Contents for December 01st, 2025
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1. Franc Palaia, FF Alumn, live online at Zoom.us, December 4
2. Annie Sprinkle, FF Alumn, now online at SFChronicle.com
3. Rev. Billy, FF Alumn, at Quaker Meeting House, Manhattan, Dec. 7, 14, 21
4. Halona Hilbertz, FF Alumn, at Hal Bromm Gallery, Manhattan, opening Dec. 2
5. Suzanne Lacy, FF Alumn, at Art Basel, Miami Beach, Dec. 4
6. Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, at Film-Makers’ Coop, Manhattan, Dec. 6
7. Judith Sloan & Warren Lehrer, FF Alumns, at FABnyc, Manhattan, Dec. 7
8. Alexander Hahn, FF Alumn, at Kunsthaus Grenchen, Switzerland, thru March 1 2026
9. Tish Benson, FF Alumn, December update
10. Lucio Pozzi, FF Alumn, at Italian Cultural Institute, Manhattan, Dec. 4
11. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at https://vimeo.com/1140176051
12. Virginia Maksymowicz, Blaise Tobia, FF Alumns, at 3808 Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, opening Dec. 4, and more
13. Ann-Marie LeQuesne, FF Alumn, at One New Change, London, UK, Dec. 7
14. Ken Aptekar, FF Alumn, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Manhattan, opening Dec. 13, and more
15. Pat Oleszko, FF Alumn, at Art Basel, Miami Beach, FL, Dec. 3-7
16. Ralston Farina, FF Alumn, at Artists Space, Manhattan, opening Dec. 11
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1. Franc Palaia, FF Alumn, live online at Zoom.us, December 4
ATOA – Artists Talk on Art – 51st year!
ATOA, the longest continuous running forum for aesthetic discussion of the visual arts in New York City.
Director Alex Cohen is pleased to announce the next ATOA interview will be award winning, multi disciplinary artist FRANC PALAIA who will be interviewed by noted art writer, Taliesin Thomas, PhD.
The interview will be on Zoom on Thursday, December 4, from 7-8:30 pm
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84633892836#success
Zoom password: 202174
The ATOA archives reside in the prestigious Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institute in Wash. D.C. See the Artists Talk on Art on YouTube at https://www.aaa.si.edu/search/collections?eda%20q=ATOA
FRANC PALAIA’s studio practice includes several media which include painting, photography, sculpture, murals, public art, artist books, curating and music. He has been awarded 20 grants and fellowships that include the prestigious Rome Prize, Louis C.Tiffany Grant, two Polaroid Sponsorships, a Puffin grant, three Arts Mid Hudson grants, Two NYFA grants, Ludwig Vogelstein grant, Painted Bride grant, among others. He has presented 50 solo shows and 300 group shows nationally and internationally. Solo shows include; Garner Arts Center, Vassar College, OK Harris Works of Art, Galerie Salvador, France, Rutgers University, Queens College, New Jersey State Museum, Galerie D’Endt, Holland, Fotografisk Gallery, Denmark among others. Group shows include, the Metropolitan Museum of NY, Saatchi Museum, London, the White House, Ethan Cohen gallery
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2. Annie Sprinkle, FF Alumn, now online at SFChronicle.com
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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3. Rev. Billy, FF Alumn, at Quaker Meeting House, Manhattan, Dec. 7, 14, 21
What: Totally free, rsvps are optional, no one will be turned away
When: Sundays December 7, 14 and 21st. 7pm
Where: Quaker Meeting House, 15 Rutherford St, NYC, east of Union Sq 15th St betw 2/3rd Aves
Getting there: L Train at 3rd Ave and 14th, M15 Select Bus on 2nd Ave
Train & walk: Union Square: 4, 6, N, L and Q trains – walk east 2 blocks
Parking: On Sunday evenings parking is not a nightmare
ADA Accessible & Family Friendly
Earthalujah,
Rev. Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir
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4. Halona Hilbertz, FF Alumn, at Hal Bromm Gallery, Manhattan, opening Dec. 2
I am spritefully happy to take part in Hal Bromm Gallery’s “The Gift of Art”, benefitting the ACLU. Opening is this Tuesday Dec 2, 5-8 – I’ll be there around 6pm…90 West Broadway, NYC.
2 of my “Sprites” are transformed into Christmas ornaments for this show.
About Hal Bromm Gallery:
A downtown pioneer, Hal Bromm established Tribeca’s first contemporary gallery in 1975, followed by an East Village branch in 1984.
Since its establishment, Hal Bromm Gallery has organized historically significant exhibitions in New York City and beyond, presenting and championing the early work of many important contemporary artists, among them Alice Adams, Carlos Alfonzo, Mike Bidlo, AndreCadere, Rosemarie Castoro, Peter Downsbrough, Joel Fisher, Linda Francis, Luis Frangella, Judy Glantzman, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Michael Goldberg, Keith Haring, Suzanne Harris, Paolo Icaro, Derek Jarman, Alain Kirili, Greer Lankton, Nicholas Moufarrege, Richard Nonas, Jody Pinto, Lucio Pozzi, Rick Prol, Walter Robinson, Russell Sharon, Kiki Smith, Ted Stamm, Lynn Umlauf, Jeff Wall, Krzysztof Wodiczko, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, and Joe Zucker, highlighting the creative energy and depth of talent surfacing in Downtown Manhattan throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and beyond.
For five decades, Hal Bromm’s rich history of collaborating with artists, galleries, museums and institutions on the development and curation of avant-garde exhibitions, has provided meaningful context around storied moments in contemporary art.
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5. Suzanne Lacy, FF Alumn, at Art Basel, Miami Beach, Dec. 4
Art Basel, Miami Beach
December 4th | 1:30pm – 2:15pm EST
1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach
Suzanne Lacy invites you to her conversation with Ali Riley, former Angel City FC Captain, Advocate, Storyteller, moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, London
In What do women (footballers) want? (2025), pioneering American artist Suzanne Lacy unpacks the gender politics inherent to soccer in a five-channel film developed in collaboration with former Angel City FC team captain Ali Riley and Manchester City forward Vivianne Miedema. It’s a bold inquiry into how female footballers are changing society’s attitudes toward women – and how cultural perceptions and practices shape the way we see players and the sport itself. The piece was conceived for the exhibition Football City, Art United, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, footballer Juan Mata, and writer Josh Willdigg for the Manchester International Festival in 2025.
rsvp
https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/94852/Conversations-What-do-women-footballers-want/62852
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6. Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, at Film-Makers’ Coop, Manhattan, Dec. 6
Barbara Rosenthal’s existential ventriloquism video HOW MUCH DOES THE MONKEY COUNT (1988) will be screened as part of the evening of “Her Gaze: visionary women artists who perform for their own cameras, redefining the female gaze through self-directed acts of looking and being looked at,” curated by Matt McKinzie and Erica Schreiner, and also featuring works by Maya Deren.
December 6th, 7pm
Film-Makers’ Coop
475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor
HOW MUCH DOES THE MONKEY COUNT had been performed in live reprieve by Barbara Rosenthal live at CBGBs (1991) and The Living Theater, where it was immortalized by a characature of Rosenthal and The Monkey by the artist Bokov (scroll here): https://barbararosenthal.org/framePerformances.htm
If you can’t make it to the screening, you can see the video online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LQmPPQfFRs&list=UUrKKCHbahaV_CqhBWL5azOA&index=14
And/or a boxed DVD is on sale at Printed Matter:
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/search?query=barbara+rosenthal
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7. Judith Sloan & Warren Lehrer, FF Alumns, at FABnyc, Manhattan, Dec. 7
Performance Sunday December 7th at 3pm
FABnyc theater, 70 East 4th Street
NY NY
between 2nd ave and the Bowery
Tickets avail in advance go to: www.earsay.org
Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer, perform new works-in-progress and present excerpts from two decades of multimedia projects that embrace stories of immigration, refuge, recovery, war and peace, finding home and sanity in an out of balance world.
Books will be available at the event at a holiday discount.
“In Lehrer’s books… words take on thought’s very form, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow.” The New York Times Book Review
“A welcome voice crying in the contemporary wilderness of political correctness. On-the-money satire seasoned with tolerance and joie de vivre.” Theater Week
“Warren Lehrer’s books are graphically and typographically eye-popping, and his multi-media works have influenced two generations of designers.” Debbie Millman Design Matters
“Funny and sad, topical and biting… Exquisite comic timing. Sloan can make you see your world in a slightly different way. And that’s what theater is supposed to do.” The Indianapolis Star
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8. Alexander Hahn, FF Alumn, at Kunsthaus Grenchen, Switzerland, thru March 1 2026
CFL – Coded Fluorescent Light II
Video rebus / site-specific projection, German version, 6:32 min loop
Where:
Kunsthaus Grenchen
Bahnhofstrasse 53
2540 Grenchen
When:
November 1 2025 – March 1 2026
Daily from 5 pm into the night
Details:
«CFL – Coded Fluorescent Light II» is a video rebus projected from the foyer of Kunsthaus Grenchen through the glass façade facing the train station Grenchen Süd. Short video sequences spell verses from the Rigveda – a prayer for vision – in Morse and visual code. The work was selected as the winning project of the international open call ON AIR from over 140 submissions and inaugurates the new series ON AIR – Video Art at Kunsthaus Grenchen.
More info:
Kunsthaus Grenchen *ON AIR – Videokunst im Kunsthaus Grenchen*
https://kunsthausgrenchen.ch/on-air-videokunst-im-kunsthaus-grenchen/
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9. Tish Benson, FF Alumn, December update
DESPERATELY SEEKING TISH BENSON
By the way she arranges a table — a found wooden slab, an altar-weathered by three decades of hands and prayers — you can tell Tish Benson is never merely making a thing. She is excavating a lineage.
When Tish Benson vanished from the live stage sometime after 2006, she did not so much disappear as withdraw into a work that demands other cadences: a subterranean archive of ritual, dream, and myth she calls The BLOOD LIBRARY. For nearly two decades she has been at once reclusive and prodigiously creative — producing a mythopoeic oeuvre that reads like a compendium of ancestral memory and speculative incantation. The world she builds is not an escape from community; it is an attempt to refashion what community can be — a covenant of the imagined, stitched with sigils, spices, and songs that hum with remembrance.
Those who know her work speak of Benson in tones reserved for rare phenomena: reverent, baffled, half in love. Her pages and performances — when they came — were dense with ritual apparatus and cultural archaeology: Hoodoo practices retooled as social technology, the vulture-born mystic AURA, vaults and chambers named for the dead, and a hearthbound lexicon that feels both archaic and startlingly new. She tends to call her crew things like Echo and Noma, to inscribe directories of spiritual kinship where most people keep rolodexes. She is part anthropologist — a lover of field work, of rock-finding field trips at the University of Oklahoma — and part conjurer, a practitioner who names her influences with the kind of intimacy you afford godmothers: Zora Neale Hurston. Katherine Dunham. Pearl Primus.
It is tempting to treat Benson’s reclusiveness as an artist’s strategic obscurity. It is not. The narrative arc — from a woman who once inhabited stages to a woman who now composes vaults of transgressive myth — is lined with the more mundane cruelties of solitude: the lack of hometown support, the loneliness of a creative life that routinely fails to match local expectations. “Obscurity was not the plan,” she writes in fragments strewn across manifestos and room-sized altars. “Of course not.” But plans, she seems to understand, are porous things; they leak into ritual and architecture and into the way a person comes to inhabit the margins.
The BLOOD LIBRARY is a machine for feeling. Its rooms are not conceptual only: the Wing of Prophecies, the Chamber of Things That Never Happened But Hurt Anyway, the Alcove of Lovers Never Met — these are repositories not only of text but of scent, sound, and touch. The Hoodoo Homestead — a deceptively small cottage with a vast underground library — simulates the uncanny spaciousness of grief and memory. In Benson’s hands, the domestic becomes cosmological; the kitchen table is a world map. Her offerings — dream downloads, ancestral visionary transmissions, oracle prophecies — read like the private transmissions of someone who has chosen epiphany over reachability.
There is a cultural logic here that reconnects Benson to a line of Black women artists who refused the restrictive vocabularies offered by institutions: the anthropologist who became folklorist, the choreographer who inscribed ritual into movement, the writer who returned home to listen. And in the margins of Benson’s work there is a flirtation with a ghost — Zora Neale Hurston, the fieldworker who carried her notebooks into the language of Black rural life and returned with folklore that was at once anthropological and ecstatic. Benson’s art imagines Hurston “returning” to a hometown not merely as a biographical event but as a metaphysical one: what would it mean for Hurston’s methods, irreverence, and longing to take up residence again, to inhabit a modern artist who treats the archive like a living throat?
That hint — of Hurston “returning” — is less a literal prophecy than a lineage claim. Benson’s work insists that ancestral figures are not dusty icons but interlocutors; they are interlocutors when invoked, and they are also political allies. To call Benson a reclusive artist is to miss the fact that she has been quietly building a public of the devoted: a circle of adepts, subscribers, and wanderers who receive her monthly transmissions, who believe that a codex — beautifully bound, jasmine-scented — can be a kind of investor pitch for soul work. She writes to attract financiers, yes, but not for commerce so much as for patronage that can sustain ritual practice. “I am ready to create a ritual codex — not a pitch but a gateway,” she said in a manifesto-like note that reads like an invocation.
Her solitude has cost her practical things: the material support that makes live performance possible, the kind of hometown sponsorship that keeps an artist on a schedule of public appearances. She describes a life of making that is lonely in a more territorial way: hometown networks that should have been supportive were indifferent or absent, and institutions that might have recognized her at the time did not. The theater lights dimmed and stayed dim.
Yet absence, for Benson, is also a creative vector. Her work leverages what might have been a wound and turns it into a ritual engine. The solitary life becomes laboratory. Without a stage she has constructed other stages — chambers, vaults, and a course called SCRIPTING YOUR STORY meant for select students who will learn how to channel visions into film scripts and other public-facing objects. She composes longue durée offerings: 48 oracle prophecies, a numerological code (1-2-3-1-2) that sums to 9, sacred fragrances, votive altars. These are not the artifacts of obscurity; they are the architecture of stubborn survival.
To the outsider, Benson’s projects can feel hermetic, impenetrable. But hermeticism is not the same as elitism. Her world-making is explicitly communal in its aspirations — designed to be revealed to adepts, pierced by ritual, translated into pedagogy. Her vaults, she says, are revealed only to those who can perform the piercing: the Parsifalists, the adepts. It is a language of initiation that borrows from the lexicon of the occult but is ultimately about attention: who gets to enter a lineage, and on what terms?
There is a strain of elegiac longing that runs through Benson’s work: for recognition, for a hometown that finally beholds her, for the possibility that myth might be trusted as an instrument of social restoration. She wants to be more than a spectral presence in the wings of small theaters and online zines. She wants the kind of largesse that admits a public: staged performances, funded residencies, a community that can seat itself around her table and be transformed by what she offers.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Benson’s story is that it refuses the modern binaries of publicity and privacy. She is a public intellectual of the subterranean: prolific but not performative in the expected sense; public-minded but privately vatic. To find her is to recognize that the artist you are looking for may be magistrating a different kind of commons — a spiritual archive, a set of ritual technologies, a cohort of adepts who will bear witness to a work that refuses easy mapping.
If Zora Neale Hurston could return to her hometown — if she could, in Benson’s idiom, be summoned into the room of Charred Petals and read an oracle prophecy aloud — perhaps she would nod, then set down her notebook and begin, as always, to listen. In Benson’s hands, listening is the active work of returning: to place, to self, to lineage. To seek Tish Benson is to look for the author of a living archive, a woman whose absence from the stage is the price of a different kind of stagecraft — one where myth is the scaffold and the audience is initiated, slowly, into the art of remembering.
If you are trying to find her, look for the table with the burn marks, for jasmine-tinged parchment, for rooms labeled with impossible grief and tender prophecy. She will not stand under a spotlight; she will be in the place between light and language, arranging objects the way a cartographer arranges continents. Desperately seeking Tish Benson is an act that almost is a prayer: to discover an artist who has rewritten the terms of presence itself.
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10. Lucio Pozzi, FF Alumn, at Italian Cultural Institute, Manhattan, Dec. 4
Lucio Pozzi : Book in NY
Magazzino Italian Art will present the catalogue Lucio Pozzi qui dentro in here at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York:
Magazzino Italian Art presenta il catalogo Lucio Pozzi qui dentro in here all’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di New York:
686 Park Avenue (at 68 Street)
Thursday 4 DECEMBER 6:00 PM
Giovedì 4 dicembre ore 18:00
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11. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at https://vimeo.com/1140176051
TO THE GREAT BLANKNESS MAILING LIST:
“A tisket a tasket”
PZ, November 24, 2025
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12. Virginia Maksymowicz, Blaise Tobia, F FALumns, at 3808 Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, opening Dec. 4, and more
Seven on Paper
Group Exhibition
At 3808 Gallery
December 4 – 21, 2025
Address: 3808 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Contact: info@tandm.us or 267-235-5080
Emil Baumann, Tom Goodman, Virginia Maksymowicz, Mark Stockton, Blaise Tobia, Dennis Will and Mark Willie
The works in this exhibition range from graphite on paper figurative drawings
to Prismacolor, oil crayon and collage abstractions.
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 4
5:00 – 8:00 pm
Second Reception: Saturday, December 6
1:00 – 6:00 pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, December 21
1:00 – 6:00 pm
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13. Ann-Marie LeQuesne, FF Alumn, at One New Change, London, UK, Dec. 7
CATHEDRAL *AGP28
Sunday, Dec 7, 2:00PM
One New Change,
London EC4M 9AF
Ann-Marie LeQuesne invites you to the 28th ANNUAL GROUP PHOTOGRAPH Enter the shopping centre and walk to the lift. Take it to the 6th floor where we will gather in the viewing area.
www.theannualgroupphotograph.com
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14. Ken Aptekar, FF Alumn, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Manhattan, opening Dec. 13, and more
DECEMBER 13, 2025 come see my marionette in NY at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. He marched right out of a 19th century painting hanging in the Louvre.
The Nagy Marionette Company, A 75th Anniversary Exhibition, December 13, 2025 through January 27, 2026, TIBOR DE NAGY Gallery, 11 Rivington St., New York, NY 10002, Tel. 212 262 5050
https://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions
My first solo exhibition of illuminated manuscripts IN PARIS opens at Le Clezio Gallery March 5, 2026, on view through April 17, 2026. https://www.lecleziogallery.com/
157, rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, 75008 Paris
The first exhibitions of the manuscripts were in 2024 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in NY, and Wasserman Projects in Detroit!
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15. Pat Oleszko, FF Alumn, at Art Basel, Miami Beach, FL, Dec. 3-7
PAT OLESZKO
at
Art Basel Miami Beach 2025
Survey | Booth S17
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
December 3 – 7, 2025
VIP Preview: Wednesday, December 3/Thursday, December 4 | 11am-7pm
Request a Preview
For the upcoming edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the gallery is pleased to present a Survey booth foregrounding American artist Pat Oleszko’s life-long endeavor of absurdity through resurfacing Big Foots (1995), a pivotal large-scale inflatable work, shown alongside her sculptural hats from the era. In the early 1970s while studying at University of Michigan, amongst male peers who had been trained in welding and joinery, Oleszko was confronted with collapses of her sculptural work in traditional materials. Realizing her armatures could be her body and air itself, Oleszko subverted the phenomena of humiliation, reconfiguring herself into monumental works. “I was six feet tall and could carry anything I could make and not fall over. At that moment, my art walked out the door and I began using all the world as a stooge. Everything became a platform.” (Interview with Gyula Muskovics for The Kitchen, August 2024).
Working in disregard for any and all divide, Oleszko’s practice bleeds into everything. What she refers to as “pedestrian art” is sprawled across costuming, large-scale installation, theater, protest, and burlesque. Her wearable works and inflatables appear not only as standalone sculptures but as the attractors in performances and characters in her video works, seducing the viewer through a rigorous developed language of pun populating Pat’s planet.
Seeing any restriction as an opportunity for derision whilst seeking solutions to spatial concerns, what could be deemed “women’s work” of textile fabrication led to her splicing and sewing of swathing nylon fabric, powered by ad-hoc motors, vacuums, and fans. It was through these means that works grew in spite of the architectural confines of her home-studio— the uninflated works compress down to the size of a shoebox, allowing her to operate at the scale of giants without the consequence of storage.
Big Foots (1995) was first presented as a part of the Errant Space Museum, a show of inflatables at Hallwalls, Buffalo. Another iteration was in House of Alice at Pilchuk, WA, where they were installed as a standalone sculpture emerging out of a house’s windows. Big Foots also appeared in the performance Roamin’ Holiday at PS1, NYC and continued to be used in ever-evolving performance works, such as Rampant Inflation at the University Art Gallery of California State University; Air Today Gone Tomorrow at The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and The Fool Emporium (First Night) at Plaza Castle, Boston. Oftentimes these performances would commence with Pat et al. perched as ventriloquists on the towering legs. In that instance, the object of creation drives the artist’s choices, movements, and speech—with this, Oleszko’s interests in the body as a vehicle for absurdity are pushed to defiant proportions.
Oleszko’s prerogative of play continues to happen across scale, urging the participation of antagonists, onlookers, and admirers alike. In accordance with this philosophy, the gallerists in the booth will wear sculptures in the form of hats, another long-standing component of her all-encompassing practice. The hats function as a drawing practice for performances; Oleszko sees an idea starting from the top of the head, which then informs the way the rest of the elements take shape. Across Pat’s pursuits, we can begin to grasp a consequence of comedy—the result is either neglected entirely or is placed at the forefront. It could be a failure to assimilate or, it could be freedom.
Pat Oleszko (b. 1947, Detroit, MI) received her BFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since the early 1970s, she has staged exhibitions and performances at institutions such as Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Performance Space 122 (New York), Museum of Contemporary Craft (now Museum of Art and Design, New York), P.S. 1 (Queens), Lincoln Center (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Civitella Ranieri (Umbertide, Italy), Neuberger Museum (Purchase), Rauschenberg
Foundation (Captiva), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington D.C.), and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut (New York); amongst others. She was the recipient of the Rome Prize in 1998, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990. In January 2026, SculptureCenter will present the artist’s first comprehensive institutional survey of her practice. Oleszko lives and works in New York City.
For more information, please contact gallery@davidpeterfrancis.com
David Peter Francis
35 East Broadway #3F
New York, NY 10002
(646) 669-7064
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm
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16. Ralston Farina, FF Alumn, at Artists Space, Manhattan, opening Dec. 11
Ralston Farina
Time // Time
Opening Thursday, December 11th, 6–8pm
December 11, 2025 – February 21, 2026
Artists Space presents the first exhibition dedicated to the elusive artist Ralston Farina (1946–1985), drawn from his recently-discovered archive. Foundational to the emergence of Downtown performance art in the 1970s, Farina developed novel techniques and theories for composing with time, grounded in his exhaustive inquiry into the affective dimensions of audience response. Working in close proximity to artists like Laurie Anderson and his mentor John Cage, Farina articulated his concept of “Time Time.” Across clandestine and public locations, like storefront windows, as well as throughout the era’s emerging alternative venues, his performances sought to program memory itself.
Farina began honing his stagecraft early in life as a child magician and mentalist in Philadelphia. These formative studies of magic, mystification, and methods of misdirection remained core to his ethos as a New York underground performer. Inspired by Ernie Kovacs’s prankish and surreal televised performances, pop art’s recasting of branding and advertising (note his pastiche alias), and heady theories of time-consciousness espoused by philosophers Bergson, Wittgenstein, and Husserl, he publicly manifested the mechanistic and residual possibilities of art performance.
Playing with audience anticipation and expectation, Farina developed arcane systems by which theatrical sequences of actions and object manipulations could be mapped and modeled using various philosophical, mathematical, and aesthetic notions of time. His aim was to maximize surprise through timing so that experience itself, and his artistry, would appear as an object shaped within memory. As Farina stated: “My medium is time. The materials I work with, the objects and images, are merely moments of punctuation, phrasing and articulation. The intended image is timing. The intended object is the time. The result is novelty phenomena.”
Farina was a bonafide showman boldly assured of his originality yet deeply fearful of his trade secrets being ripped off. His career-long mandate against documentation was by design; nonetheless, significant traces of performances do exist in a comprehensive archive, preserved by the artist’s close friends. It contains evidence of his studies in advanced mathematics and work with early computer technologies, private writings on time, diagrammatic compositions of his performances, as well as correspondences, props, and autonomous artworks he termed “time objects.” These materials offer a dense portrait of Farina’s life as an illusionist and artist whose homespun aesthetic was inflected by the most cutting-edge thinking of his era.
Biography
Beginning in 1965, Ralston Farina presented performances at venues such as the The Poetry Project, Artists Space, the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta 6, the Paris Biennale, Princeton University, and the American Center in Paris. He was the inventor of time-art performance. In an overview of performance art written for Soho Weekly News, critic John Howell noted that, “As I look back over the ’70s, Ralston Farina stands out as an innovator, Chaplinesque and delightful.” John Cage wrote that “His work is strong and beautiful; it comes across as a vision.”
Accessibility
Artists Space is fully accessible via a wheelchair lift and automated door in front of the entrance on 80 White Street. The cellar gallery can be accessed via the ground floor elevator. Artists Space welcomes assistance dogs, and has wheelchair accessible non-gender-segregated toilet facilities. If you have any further questions about access please email info@artistsspace.org.
Supporters
Lead support for Ralston Farina: Time // Time is provided by Arison Art Foundation.
SSupport for Artists Space exhibitions and programs is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Keith Haring Foundation, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, Lotos Foundation, The David Rockefeller Fund, and the Friends of Artists Space.
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For subscriptions, un-subscriptions, queries and comments, please email mail@franklinfurnace.org
Join Franklin Furnace today:
https://franklinfurnace.org/membership/
Goings On for Artists is compiled weekly by Rohan Subramaniam, Archive Intern, 2024/2025
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