NEW YORK: Xaviera Simmons

CODED

June 22 - July 29, 2016

THE KITCHEN  

512 West 19th Street

New York, NY

From thekitchen.org:

The Kitchen is pleased to present CODED, an exhibition of works by Xaviera Simmons featuring new and recent photographic, audio, video, text-based sculptural work and ultimately a movement-based performance. Her dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to art-making is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, and present and future histories, specifically focusing on shifting notions surrounding landscape and character, as well as conversations between formal processes.

With CODED, Simmons continues to mine art historical sources, Internet media, and archival images, in this case as they relate to queer history, homoerotic imagery as well as Jamaican dancehall culture, to construct a new, cohesive conceptual territory. Simmons’ particular vocabulary of movement, reference, sense, text, breath, sound, and image offers ways of looking at mapping, sexuality, gender, pleasure, and sensuality in a queer context and in an island context. The exhibition is the foundation for a unique choreographic score for the forthcoming performance work. Through the sensual, through movement, her works push towards a committed practice of visual freedom.

Exhibit link

NEW YORK: Lorraine O'Grady

Lorraine O'Grady. Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in White continues grating coconut (1982/2015), Digital C-print in 48 parts, 16h x 20w inches.
Edition of 8 with 2 APs. Image via alexandergray.com.

May 28 - June 27, 2015

Opening reception: Thursday, May 28, 2015, 6-8pm

ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES

510 West 26th Street

New York, NY

From alexandergray.com:

Alexander Gray Associates presents an exhibition of artworks by Lorraine O’Grady, focusing on two early series that are foundations for O’Grady’s performance and critical development, representing two approaches to finding one’s personal and artistic self. The exhibition debuts photographs of O’Grady’s performance work, Rivers, First Draft (1982/2015) and features selections from her first collages Cutting Out The New York Times (1977/2015). The works reveal the artist’s nuanced perspectives on art history—specifically Dada and Surrealism— and the topical issues of the late-1970s and early 1980s, when Multiculturalism and Feminism were articulated and tested in the art world. Typical for O’Grady’s practice, complex theoretical concerns collide with the mining of family history, and the works from this period result in deeply personal portraits of the artist’s community and values, taking form in New York—the city, its art world, and its media.

The exhibition includes a selection of collaged poems from the series, Cutting Out The New York Times. The series was created over twenty-six consecutive Sundays during the summer of 1977, resulting in twenty-six text-based images assembled from headlines and advertising tag-lines. O’Grady explains, “I would smoosh the cut scraps around on the floor until a poem appeared.” At that time, O’Grady was teaching the course “Futurist, Dada and Surrealist Literature” at the School of Visual Arts in New York, while simultaneously exploring alternative avenues of creative fulfillment and expression. Her interest lay in challenging the Dadaists’ and Surrealists’ embrace of the random and irrational as oppositional attitudes to rational Western society, O’Grady welcomed the random in order to expose and force meaning back into it, making instead “an effort to construct out of that random public language a private-self, to rescue a kind of rational madness from the irrational Western culture I felt inundated by.” Reproductions of the original collages are applied directly to the wall, moving the word from the page to three-dimensional space, further developing an aesthetic exercise, exploring a means of visual and performative expression beyond the purely linguistic. Relating the poems to Concrete Poetry, O’Grady creates their visuality through the linear and syncopating placement of the cut-outs. The juxtapositions of size and style between the typefaces add to the collages’ visual rhythm. The poems themselves touch on themes such as love, family, womanhood, hybridity, race, and self, subjects that would unfold in O’Grady’s subsequent performances and artworks.

Also included in the exhibition is an installation of the photographic series Rivers, First Draft (1982/2015), including forty-eight images of the 1982 performance O’Grady created for the public art program, “Art Across the Park.” Rivers, First Draft was performed in the Loch, a northern section of Central Park, on August 18 and was envisioned by O’Grady as a “collage-in-space,” with different actions taking place simultaneously on two sides of a stream and further up a hill. She describes the performance’s structure as a “three-ring circus,” in which multiple temporalities and micro-narratives coexist and speak to O’Grady’s life experiences. The narratives that compete for attention present multiple realities with the aim of uniting two different heritages, the Caribbean and New England, and three different ages and aspects of O’Grady’s self, family dynamics, and artistic identity. As O’Grady states, “In my work I keep trying to yoke together my underlying concerns as member of the human species with my concerns as a black woman in America… because I don’t see how history can be divorced from ontogeny and still produce meaningful political solutions.” The piece was performed only once, for a small invited audience of friends from Just Above Midtown gallery and the occasional passersby. It involved seventeen performers, including O’Grady, with precisely designed costumes and props. The characters were designated by their vibrantly colored clothing, such as the Woman in Red (O’Grady’s adult self), the Woman in White (O’Grady’s mother), the Teenager in Magenta (O’Grady’s adolescent self), the Young Man in Green, and the Black Male Artists in Yellow. Performed in the daylight, the lush green sun-dappled nature of the Loch was a prominent backdrop, adding to the conglomeration of saturated color and sound. O’Grady’s succinct selection and cropping of images reflect this simultaneity and the dream-like quality of the original performance. Only Kodachrome 35 mm slides of the piece survive to memorialize the event. In collaboration with Kodak, the 2015 manifestation of Rivers, First Draft captures the rich colors and deep contrasts of the performance, achieved with analog and digital technology and photographic paper from Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, NY. For O’Grady, “The paper and the process created a perfect expression of the here and then of this new/old work.”

Exhibit Link

PERFORMANCE: Gordon Skinner / Bridgeport, CT

SOCIETY FUCT

Saturday, March 7, 2015, 6:30-8:30pm

CITY LIGHTS GALLERY

37 Markle Court

Bridgeport, CT

Gordon Skinner's first Performance Art piece SOCIETY FUCT is a unique work inspired by a zine he created of the same title and made in collaboration with award winning poets Tenisi Davis and Attallah Sheppard. The result is a powerful unapologetic interpretation of visual art that combines the elements of poetry, theater and social commentary as one body of work.  

Bob Albert, a representative for Skinner states,  “This is not something you want to miss and is something that truly has to be experienced to gain a grasp of the concept. Gordon is in a very interesting space creatively.  He's been exploring processes outside of what he's done previously while still maintaining the integrity of his artistic hand. I would say many of his newer pieces are more conceptual in nature, experimenting with unconventional materials and even working in three dimensional space. You don't want to miss this part of his evolution as an artist, a work that has been cultivated over several months and an extension of his practice in a different form in collaboration with other artists.”

SOCIETY FUCT will be performed ONE TIME ONLY.

Zines and audio art pieces with original collages inspired by the performance will be available for purchase.  

SAN FRANCISCO: M. Lamar

Detail of video still from M. Lamar’s Badass Nigga, the Charlie Looker of Psalm Zero Remix, 2013; HD video, sound, 5 minutes; image via sfai.edu. 

NEGROGOTHIC

January 30 – February 28, 2015

Opening reception: Friday, January 30, 2015, 7:00 – 9:00PM

RSVP online here

SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE

Walter and McBean Galleries

800 Chestnut Street

San Francisco, CA

From sfai.edu:

M. Lamar’s exhibition NEGROGOTHIC strips the American enterprise to its hard-core components of race, sexuality, violence, and optimism. In imagery that links the histories of slavery and Robert Mapplethorpe, and through sound that connects Lamar’s operatic counter-tenor with doom metal, the artist offers a searing and soaring portrait of the contemporary United States.

Through an immersive video projection, a haunting soundtrack, large-scale prints, and sculptural props, Lamar unveils a stunning, epic vision of black male figures in transition. Lamar’s expansive narrative draws from his own African American heritage, and performs a cultural grand tour that bridges the slave ship and bondage imagery, lynchings with capital punishment, and the Negro spiritual and contemporary protest. In this fearlessly constructed landscape, Lamar projects ecstatic resistance toward both the subjugated and essentialized black male.

