Join us for the closing of Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, the first solo presentation of work in New York by Alabama raised and NYC-based artist Zeelie Brown. The closing will feature a talk by Katherine Adams with Zeelie Brown and a performance by Yatta Zoker.

RSVP via Eventbrite (Recommended)

The exhibition is accompanied by an original zine publication by the artist featuring a commissioned essay by Katherine Adams and poetry by Dre Cardinal. Framed as a conversation between Brown and figures both living and historic, the solo project will include performances by Brown and guests, a public dinner, talks, and a gallery-spanning installation of lush inter-media, tactile, and sonic works that confront the intersectional realities of climate injustice, oppression, and anti-Blackness in contemporary American society. Brown focuses on the potential for transformative and restorative justice through acts of resistance and care, as a means to “(re)form the world.” Brown refuses polite forms of permission-seeking to exist and to be visible, or as Brown writes in their artist statement, “You’ll forgive me if I want to destroy things…” 

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Katherine C.M. Adams is a curator, writer, and researcher based in New York. She is currently a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (New York). At present she is a Researcher with the New Centre for Research & Practice and a Curator for The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023. Her writing has been published in FLAT Journal (UCLA), Triple Ampersand (The New Centre for Research & Practice) and Public Parking (Manitoba), among others. As an independent curator, most recently she developed an exhibition and programs for Miriam Gallery (Brooklyn).

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called "soulscapes" to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie is currently working with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in her native rural Alabama. Queer Mother's Space is their first Manhattan solo show.

Yatta Zoker (YATTA), a Houston native, has shared the stage with musicians like Cardi B and The Sun Ra Arkestra. Their 2016 debut EP, ‘Spirit Said Yes!’ was released on NYC’s imprint PTP. In 2019, YATTA released WAHALA.The album was named one of Fact Magazine’s 25 Best Albums of 2019 and one of Pitchfork’s Best Experimental Albums of 2019. Most recently, YATTA released ‘DIAL UP’ and performed selections at the Getty alongside collaborator Moor Mother’s free-jazz ensemble, Irreversible Entanglements. Yatta has performed at MOMA PS1, MOMA, New Forms Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, and NTS x The Tate virtual festival. They are a former artist-in-residence of Pioneer Works, Elsewhere Museum, Otion Front, and Flux Factory. They are a 2022 MFA Candidate at Bard College and a teaching artist in Los Angeles, CA. 

ACCESSIBILITY AND COVID-19
EFA Project Space is located on the 2nd floor of 323 West 39th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues. The building has an ADA wheelchair accessible elevator that provides access to the gallery from the ground floor. There are all-gender single stall bathrooms and an ADA approved bathroom on the 3rd floor. The space is not scent-free, but we do request that people attending come low-scent. Admission to the building does not require an ID, but you will be asked to sign-in and out to facilitate contact tracing, as necessary. The closest MTA subway station is the Port Authority A, C, E stop which is ADA wheelchair accessible. Texts and programs are in English. Large format texts can be provided with an advance request. EFA Project Space is committed to nurturing an intergenerational environment and we encourage children & kid noise at our events. Please notify us of any accessibility needs by email to projectspace@efanyc.org, or by phone at (212) 563-5855 x 244. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, masks are required for entry.

Join us for a special artist-led walkthrough of Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, the first solo presentation of work in New York by Alabama raised and NYC-based artist Zeelie Brown. The event will feature a reading by poet Dre Cardinal.

The exhibition Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, is accompanied by an original zine publication by the artist featuring a commissioned essay by Katherine Adams and poetry by Dre Cardinal. Framed as a conversation between Brown and figures both living and historic, the solo project will include performances by Brown and guests, a public dinner, talks, and a gallery-spanning installation of lush inter-media, tactile, and sonic works that confront the intersectional realities of climate injustice, oppression, and anti-Blackness in contemporary American society. Brown focuses on the potential for transformative and restorative justice through acts of resistance and care, as a means to “(re)form the world.” Brown refuses polite forms of permission-seeking to exist and to be visible, or as Brown writes in their artist statement, “You’ll forgive me if I want to destroy things…” 

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called "soulscapes" to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie is currently working with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in her native rural Alabama. Queer Mother's Space is their first Manhattan solo show.

Dre Cardinal is a half-Korean, quarter French-Canadian, quarter German published poet who has won numerous awards, most notably the highly competitive creative thesis mentorship under her favorite poet Josh Bell while (not) studying at Harvard College. A Gemini military brat who moved around the South, she mostly grew up in San Antonio where Zeelie was her next door neighbor. Dre has also lived in Germany, South Korea and Madagascar. She is the last of a long line of first-born surviving females. Her life’s purpose is to clear heart chakras through her writing -- and bring love. She’s known Zeelie for 31 years.

ACCESSIBILITY AND COVID-19
EFA Project Space is located on the 2nd floor of 323 West 39th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues. The building has an ADA wheelchair accessible elevator that provides access to the gallery from the ground floor. There are all-gender single stall bathrooms and an ADA approved bathroom on the 3rd floor. The space is not scent-free, but we do request that people attending come low-scent. Admission to the building does not require an ID, but you will be asked to sign-in and out to facilitate contact tracing, as necessary. The closest MTA subway station is the Port Authority A, C, E stop which is ADA wheelchair accessible. Texts and programs are in English. Large format texts can be provided with an advance request. EFA Project Space is committed to nurturing an intergenerational environment and we encourage children & kid noise at our events. Please notify us of any accessibility needs by email to projectspace@efanyc.org, or by phone at (212) 563-5855 x 244. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, masks are required for entry.

Time: Saturday, May 14, 2022, 1-2:30 PM

In Person at EFA Project Space (323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, NYC 10018)

RSVP RECOMMENDED (via Eventbrite)

What became of the White Seeds planted in Black Soil?

In “Atlantic Correspondence,” Tanika I. Williams reconstructs her genealogical journey from Ireland, to Jamaica, to New York from the 1800s to present day. The cartographic performance plots Williams' ancestry with soil, immigration documents and vital records, to visualize ancestry through plant migrations.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph with Anne Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tanika I. Williams is a Brooklyn-based video and performance artist exploring mothering, ecology and spirituality. https://www.tanikawilliams.net/

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

Time: Saturday, May 7, 4-5 PM

In Person at EFA Project Space (323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, NYC 10018)

RSVP Recommended

on the boat, let's face it i'm held. in its waves, its vagueness, in its water. i see only water. water doesn't answer. no land ahead. just water. /eileen myles, the importance of being iceland

...and under them the earth
sank with its grosser portions; and the water,
lowest of all, held up, held in, the land. /ovid, metamorphoses, book one, lines 30-2

the water is opaque. it is comforting to imagine that you are in it. you won't be visible any longer… relief from the unending demands of simple sight. /roni horn, saying water

water receives you, affirms you, shows you who you are, and all the neat, imperceptible qualities that are water tease you with their ambiguity, tease you and extend you out into the world. /roni horn, saying water

May 7, dispersed holdings will perform meditations on water with words and sound, in conjunction with Sal Randolph’s installation, Slowing Time.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS
Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University, where he was founding director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. A collection of his poems, A New English Grammar, is forthcoming from Dispersed Holdings.

dispersed holdings is an artist-run platform for publishing and experimental listening practices founded in 2015 by Sal Randolph and David Richardson. For two years (2016–18), dispersed was sited in the former Bowery apartment of the artist Eva Hesse. Since leaving that space, dispersed holdings has published three books: Speed of Resin (2019), a meditation on impermanence and an homage to Hesse; Reading Room (2020), a document of the "Ambient Reading Spectacular" residency series and an exploration of the practice of reading; and Reading Now (2021), a follow-up to Reading Room that considers reading practices amid lockdown. On occasion, dispersed holdings is also a band.

Sal Randolph is an artist working between language and action. Her current work addresses the intersection of attention, time, feeling, capital, and crisis through performance, experimental publishing, and the creation of social spaces. She is co-founder of dispersed holdings, originally a listening and publication space in New York sited in the former apartment of sculptor Eva Hesse, continuing now as a publishing project and, from time to time, a band. She is a member of the research consortium ESTAR(SER) and is currently a teaching fellow at Bennington College. She is also a Zen practitioner and senior student of Roshi Enkyo O’Hara at the Village Zendo.

David Richardson writes fiction and essays. Since 2015, he has co-directed the publishing project dispersed holdings, with whom he edited Reading Room (2020) and Speed of Resin (co-published with Cooperative Editions, 2019), and co-edited Reading Now (2021). He holds an MFA in fiction from UMass Poets & Writers, and he teaches in the Bard Language and Thinking Program, the Bard Prison Initiative, and the UMass Writing Program.

Emma Wippermann is a poet based in New York. Her closet drama Joan of Arkansas is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse later this year. She has an MFA from Brown University and has published work in jubilat, Omniverse, Second Factory, No, Dear, Oversound, Temporary Art Review, and elsewhere.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

Time: Thursday, April 21, 6-7 PM

NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR A POSTPONEMENT DATE.

Join us for an evening performance by Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble artist Del Hardin Hoyle and sound artist/composer Matt Evans.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS

Matt Evans is a composer and percussionist producing acoustic and electronic music, collaborative performances, and concept-driven recording projects through an eco-fictional lens. Taking cues from interwoven organic species, entangled online networks, and intersectional thinking, Evans uses drum-driven hypnotic soundscapes and embodied improvisatory performance to question the unknowable and absurd relationships between the human experience, capital-driven consumerism, and ecological systems. These projects imagine new ways to care for ecosystems and communities while engaging in art-making that applies research, ritual, and abstraction.

Evans’ classical compositions tend toward the ambient and the poetic, where simple structural logics are impeded on by indeterminate and incidental forms. Textural string and wind writing combine with ephemeral and otherworldly percussion and keyboard sounds in the production of effervescent clouds of subtle shifting harmony and rhythm. Experiments with expanded intonation and euclidian rhythms give these compositions an uncanny, hyperreal feeling that extends an overarching dreamy sentiment. These works often take optical phenomenon and theoretical physics as a point of departure — as calculated depictions of phenomenological anomalies. 

Del Hardin Hoyle was born in Rotherham, UK. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City. A recent graduate from the Interior Design MFA at Parsons the New School for Design, New York. Del’s work establishes itself across a wide range of forms - from sculpture, furniture and interior design, sound, music, installation, curating, film and graphic design to name a few. Del started the monthly radio show A Year On Earth with musician and sound designer Sam Bellingham in 2018. He co-founded the artist collective (it’s all) Tropical in England in 2014 curating ambitious large scale group exhibitions all over the UK. He has exhibited widely across the UK, Northern Europe and New York City.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

Join us on Friday, December 17 from 6-8 PM for a closing reception for Jank Museum artists-in-residence Kamari Carter and Lamar Robillard.

RSVP to the In-Person Event at EFA Project Space (via Eventbrite) here.

About Jank Museum

Jank Museum, organized by artist, poet and curator Anaïs Duplan and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), and co-presented by EFA Project Space investigates the idea of “jank,” speculating around objects made with limited resources to meet an immediate survival need. Taking cues from Adrian Piper in her essay, “The Joy of Marginality,” Jank Museum invites artists who make work from the margins to center their own survival, persistence, and futurity. Jank Museum is a two-week residency in EFA Project Space's 2500 square foot gallery for two artists of color, each tasked with creating one piece of “jank” every day for 10 days. Artists were selected through a competitive open call, and are provided with resources and an honorarium as well as studio visits with EFA staff and affiliated curators and 24/7 access to Project Space over the duration of the residency period.

About the Artists

Kamari Carter is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.  

Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Lamar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Port Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN and Art Helix Gallery.

About the Center for Afrofuturist Studies

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) is an artist residency and programming initiative that reimagines the futures of marginalized people by creating dynamic workspaces for artists of color. Dynamic means interactive, supportive, community-engaged, rigorous, and inclusive. The CAS rethinks and challenges what an arts practice that revolves around Black futurity looks like—through long-term engagement and financial, logistical, and programmatic support. Since 2016, we have hosted residencies for 18 Black artists, writers, dancers, filmmakers, and scholars, and worked with many more to collaboratively produce exhibitions, workshops, and other programming. The CAS also maintains a growing public reading room and archive at its home base at Public Space One in Iowa City.

Join us on Saturday, December 4 from 4-6 PM for an Open House with Jank Museum artists-in-residence Kamari Carter and Lamar Robillard.

About Jank Museum

Jank Museum, organized by artist, poet and curator Anaïs Duplan and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), and co-presented by EFA Project Space investigates the idea of “jank,” speculating around objects made with limited resources to meet an immediate survival need. Taking cues from Adrian Piper in her essay, “The Joy of Marginality,” Jank Museum invites artists who make work from the margins to center their own survival, persistence, and futurity. Jank Museum is a two-week residency in EFA Project Space's 2500 square foot gallery for two artists of color, each tasked with creating one piece of “jank” every day for 10 days. Artists were selected through a competitive open call, and are provided with resources and an honorarium as well as studio visits with EFA staff and affiliated curators and 24/7 access to Project Space over the duration of the residency period.

About the Artists

Kamari Carter is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.  

Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Lamar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Port Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN and Art Helix Gallery.

About the Center for Afrofuturist Studies

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) is an artist residency and programming initiative that reimagines the futures of marginalized people by creating dynamic workspaces for artists of color. Dynamic means interactive, supportive, community-engaged, rigorous, and inclusive. The CAS rethinks and challenges what an arts practice that revolves around Black futurity looks like—through long-term engagement and financial, logistical, and programmatic support. Since 2016, we have hosted residencies for 18 Black artists, writers, dancers, filmmakers, and scholars, and worked with many more to collaboratively produce exhibitions, workshops, and other programming. The CAS also maintains a growing public reading room and archive at its home base at Public Space One in Iowa City.

Saturday, February 6, 2021, 7-9:00 PM EST, presented via Zoom. Featuring a curatorial walkthrough, a live discussion with Tela Troge, Tribal Attorney of the Shinnecock Nation and organizer of Warriors of the Sunrise, and a DJ set by Aerial (Devin Ronneberg) and DJ bb buffalo (Suzanne Kite).

For the full schedule of public events, visit: efaproject.space/speculations-on-the-infrared

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Christopher Green is a writer and art historian based in New York. His research and writing focus on modern and contemporary Indigenous art and primitivisms of the historic and the neo-avant-garde. His criticism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications, and he has contributed catalog essays to the Heard Museum, New Museum, Artists Space, the James Gallery. His scholarly research has been published in ARTMargins, Winterthur Portfolio, ab-Original, and BC Studies, and in 2019 he co-edited issue 11 of SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL.” His research has been supported by the Dedalus Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, the International Council for Canadian Studies, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Texas.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations. Devin Ronneberg is a multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and living in Los Angeles, working primarily in sculpture, sound, image-making, networking, engineering, and computational media, his work is currently focused on the unseen implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, and the radiation of invisible forces. Ronneberg’s work has most recently exhibited at MoCNA, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Imaginenative 2019. Ronneberg co-founded the Los Angeles underground imprint Private Selection Records, and produces, djs, and performs live under the Aerial moniker. He holds a BFA in music technology from California Institute of the Arts and is an experimental aircraft designer / builder at Berkut Engineering.

Tela Loretta Troge, Esq. is a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation and a member of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Tribe. She recently organized the Warriors of the Sunrise Sovereignty Camp 2020 in an attempt to raise awareness about the plight of the Shinnecock people. Tela graduated from Michigan State University College of Law with a Juris Doctor and certification in Indigenous Law and Policy from the Indigenous Law Program. She has been fighting for tribal sovereignty for the past 5 years as the attorney with the Law Offices of Tela L. Troge, PLLC. 

RELATED EVENTS

Medicine for the People is an offering back to the individual to initiate self-realization curated by Bianca Dominguez, Project Space Curatorial Fellow with:

Koyo

Tattfoo Tan

Raelyn Williams

ABOUT

A crucial concept for the relationship between a visionary to their reimagined world is the workings of their inner consciousness in conversation with embodied empowerment. Medicine for the People is an ongoing curatorial project that invites the public to see an individual and their inner consciousness as the microcosm of the collective they exist in, the macrocosm. Perceiving a symbiotic nature between inner consciousness and embodied freedom, within an individual and within a collective, is the guiding ethos. 

Reimagining public art as a pathway for the community to become co-creators alongside the artist, through actively consuming, initiates the process of alchemized healing. Medicine for the People invites the public to engage with the act of consumption through art making and radical healing practices within a co-created collective space. The process of consumption or cannibalism, coined by Oswalde de Andrade, was a major component within Brazil’s revolution during the 1920’s and has the potential to guide us within our present day. Andrade, a Brazilian poet, created the Manifesto Antropófago and he states, “Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. In order to transform him into a totem. The human adventure.” Consumption of the “sacred enemy” translates now as consciously ingesting the oppressive forces that have transpired within the infrastructures that are the social institutions of modern America; including the health care system, the government, the educational institutions, ultimately, the pillars that sustain our reality. Consciously devouring the patriarchy, the colonized traces of white supremacy, American imperialism, and capitalism may offer a path of revolution. 

Medicine for the People invites the public to engage through a virtual series focused on the intersectionalities of radical healing. Reimagining public art through incorporating workshops and interactive art pieces/ performances guiding the community in exploring their inner consciousness and manifested self is another guiding force of the event. I refer to the event as a gathering to highlight the aspect of engagement, interaction, and communal work as participants will be invited to internal conquests, communal discussion, and creative exploration. A youth member from the AYO cohort will be chosen to facilitate a workshop inspired by the activity they created within their mini workbook. In addition, an artist and a healer will be chosen to offer their medicine incorporating the 4 components of holistic wellness; mind, body, spirit, and emotion. This space intends to provide a platform for BIPOC artists, health practitioners, and youth abolitionists to share their rituals, their practices, and their teachings spanning across the topics of ecological activism, political activism, mental health, social justice, spiritual development, and personal growth.

Register via Zoom.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Karen Miranda Rivadeneira (Koyo) is an interdisciplinary artist, a visionaire, and walks the path of curandera. She was raised in the Pacific tropical south and the Ecuadorian Andes. Through her artistic and spiritual pursuits she has weaved a unique journey. Her medicine path is indebted to her mother, grandmothers, elders, ancestral spirits and the land that raised her. Her home has always welcomed the syncretic union of afro-indigi-latinx spiritual traditions. She has lived on and off with a medicine woman in the Ecuadorian Amazon for over a decade. She had her first initiation to shamanism there, where she learned about plant medicine, drum ceremony, tobacco readings, oracle reading, limpias, and vapores. Concurrently, she apprenticed in the Andes with a medicine woman who adopted her, teaching her the Andean way to awakened the original knowledge; from listening with your inner ear, reading the candle, cleansing the body/soul with smoke, fire dancing, fire cleansing, energy healing, to walking between light and night with joy and reverence. Koyo also apprenticed with an Aymara priest who introduced her to the Andean energetic movements and sun gazing. Ultimately, her goal is to share how to journey within and awaken the curanderx that lives in us, through humility, integrity, wisdom and creativity.

Tattfoo Tan is an artist who collaborates with the public on issues relating to ecology, sustainability and healthy living. His work is project-based, ephemeral and educational in nature. Follow him on Instagram @tattfoo

Raelyn Williams (she/her) currently works as a preventionist at the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance in Richmond, VA. Her work and passion is around youth justice and empowerment. Williams fights for liberation and abolition and believes in the power of art as a tool for social change. She believes that one of the steps toward abolition is recognizing and undoing the ways that we police others, most often the most marginalized members of our communities.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Bianca Rose Dominguez (1996) is an artist, a writer, and a medicine woman. Her work addresses the power in silence, the primitive and ancestral practices connected to humanity, and embodied practices of healing. Her multidimensional work begins as an internal meditation and a devotion to the Great Mystery, transforming into poetry, intuitive symbols, medicine books, visual images, site specific installations or collective ceremonies.The impermanence of life is a part of her work just as much as the materiality. She believes art is a way of being interwoven with life activating humanities consciousness. 

She was a collaborative artist alongside Tanya Aguinia at the MAD Museum performing Performance Crafting: Backstrap Weaving in 2018.Her ceremonial art performances have been shown at Arts Gowanus in 2018 and in Staten Island at the Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art in 2019. Currently she is attaining a BA in visual arts at Columbia University and is EFA’s Project Space curatorial fellow.

* Note: This event will be ASL interpreted and CART captioned in Zoom.

“Static Erratic is a selection of works made together this year, across various places and displaces. We found ourselves in search of a possible landscape, in a string of travel from Chile to California to New Mexico and back. The joy of these adventures was mixed with survival instincts and escape, as bodies within CDC guidelines for high-risk. Static Erratic searches for materiality in a world that slips away. We experiment with what staying in touch looks like when faraway from friends. Sets, props and filmed material create scenes for connection in a disrupted time, through social uprisings, electoral anxiety, and pandemic lockdowns.”

On December 9th Amelia Bande and Rachel Higgins will present a collective physicality made through improvisation, songs, and conversations across digital space.

Presented via Zoom.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Amelia Bande is a writer, performer, music maker and language teacher from Chile. She uses text and visuals to create live capsules of intimacy and low-fi musicals. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Storm King Arts Center, Participant Inc., BOFFO Performance Festival, EFA Project Space and more. She has been an artist in residence at WORM Filmwerkplaats, The Shandaken Project, FIAR, Tinkledy Springs, HRLA and Yaddo. She was co-editor of Critical Correspondence, an online publication of Movement Research. Find me @meliosmelios + https://meliosmelios.tumblr.com/

Rachel Higgins is an artist and builder based in L.A. She creates sculpture and participatory events using construction materials and the language of corporate design to re-imagine social space. Higgins received an MFA from Hunter College in 2010. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Kristen Lorello Gallery NY, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Hammer Museum, EFA Project Space, among many others. She has been awarded residencies at Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program, Real Time & Space in Oakland, CA, Fire Island Artist Residency, and Tinkledy Springs in Abiquiu New Mexico. www.rachelhiggins.com

EVENT VIDEO

How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins: PAN de YUCA

EFA Project Space presents How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins: PAN de YUCA by the artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. Employing a traditional, South American Pan de Yuca bread as raw building materials, Skvirsky’s live participatory performance doubles as a community action, with the audience assisting in the building of an ephemeral Incan border wall within EFA Project Space.

The performance is preceded by a screening that introduces Incan construction techniques. How to Build a Wall... links popular narratives concerning the persistence of pre-Columbian identity with current discussions on borders, immigration, and nation states. A Q&A with the artist and reception will follow the performance. Admission is free and first-come, first-served.

How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins: Pan de Yuca is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement (LMCC), supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Pan de Yuca for this performance is provided by by La Nueva Bakery (Jackson Heights, Queens).

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and early arrival is recommended.

About the Artist

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. Skvirsky became interested in photography at a young age discovering her identity by organizing her parents’ photo album. As an artist, Skvirsky excels at telling stories through images, static or moving, often using performance to ground them. Her video, The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios and series of images, The Railroad Workers, draw parallels between a teenage girl’s journey through the mountains of Ecuador, and the indigenous and Jamaican workers who constructed one of the most dangerous stretches of railway in the world. The project premiered at the 2016 Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) curated by Dan Cameron.  

In 2010 she participated in There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), where she exhibited work from her project, Memories of Development. 

Skvirsky's work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows including: Centro de la imagen, DF, MX (2018), Centro de arte contemporaneo Quito, EC (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, NY (2018), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2017), Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid, SP (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016), Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, NY, NY (2014), DPM Gallery, Guayaquil, Ecuador (2014), Instituto Cervantes, Rome, Italy (2013), The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2013), Stephan Stoyanov Gallery,  NY, NY (2013), La Ex-Culpable, Lima, Peru (2010), Scaramouche Art, NY, NY (2010), Galeria Proceso, Cuenca, Ecuador (2009), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT (2007), El museo del barrio, NY, NY (2006), