not a U.S. citizen, but I really do love the city, so what better idea than to actually kiss the floor in New York,” he said.
Annie Leist, a 45-year-old artist who is sight impaired, crawled holding her white cane as an added degree of difficulty. “You really felt the experience of being this soft mass of human body on the hardness and roughness of the sidewalk,” said Ms. Leist. She found it physically more difficult than anticipated but felt buoyed by people cheering her on. “It wasn’t a race but it was sort of a competition with yourself,” she added.
Mr. Pope.L dispensed a bear hug to each crawler who mounted the podium at Union Square. “Everyone who participated goes home with their own story about what happened,” he said. “It’s a fantasy about community and making things O.K., no matter what shadows fall.”
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 23, 2019, Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Group Crawl Along New York’s Mean Streets. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
(c) 2019 The New York Times Company
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16. Verónica Peña, Nicole Goodwin, and Vernita Nemec, at Viridian Artists Contemporary Art Gallery, NY, Sep 26.
COLLECTIVE BECOMING: “HOMEOSTASIS”
Performance Art public event featuring KEVIN QUILES BONILLA, NICOLE GOODWIN, and JENNA KLINE
Curated/organized by Verónica Peña, and hosted by Vernita Nemec
VIRIDIAN ARTISTS Contemporary Art Gallery
Thursday, September 26th, 2019
Reception: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
548 W 28th Street #632, New York
Links:
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/homeostasis-tickets-73445004987
http://www.facebook.com/events/2211094952513840/
COLLECTIVE BECOMING, curated by Verónica Peña, is an ongoing Performance Art initiative of international scope that wants to foster collaboration amongst artists in order to promote empathy, freedom, and human unity. Homeostasis is the third project to be developed under the umbrella of Collective Becoming. The second project, called Expressions of Love, Freedom and Resistance, took place at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SAIC, Sullivan Galleries during Peña’s residency as a guess artist for the Art As a Social Force class, hosted by Professor Howenstein. The first project, The Urban Caress, took place in 2015 in Berlin, Germany, as part of the Month of Performance Art. Through an open call, The Urban Caress invited artists to create art performances that would transform the city into a less hostile place. http://www.veronicapena.com
HOMEOSTASIS is a curatorial Performance Art project that highlights the work of artists who, by bodily reacting to violence, inequality, racism, rooted stereotypes, hypocrisy, the perfect, and the negative, contribute towards the opposite generating a more balanced, open, and just society. In its medical definition, Homeostasis describes a healthy state sustained by constant biochemical and physiological adjustments that happen between elements within an entity to achieve equilibrium, and preserve its existence. Overcoming obstacles, and working towards the positive and the transparent, the live realities created by the showcased artists publicly challenge personal, social, and political disequilibrium in pursuit of a healthier system, and a more harmonious state of being. The first enactment of Homeostasis presents the work of artists Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Nicole Goodwin, and Jenna Kline.
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17. Verónica Peña & Hector Canonge, at Salisbury University Art Galleries, Salisbury, MD, Sept. 29
Verónica Peña & Hector Canonge
HORIZONTES (Horizons)
Salisbury University Art Galleries, Salisbury, Maryland
– Exhibition: August 26, 2019 – February 8, 2020
– Performance: Sunday, September 29, 2:00pm, at Assateague National Seashore
– Workshop: Monday, September 30, 12:00pm, at Salisbury University
– Talk: Tuesday, October 1, 12:45pm, at Salisbury University
Link:
http://suartgalleries.org/2019/08/23/horizontes-horizons/
http://www.stardem.com/entertainment/arts/su-exhibit-explores-human-connection-to-water/article
HORIZONTES (HORIZONS) is a multidisciplinary project that explores the human connection to water and is comprised of an exhibition, site-specific performance, talk, and worksop. As an exhibition, it presents photo and video documentation of the project “Reflejos”, developed in Spain in 2018, and is to be complemented with artifacts of the performance HORIZONTES, to be enacted during the artists’ residency at Salisbury University. HORIZONTES, the performance, references the history of Assateague Island through a series of actions inspired by cultural traditions of the early inhabitants of the region.
“Reflejos” proposed a surreal transformation of the landscape to evoke people’s connection to water. Inspired by the geography of Santa Lucía de Ocón in La Rioja, the artists created a large blue surface in one of the farm fields. The lake of painted round-stones (cantos rodados) referenced the history of the region as it was once covered by water millions of years back. In addition to altering the visual appearance of the quotidian agrarian landscape, “Reflejos” offered an experience that treats the relation of people and their habitat. HORIZONTES (HORIZONS) constitutes a continuation of “Reflejos” as the project draws on the intersections of geography and people’s relation to the land.
Verónica Peña & Hector Canonge are performance artists working at the convergence of various disciplines. Peña (Spain) and Canonge (Argentina) are based in the United States. They met in 2014 during their participation at the Month of Performance Art in Berlin. After presenting work independently in the United States, and coinciding in various programs in Europe and Latin America, they decided to collaborate in a series of works exploring themes of identity, migration, intercultural exchange, and human cohesion. As collaborators, since 2016, they presented their work in the United States and abroad. In New York City, they have performed: Lazos (Entanglements) at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and Last Frontier; De lo Sano (of the Sane) at Knockdown Center, De lo Posible (of Possibilities) at Triskelion Arts; De lo Ajeno (of Others) at Queens Museum, and Rabbithole; De lo Lejano (of the Distant) at Panoply Performance Lab; and De Lo Nuestro (of Ours) at The Woods Cooperative. They presented the Exhibition and Performance Art program UNDER OUR SKIN: Body and Territory in Performance Art at Purdue University, Indiana. In Spain, as part of their project Derivas y Jornadas, they presented their work at Fundación BilbaoArte, Bilbao; Festival Instramurs, Valencia; Tabacalera, Madrid; and La Grey Gallery; Tarragona. In 2018, they performed in France and Spain where among other projects they presented “Reflejos”, showed in this exhibition.
http://www.veronicapena.com
http://www.hectorcanonge.net
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18. Frederieke Sanders Taylor, FF Alumn, at Doyle, now online
Please visit these links:
https://www.artsy.net/auction/doyle-works-from-the-estate-of-frederieke-sanders-taylor-part-i
thank you.
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19. Hannah Wilke, FF Alumn, at Feldman Gallery, Manhattan, thru Nov. 30
Hannah Wilke
Force of Nature
September 19 – November 30, 2019
“One of the ten most subversive women artists in history.”
(Hannah Wilke listed second after Artemisia Gentileschi) Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, January 13, 2014
“Perhaps more than her sexual candor, the quality that distinguished Wilke among her peers – and that forms the most illuminating comparison with artists of succeeding generations – was her spirit of affirmation. When she was extravagantly beautiful and when she was not; when her personal life and professional career were flourishing and when they were balked; and whether the cultural and political circumstances called for celebration or gloom, she used her art to broadcast her strengths and vulnerabilities, to insist on their importance, and to model the positions that must be struck for women to have a fair share of the world’s manifest bounty.” Nancy Princenthal “Hannah Wilke,” page 7, Prestel Verlag, 2010
Ronald Feldman Gallery is honored to present a solo exhibition of work by Hannah Wilke (1940-1993). Entitled “Force of Nature,” it is the thirteenth solo exhibition of her art mounted by Feldman Gallery since it began representing Wilke in 1972.
With great passion and acuity, Wilke empathetically and provocatively transformed her relationships and personal experiences into her practice. Her work has often been described as incorporating a wide emotional range, which undoubtedly stemmed from her determination to speak for a more complex narrative of sexual freedom and self-representation and against stereotypes and objectification.
Wilke embraced and critiqued the Feminist movement, creatively engaged with word play and linguistics, and was inspired by philosophy, politics, and literature. She consistently and fearlessly confronted the paternalistic artworld. In her studio practice, she pioneered new forms using traditional as well as unconventional materials, and even her own body. A fundamental commitment to the process of art making is evident in her drawing, sculpture, and performance which often emphasizes motion and sensuality.
This exhibition brings together more than fifty “Performalist Self-Portrait” images (the term Wilke used to give credit to the many people who assisted her in works she directed herself and in which she posed), as well as ceramic, kneaded eraser, and chewing gum sculptures created over 33 years.
A rare opportunity to view Wilke’s iconic works, the show includes: Super-T-Art, 1974; S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974; So Help Me Hannah, 1979-1985 and Intra-Venus, 1991-1993. A powerful video sculpture entitled So Help Me Hannah summons the artist’s presence by combining video footage of Wilke’s five live performances from the series. Also on view are works from the Needed-Erase-Her Series, 1974-1977 and I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver, 1977-1978, a color photographic diptych conceived as the front and back cover of Wilke’s unrealized autobiography.
Wilke, a seminal artist of the late 20th century with an international reputation, was a native New Yorker who lived and worked in the city and played a significant role in the art community. Sadly, she died of lymphoma in 1993 at the age of 52. Not surprisingly, her confrontation with illness and death extended the complexity and integrity of her oeuvre and is an astonishing accomplishment as seen in Intra-Venus, 1991-1993. Despite her interrupted career, Wilke’s influence on the following generations of artists cannot be overstated.
There have been two major retrospective exhibitions of her work: Gallery 210, University of Missouri/St. Louis in 1989; Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1998, which travelled to the Bildmuseet in Sweden and to the Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland.
“The message of Hannah’s art is relevant to current issues, perhaps today more than ever,” says Marco Nocella, a Ronald Feldman Gallery Director and curator of the exhibition. He had a close working relationship with the artist and, in tandem with Ronald and Frayda Feldman, has been actively involved in representing her work for over three decades.
Reception: Thursday, September 19, 6-8pm.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am – 6pm.
For more information, contact Vince Ruvolo at (212) 226-3232 or vince@feldmangallery.com
Press link: https://ronaldfeldmanfinearts.box.com/s/lu8pn4ka26xcb5st9p8fce9p4x1rcprz
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20. Adrianne Wortzel, FF Alumn, at envisionartshow.com now online
Adrianne Wortzel. FF Alum, gicleé prints of “endangered” specieis of electronic parts depicted in fertile environments for continued survivial, from Wortze’s project : “EX SITU CONSERVATION: Colony Relocation for Electronic Detritus” featured in Envision Arts Magazien at
https://www.envisionartshow.com/magazine/ex-situ-conservation?rq=Wortzel
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
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Harley Spiller, Administrator
Dolores Zorreguieta, Program Coordinator
