On November 16, 2023, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm ET at the Alumni Reading Room of Pratt Institute Library, Franklin Furnace unveiled the 2023-24 FF FUND for Performance Art recipients.
This event offered a special chance to applaud the ten fundwinners of this year and introduce them to a broader audience.
Each artist shared details about their newly funded projects, shedding light on the inspirations, thought processes, and methods that shape their upcoming performances.
Emcees Martha Wilson and Harley Spiller, special guest and FF alumn Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, panelists Arantxa Araujo, Jill McDermid, and Angel Nevarez, along with the general public attended in person. Franklin Furnace and Pratt Institute are proud to host this exceptional annual opportunity to connect with emerging and top-tier performance artists.
For both in-person and virtual participants, RSVP was encouraged for visitors from outside the Pratt campus. Friends and family were warmly invited to join us in celebrating this evening.
Video documentation of the November 16, 2023, (6:30-8:30 pm ET) event of Past, Present & Future IX. Recorded on Zoom, edited by Xinan Ran
2023-24 Recipients
This season marks the 38th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace FUND. Initiated in 1985 with the support of Jerome Foundation, Franklin Furnace has annually awarded grants to early career artists selected by peer panel review to enable them to prepare major performance art works in New York. This season, Franklin Furnace received 252 applications.
This year’s peer artist review panel met on July 18, 19, and 20, 2023 and decided to award five $5,900 and five 4,000 grants from support Franklin Furnace received from Jerome Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the members and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive.
Lina Azalea
Artist Website: https://www.linaazalea.com/
Project Description
“Light Meditation” is an evening length, multimedia dance work. The work uses lighted garments (such as dresses embedded with LED lights), projections, props, sculpture, and live sound. “Light Meditation” seeks to develop a novel visual language that uses light, or lack of, to reveal qualities, geometries, and truths about moving bodies that would otherwise not be observed.
Biography
Lina Azalea is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and event producer based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. She specializes in multi-media performance and dance event creation. She uses movement, garments, sound, lighting, sculpture, and video art to alchemize a visualization of invisible forces, magnify locational essences, and manifest subconscious visions. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, ROSEKILL, Glasshouse Project, Green Kill, Trans-Pecos, Groundswell Series, Terrain Exhibitions, and more. She views the physicality of the body as a means to democratize spirituality and events centering movement art as a vehicle to do that. In 2017, she created the dance event series BADDANCE to challenge the notion that worthiness of dance work springs from refinement and to uphold the merit of confounding, obscene, experimental, strange, and very bad dance works. In 2022, she co-founded Momenta, a monthly dance and performance art event series in residence at Trans-Pecos. Raised in New York City, she graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2018. She currently runs a part-time DIY show house, BBB House, in Kingston, NY.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Jesus Benavente
Artist Website: jesusbenavente.net
Project Description
“Paint and Pour and Pain and Poor” is a week-long performance in a rented/borrowed space in nyc. The performance takes the shape of a free to the public nightly “sip and paint” social event. However, instead of recreating an already made painting of a tree, or painting a still life. I and other hired performers will guide participants into a more deeply examined consideration of various societal issues (each night tackling a different issue). The performance turns audiences into fellow performers/artists as we guide them to consider our complicity in our social systems and provide an opportunity to collectively act.
Biography
Jesus Benavente is an amazing and attractive visual artist. Jesus earned an MFA from the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent exhibitions and performances include Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; LTD Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Performa 13, NY; Acre Projects, Chicago, IL; Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Neuberger Museum of Art, NY; Shin Museum of Art, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY and Austin Museum of Art, TX. Born in San Antonio, TX, Jesus Benavente lives/works in Brooklyn, NY. San Anto es donde está mi corazón.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Buffy
Artist Website: buffytheslut.com
Project Description
Exam. Summer 2024.
Cold steel, stripper heels, red light, neon glow, fan cam, girl dick, pill pop, pop show, tr*nny chaser, blood bath, sharp knife, electric needle, bio hack, med tech, new tits, dance sex, night music, slow death, live nudes, plastic pussy, latex grip, set list, work order, staged labor, contact high, contract no., thrust in, pull out, break open, come close, die later, buy now. buffytheslut.com/exam
Biography
Buffy is an artist and writer producing work about living horrors and dying beauties.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Monstera Deliciosa
Artist Website: www.monsteradeliciosapresents.com
Project Description
What do trans-feminine people and Mermaids have in common? Well, they’ve both historically had terrible press – damn man-eaters! Courtesy of the male gaze, mermaids have always been depicted as seductive and predatory creatures. And, in today’s world, trans-feminine people still live through a similar reputation. ‘Na Sirena’ will lure you in to witness a performance-hybrid-installation conflating these parallel herstories. You’ll hear up-close the chant of one and all mermaids, you’ll witness her strut and stumble as she swims through life, Splish Splash! You’ll be caught in a web – or fishing net – of projections, sound and installation enmeshing cultures, iconographies and folklore to celebrate trans legacy and futurity beyond the confines of white western society.
No wax earplugs needed.
Biography
My name is Monstera Deliciosa.
I am no artist, but have inhabited spaces and practices that some would call artistic.
A she-they kind of womxn, I live through the joys of trans-feminism, the perils of visibility and the paradoxes – physical and philosophical – that existing outside of the gender binary brings (boo to assimilation!). My work endeavors to articulate this all – be it through the minutia of applying lipstick while dangling from a super tall balcony or the grandeur of my sticky breath imprinted against a gallery window front. Neither here nor there, but mostly all over, Monstera tries to unsettle what is perceived as spectacular, in a balancing act between endurance and elegance, compulsion and commotion.
Hope you still like her, if you hate her!
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Shawn Escarciga
Link to the performance: https://vimeo.com/920611876
Artist Website: https://www.shawnescarciga.com/
Project Description
Admin Reveal is the continuation of a project started during the Exponential Festival 2023 bridging my online presence as Miss Lady Salad with performance work, conversation with other digital creators, and a platform for IRL and URL interfacing. The internet is a tool for facilitating IRL interactions: Admin Reveal is an ongoing project aimed at blurring the line between online and in-person, validating the performance of the hyper-online with the performativity of existing in a queerphobic, classist, and ableist world.
Biography
Shawn Escarciga is a multidisciplinary maker, administrator, and connector working between performance, collage/memes (as Miss Lady Salad), comedy, and curation. Shawn’s work has explored labor and class; questioning value systems and hierarchies; and ways to balance being silly with tangible moves towards equity and care. Shawn thinks a lot about classism, visibility, access, the internet, intimacy amongst f-slurs, communication, being a little shit, and what it would be like to live in a country that supports non-commercial artists and poor people.
Their work has been seen throughout galleries, museums, sex parties, and DIY spaces across New York City, domestically, and abroad. They are a staff member of Visual AIDS, the founder and co-leader of the NYC Low-Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund, and also provide pro-bono fundraising support for queer artists across the country.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Flowers in the Basement
Project Description
“Flowers in the Basement” (FITB) is a multidisciplinary collective of artists specifically formed to both create a new original performance piece, and to speculate on radical alternatives to our current forms of reproductive labor. Using the “demon text” of second wave feminism, “The Dialectic of Sex” (Shulamith Firestone, 1970), as a jumping off point, the project offers an intergenerational, multiracial response to revolutionary demands for gender abolition, artificial reproduction, polyamory, child liberation, and “cybernetic communism.” The resulting performance will be structured like a variety show, with solo-authored performances by each collective member, and collaboratively devised ensemble acts.
Biography
Flowers in the Basement is the name of both a project and a collective consisting of Kite, Mel Elberg, Alisha B. Wormsley, Frances Ines Rodriguez, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Amy Ruhl formed to create new work and speculate on insurgent, utopian living. Bringing together a group of core collaborators working in vast fields of inquiry — Afrofuturism; queer, speculative, intersectional and Marxist feminisms, Lakota epistemologies; and African migration narratives — their mode of collaboration forges collectivity while respecting the autonomy of each artists’ individual praxis.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Board of Directors, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Sara Kostic
Artist Website: http://sarakostic.com/
Project Description
Tender is a performance art piece that continues my research about sugar, its history, its present, its influence on the mind and body, and as a metaphor for a consumeristic, colonial, click-bate society.
Biography
Sara Kostić (she/her) is a Serbian interdisciplinary artist whose creative practice spans the domains of performance, visual arts, and architecture. She has an academic background in architecture design and is an alumna of EmergeNYC and PerformanceHUB
Her work incorporates various phenomenology related to the social, political, and physical body, questioning the transformative relations between borders and possibilities.
She is actively involved in the international performance art scene and has performed at MoCA Belgrade (Serbia), Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy), Biennale in Mardin (Turkey), Grace Exhibition Space (New York), and others. She is holding guest lectures and workshops with a focus on site-specific performance – how architecture, its history, and use, shape the concept – at institutions and collectives such as RUFA (Rome, Italy), Magacin (Belgrade, Serbia), and others.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Elina Kulikova
Artist Website: www.elinakulikova.com
Project Description
Lost Places is an olfactory immersive performance on the issue of the politics of memory. The category of home more often appears to be a lost or forgotten space in the world which is falling apart. Especially for people who experienced exile or refuge. The show is based on 7-8 documentary stories with the focus on the psycho-geography of speakers, and invites the audience to look at their physical and emotional memories of lost homes both as a real place with some objects, smells, temperature and interior and an existential space of their identity.
Biography
Elina Kulikova, (born in St. Petersburg, Russia)— a theatre director, performance artist, and writer; a participant of international theatre festivals and laboratories. Graduated from the Liberal Arts and Sciences course at St. Petersburg State University and Bard College (NY, USA) in 2019. Based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
As a performance artist, mainly makes interactive and immersive performances and installations combining conceptual and processual approaches in the field of participatory art. She is exploring the boundaries of performative practices and creating multidisciplinary projects: performances for one viewer, weeks and months-long performances, and site-specific and digital performances.
The major theme of her political theatre is ‘a catastrophe as a principal feature of today’s time’. Elina does projects both on global aspects and individual voices raising the issues of war conflicts, social and political injustice, terrorism, and ecological and feminist utopias.
After the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she left Russia and experienced political prosecution because of her anti-war position. She has already created several anti-war performances and texts and continues reflection on these events in her work.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Nima Nikakhlagh
Artist Website: https://www.nimanikakhlagh.com/
Project Description
All Clear, a 54-year-old nude white woman wrapped with barbed wire embraced by the artist (a nude man of color). The two stand facing each other in the public space; the nudity can be obscured by the positioning of the bodies. This performance aims to force spectators, confronted with the harsh physicality of the work, to careful consideration – or re-consideration – of ongoing, unresolved, problematic societal themes. It explores the power dynamics in gender and identity politics, and cultural and legal enforcement of gender roles and gender-dependent rights, but offers many possible interpretations, limited only by the viewers’ personal experiences.
Biography
Nima Nikakhlagh is a multidisciplinary artist, native to Iran, who arrived in the United States in 2014. He is currently living and raising his daughter in Western Massachusetts. Nima’s practice concerns itself with socio-political power dynamics, political resistance, and non-violent action approached in a poetic manner. Most of his works are performance-based, and he perceives performance art as not only a form of visual art, but much more, a social-political art form and a social-political art practice. In his words, “the togetherness that performance art establishes is something truly necessary.” Nima’s works have appeared/been performed in Iran, Europe, Canada, and the United States. He has published two literary-performative books: Bodies, Languages, Truths and This Is Not a Book.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Nickolas Vaughan
Artist Website: https://www.nickolasvaughan.com/
Project Description
Let Me Check In The Back– is a hybrid, immersive solo performance set in a fictional popup clothing store. This 50 minute guided performance will take place two times throughout the course of one day and will incorporate spoken text, improv, choreographed movement, video projections and sound composition. The audience will be led into the store’s backroom, a liminal space where they will bear witness to a delayed-coming-of-age story, told from the Black queer perspective of the store’s sales associate. Using elements of Afrofuturism, this project will explore ancestral trauma, intersectionality of being black and queer, and unabashed self-love.
Biography
Nickolas Vaughan is an LA based multi-hyphenate creative artist, filmmaker, actor and producer from Mobile, Alabama. At an early age, Nickolas expressed a love for filmmaking and performing, which prompted his parents to purchase a camcorder for him to create his own films. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Howard University, he began his professional acting career in Washington, DC, where he performed extensively at prominent theaters including: The John F. Kennedy Center, Ford’s Theatre, Signature Theatre and Studio Theatre.
Nickolas later moved to New York where he utilized his skills in photo manipulation, video editing, art direction, music composition, and world building to co-create Show:UP!, an immersive, interactive, theatrical dining experience. Show:UP! has been presented in New York, Detroit and DC.
In 2019, Nickolas wrote, produced and starred in ’Til You Make It, a one-man show presented in both Los Angeles and New York. ’Til You Make It, was selected into the TAG Solo Festival at The Actors’ Group in Burbank, CA.
Nickolas took center stage again in 2022, to further explore the intricacies of black gay identity. He unveiled his latest creation, Project Nick Vaughan, at The Flea Theater. This time, his live theater showcase was a fusion of original orchestral compositions and interactive video installations.
Throughout his artistic career, Nickolas has worked behind the scenes on various television presentations including, Hart Of It All with Kevin Hart and Bruno Mars: Live at the Apollo. He is currently a producer for HBO’s Emmy & Peabody Award winning series, We’re Here and co-producer of HBO’s Rom-Doc series, Swiping America. In his “free” time, Nickolas enjoys sewing, crafting and building furniture.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
2023 Peer Review Panelists: Arantxa Araujo (Fundwinner 2019), Amy Khoshbin (Fundwinner 2017), Jill McDermid, Gylbert Coker and Angel Nevarez (Fundwinner 2006).