Here we witness the violence of our past, freedoms of the present, alongside the ongoing inability of the American justice system to materially protect black youth. Lamar painfully evokes injustice, even as he occupies the transcendent, empowered role of the diva.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

M. Lamar works across opera, metal, performance, video, and sculpture to craft sprawling narratives of racial and sexual transformation. Lamar holds a BFA from SFAI and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at Participant Inc., New York; New Museum, New York; Södra Teatern, Stockholm; Warehouse9, Copenhagen; WWDIS Fest, Gothenburg and Stockholm; The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany; Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York; Performance Space 122, New York; and African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco; among others. Lamar has had many years of classical vocal study with Ira Siff, among others; and is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant 2013–14. He recently performed the pre-transition role of Sophia, alongside his twin sister Laverne Cox, in Orange Is the New Black.

Exhibit/Related Events Link 


Southern Gothic and Goth-Kid Makeup: M. Lamar on Racialized Art and Leather 


Fully Cocked: Provocateur M. Lamar Reclaims African-American Male Masculinity in New Show


M. Lamar's Art of Race, Sex and Bondage: Laverne Cox's Brother Is 'Glad' He Isn't Her

LONDON: Senga Nengudi

Senga Nengudi, R.S.V.P.Reverie "Scribe" (detail), 2014, Nylon mesh, sand and found metals. 94 x 54 x 67 inches. Image via whitecube.com. 

Alt

November 26, 2014 – January 18, 2015

WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY

144 – 152 Bermondsey Street

London, UK

From whitecube.com:

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Senga Nengudi. Nengudi’s pioneering art, developed over a 40-year long career, seamlessly traverses the disciplines of visual arts, dance, and spirituality while at the same time, eloquently dealing with such powerful themes as race, gender and culture. This exhibition, Nengudi’s first ever solo presentation in the UK, will include a selection ranging from the mid-1970s to newly produced ‘Reverie’ works.

Nengudi first came to prominence in the 1970s when she was a Los Angeles-based artist affiliated with Studio Z. This radical group of African-American artists were distinguished by their experimental and improvisational practice, and included amongst them David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, with whom Nengudi frequently collaborated.

Nengudi’s output has always been wide-ranging, although she is perhaps best known for her sculptures and choreographed performances – sometimes merging the two together – which encouraged an active involvement on the part of the viewer. Her free-form, abstract and biomorphic ‘soft’ sculptures incorporated a variety of found materials (such as nylon mesh tights or ‘pantyhose’, everyday objects or masking tape) as well as natural materials like sand or rock. As part of this practice, in the mid-1970s she produced the ‘R.S.V.P.’ series; works that used nylon tights – a material associated with a gendered, female body – stretched, twisted and knotted and then filled with sand. Hung on the wall but stretching out three-dimensionally into the gallery space, the materiality of these sculptures suggests skin, breasts, or bodily organs and places an emphasis on the performative body through its palpable sense of tactility.

Nengudi’s performances, which incorporate sculptural objects with real bodies – either her own or those of others – are powerfully engaging. In R.S.V.P., performed with Maren Hassinger, Nengudi utilised movement to explore ‘feminist issues … a sense of body, how body issues related to self-esteem and self-acceptance … also entanglements – being entangled by my stuff and stretching oneself beyond your limits.’ While it can clearly be positioned in relation to both Minimalism and Feminism, Nengudi’s work resists any defined political or ethnic content, but rather, evokes the fragility and resilience of both mind and body.

Senga Nengudi was born in 1943 in Chicago. She studied in both Los Angeles and Japan, and currently lives and works in Colorado. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Solo exhibitions include Senga Nengudi: The Material Body, MCA Denver and Senga Nengudi: The Performing Body, Redline Gallery, Denver (both 2014). Recent important group exhibitions include Blues for Smoke, Whitney Museum and MoCA, Los Angeles (2012-13); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2012); Now Dig This – Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and MoMA PS1, New York (2011-12) and ‘Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution’, MoCA, Los Angeles (2007).

Exhibit Link

MINNEAPOLIS: Radical Presence - Black Performance in Contemporary Art

Senga Nengudi, RSVP, 1975-77. Maren Hassinger performance at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, November 17, 2012.
Photo: Max Fields. Image via walkerart.org.

July 24, 2014 – January 4, 2015

WALKER ART CENTER

1750 Hennepin Avenue

Minneapolis, MN

From walkerart.org:

This groundbreaking exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of performance art by black artists working from the perspective of the visual arts from the 1960s to the present. While black performance has been largely contextualized as an extension of theater, visual artists have integrated performance into their work for more than five decades, generating an important history that has gone largely unrecognized until now.

Presenting a rich and complex look at this important facet of contemporary art, the exhibition chronicles the emergence and development of black performance art across three generations, beginning with Fluxus and conceptual art in the early 1960s through present-day practices. Featuring more than 100 works by some 36 artists, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art includes video and photo documentation of performances, scores and installations, interactive works, and artworks created as a result of performative actions. A dynamic range of performances, actions, and discussions will accompany the exhibition’s run at the Walker. Catalogue available.

Organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH).

Radical Presence Press Release

Exhibit Link

PERFORMANCE: Lawrence Graham-Brown

Omnia Vanitas

“Lamentation” – Friday, June 27, 2014, 8pm

“Joy” – Saturday, June 28, 2014, 8pm

This is a nude performance

General admission: $20

THE PERFORMING GARAGE

33 Wooster Street

New York, NY

Lawrence Graham-Brown’s Omina Vanitas is a live art performance diptych spanning two nights. Aural and scent-laden, Omina Vanitas explores the conduct of vanity and the effects and repercussions of it on gay culture.

Lawrence Graham Brown – OMNIA VANITAS - The Performing Garage from The Wooster Group on Vimeo.

Event Link

Ticket Link

APPOINTED: Thomas J. Lax

Thomas J. Lax photographed by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Image via galleristnyc.com.

Former Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem is now Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at Museum of Modern Art

From MoMA press release posted on May 12, 2014:

The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Thomas J. Lax as Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art.  In this role, Mr. Lax will work on a wide range of exhibitions, acquisitions, and performance and screening events. He joins MoMA after seven years at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he was Assistant Curator. While at the Studio Museum, Mr. Lax organized over a dozen exhibitions as well as numerous live performances and public programs, focusing especially on performance art, dance and video, and socially engaged practices in all media. Mr. Lax will join the Museum in late August.

“Thomas brings an array of interests that will position him as an exciting collaborator both with artists and with curators across the Museum,” said Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA. “He has been a dynamic part of the Studio Museum’s remarkable programming, and we look forward to bringing his energy and vision to MoMA.”

Most recently, Mr. Lax organized the Studio Museum exhibitions When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014) and the Studio Museum’s presentation of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2013). In 2008, he developed and launched the Museum’s VideoStudio program, an ongoing series of exhibitions of time-based art; in 2011, he initiated Studio Lab, a think tank and short-term residency program for ideas in formation. At the Studio Museum, he has also organized Ayé A. Aton: Space-Time Continuum (2013); the New York presentation of David Hartt: Stray Light (2013); Fore (2012, with Lauren Haynes and Naima J. Keith); Ralph Lemon: 1856 Cessna Road (2012); Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait (2011); a collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, New York, OFF/SITE (2010); Mark Bradford: Alphabet (2010); Kalup Linzy: If it Don’t Fit (2009); among others.

“I am thrilled to be transitioning from one world-class institution to another,” Mr. Lax said. “I am looking forward to working with a fantastic team of colleagues, the Museum’s esteemed permanent collection, as well as artists and thinkers living across the globe at this exciting moment in the Museum’s history.”

He has contributed to artist monographs locally and internationally for venues including Artists Space, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; MoMA PS1, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is a contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, and Mousse.

He has lectured widely at institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2014); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Columbia University, New York (2013); the Jeu de Paume, Paris, (2013); the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (2013); New York Live Arts (2012); and Danspace Project, New York (2012 and 2014).

Mr. Lax is a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts; on the Advisory Committee of the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics; on the Arts Advisory Committee of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; a member of the Catalyst Circle at The Laundromat Project; and on the Advisory Board of Recess.

He received his AB from Brown University and his MA in Modern Art from Columbia University. A lifelong resident of New York City, Mr. Lax currently resides in Brooklyn.

Source Link

NEW YORK: Adrian Piper

Image via elizabethdee.com. © the gallery and the artist(s).

Adrian Piper: The Probable Trust Registry

May 3 – May 31, 2014

ELIZABETH DEE

545 West 20^th Street

New York, NY

Elizabeth Dee press release via galleriesnow.net:

Elizabeth Dee proudly presents The Probable Trust Registry, a new installation and participatory group performance by Adrian Piper. Piper’s work stages an environment for the potential of collective exchange in the form of personal declarations that become part of an enduring and ongoing artwork.

 

For this exhibition, the main gallery is transformed into three corporate reception environments drawn from universal work culture. Each reception area is fully staffed by a volunteer administrator who helps to execute personal declaration contracts to a self-selecting public. Above each reception desk exists a different personal declaration affixed in gold to the stereotypical grey walls. These “Rules of the Game” are mirrored in the corresponding contract on the desk, each desk/contract respectively with one of the three rules:

I will always be too expensive to buy

I will always mean what I say

I will always do what I say I am going to do

Engagement with Piper’s interactive installation offers the possibility to assess one’s own philosophical obligations and to reevaluate complicit relationships to others. The Rules of the Game is an introspective catalyst to personally audit the question of the declaration’s potential for success or failure on both a personal and collective level. Piper’s new installation engages the public with sharp clarity and perception.

Signatories that sign the Personal Declarations will assist to participate in an ongoing artwork by Adrian Piper and have the option to contact one another if mutually agreed. Following the close of the exhibition, the gallery will send The Probable Trust Registry consisting in bound photocopies of all personal declarations filed in The Rules of the Game to all and only its signatories. These documents become part of the APRA Foundation Berlin confidential inventory and are sealed to the public for 100 years following the closing date of the exhibition.

Since the late 1960s, Adrian Piper has forged a unique artistic practice that infused classical Minimal sculptural form with explicit political content and introduced issues of race, gender and identity politics into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. She has deployed performance, permutation and seriation—which at the time that Piper began using them were considered non-traditional artistic media—as strategies for investigating the infinite variability of perceptual form and content. In recent years, her artwork has begun to intersect more explicitly with her philosophical work, resulting in a reconsideration of space, time, and infinity in defining the limits and potential permutability of the self as situated on a pre-established grid defined by social and political variables of race, sex, class conflict, and social relations.

This is Adrian Piper’s third solo exhibition with Elizabeth Dee, following the acclaimed 2010 historical exhibition, Past Time: Selected works 1973-1995, which honored Piper with the CAA (College Art Association) Award. She has shown extensively for the past five decades in solo and group contexts and has been the subject of numerous survey exhibitions including Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2003); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2002); New Museum, New York (2000); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2000); Kunstverein München, Munich (1992); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (1991); and Alternative Museum, New York (1987).

A forthcoming monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. will feature essays by Diarmuid Costello, Helmut Draxler, and Jörg Heiser in 2015.

Exhibit Link

Adrian Piper to Stage Participatory Piece at Elizabeth Dee

Call for Volunteer Administrators

PERFORMANCE: EJ Hill / Los Angeles, CA / April 10, 2014

EJ Hill, still from live performance of Drawn, 2011. Photo by Matt Austin via thepresenttense.org.

EJ Hill: Complicit and Tacit

Curated by Laura Watts for Have At It performance series

Thursday, April 10, 2014, 7 - 9pm

HONOR FRASER GALLERY

2622 South La Cienega Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA

From honorfraser.com:

Through the presentation of a simple gesture, EJ Hill will conduct an open-ended experiment designed around ideas of shame, guilt, the politics of viewership, the conventions of performance, and the ever-contested space between art and life.

EJ Hill is a Los Angeles-based artist known for his durational, physically demanding performances. Hill's performances often possess an element of institutional critique or are direct in their address of politics around constructed identity and the body in gendered, racial and sexualized terms. Hill graduated from the New Genres program at UCLA in 2013 and obtained his BFA from Columbia College in Chicago. He has presented solo and group exhibitions at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; RAID Projects, Los Angeles; NEXT Fair, Chicago; and A+D Gallery, Chicago.

About Have At It performance event

Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to host its third annual performance event, Have At It. In collaboration with this year's artists, the gallery explores the tension between the inherent structure and chaos at work in live performance and how much more vulnerable that tension is to be being misperceived by the viewer in performance than it is in the visual arts. For example, in looking at painting, the parameters of the viewing experience are familiar, while in performance, the careful considerations and practice of ideas over time may not be as evident or discernible. As the only commercial gallery with a recurring performance program in Culver City, Honor Fraser Gallery is committed to providing time and space to investigate how performance functions and intersects with the performative acts of making and viewing art

Event Link

SIGNED: Jason Moran

Jason Moran performing the Fats Waller Dance Party at Harlem Stage Gatehouse, NYC, 2011. Photo by Eric Sandler via revive-music.com.

Luhring Augustine announces gallery representation of jazz pianist, composer, and performance artist.

Jason Moran's rich and varied body of work is actively shaping the current and future landscape of jazz. His activity stretches beyond the many recordings and performances with masters of the form including Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers, and his work with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records. 

The scope of Moran’s partnerships and music-making with venerated and iconic visual artists is extensive. He has collaborated with such major figures as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker; commissioning institutions of Moran’s work include the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. 

Moran has a long-standing collaborative practice with his wife, the singer and Broadway actress Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of live music. BLEED explored the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, and it was widely hailed as groundbreaking in the music and performance realm.

Moran’s upcoming ventures include the world premiere of Looks of a Lot, a site-specific performance at Chicago Symphony Center with Theaster Gates in May 2014, and an appearance with The Bandwagon at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in April in conjunction with the museum’s Carrie Mae Weems exhibition. Moran’s new recording, All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller, will be released in September by Blue Note Records. 

Moran was born in Houston, TX in 1975 and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Jaki Byard. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. Moran currently teaches at the New England Conservatory.

Gallery site

EVENT: From Niggas to Gods – An Afrofuturism Multi-media Performance Art Show / Baltimore, MD / March 29, 2014

Afrofuturism in Baltimore!

Saturday, March 29, 2014, 7pm to midnight

Doors open at 7pm, Show starts at 8pm

Admission: $10.00

THE WAREHOUSE BALTIMORE

1400 Warner Street B

Baltimore, MD

Bridging AfroFuturism elements that are based in music, art, and technology with philosophies written in “From Niggas to Gods” this event will explore the transformative idea of discovering and identifying with one’s “God-self”.

This creative celebration is designed to connect attendees to their personal Divine Source through music and art. There will be a beat showcase from Moor Mother Goddess, performances from, Yo Slick, Eze Jackson, Greenspan, Voice, Jamal Loving aka Blaqstarr, Lotus Song and The Black Light Asylum. In addition to the performances, we will be featuring a large scale interactive art installation by BlackShesus and a bevy of original art by Cleatress. Soundtrack of the night by Dj Shawn Smallwood.

Afro-Futurism enthusiasts are encouraged to come dressed as their God-self and others to come with an open mind with the intention of being inspired. This event will be covered by invited bloggers, videographers and photographers.

Spread the word about this event on your social networks using the #FNTG

Facebook Invite

EXHIBIT/PERFORMANCE: Rashaad Newsome

Detail from Rashaad Newsome, FIVE (Biennial), 2010. Image courtesy of The Drawing Center, NY.

FIVE (The Drawing Center)

March 6 – 11, 2014

Performance: Thursday, March 6 at 6:30pm

Event is free, but an RSVP is required. Please email info@drawingcenter.org

THE DRAWING CENTER

35 Wooster Street

New York, NY

The Drawing Center will present FIVE (The Drawing Center), a multimedia performance that highlights the art of vogue, a dance form characterized by angular and linear body movements and the assumption of a series of rigid poses inspired by the stylized poses of high fashion models on the catwalk and in the pages of magazines. As Newsome's work illuminates, it also evokes a number of qualities long associated with the medium of drawing: the latter's emphasis on repeated gestures; its mapping of time and space.

For FIVE (The Drawing Center), New York-based vogue dancers and musicians, including renowned opera singer Stefanos Koroneoss and distinguished vogue commentator Kevin Jz Prodigy, will perform and be conducted by Newsome. The artist challenges the ephemeral nature of live performance by employing a specially designed motion-tracking software (that traces flashes of color in real time), translating the dancers’ dexterous gestures into colorful linear abstractions that will appear on his laptop during the performance via live video feed and subsequently be

printed as works on paper. In addition to the evening performance, The Drawing Center’s presentation will feature video documentation from FIVE (ARTHK), originally performed at the 2012 Hong Kong International Art Fair, as well as five multi-colored drawings from that performance. Produced by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.

ABOUT RASHAAD NEWSOME

Rashaad Newsome (b. 1979, New Orleans, Louisiana) earned his BFA from Tulane University in New Orleans in 2001. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA (2013), The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2011), The Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, NY (2010), and has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012), The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012), MoMA PS1, New York (2010), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010). Newsome was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011 and the SVA/LMCC Visiting Artist Award in 2008.

PUBLICATION

To accompany FIVE (The Drawing Center), The Drawing Center will produce an edition in the Drawing Papers series that will include an introduction by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow and an essay by Evan Garza, an independent curator and co-founder and Assistant Director of Fire Island Artist Residency, as well as a selection of color images from the artist’s previous performances and drawings produced from those performances.

CREDITS

Rashaad Newsome: FIVE (The Drawing Center) is made possible through the generous support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Program, which supports risk-taking and innovative collaborations in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg

EVENT LINK

PERFORMANCE: Clifford Owens

Clifford Owens, still from performance of Tell Me What To Do With Myself, 2005 via whitney-white.com.

Five Days’ Worth

Curated by Adrienne Edwards

November 18 – 22, 2013

THIRD STREAMING

10 Greene Street, 2^nd Floor

New York, NY

In conjunction with the traveling exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Performa13, and Third Streaming, Clifford Owens will present Five Days’ Worth, a new performance art project for which he will create a unique performance each day for five consecutive days; November 18 – November 22, 2013.

While conceived as one art work, Five Days’ Worth is structured in five parts, each of which is realized on a different day over the course of a week: In the Dark, Waiting for David (Hammons), Letters from My Lovers, Dad, and Come to Me. The project is a point of departure for the artist as it will be realized outside of the white cube space of a gallery or museum, as is typically the context for Owens’ performances. Instead, the artist will respond to Third Streaming’s intimate loft setting. Five Days’ Worth is also Owens’ most personal work to date as he creates distinct yet related performances which explore various personal themes of emotional, inspirational, and artistically influential importance. Throughout the project, Owens activates objects, and stages conflicts and resolutions, which accumulate and crescendo in the culminating performance through a series of participatory actions with the audience. As in previous bodies of work, such as Photographs with an Audience (2008-) and Anthology (2011-2012), Owens will use the occasion and context of the project as the basis for a new series of photographs, videos, and sound works.

Performances are free to the public but RSVP is required; please send to info@thirdstreaming.com

Performance titles and dates:

In the Dark

Monday, November 18 2013, 8:00PM-10PM

Waiting for David (Hammons)

Tuesday, November 19, 12:00AM-2:00AM
Note: This event is not open to the public.

Letters from my Lovers

Wednesday, November 20, 7:30PM-8:30PM

Dad

Thursday, November 21, 7:30PM-8:30PM

Come to Me

Friday, November 22, 7:30PM-9:30PM
Note: For admission to Come to Me, attendees are required to bring an object, a text, or an instruction for Owens to perform.

Performance Link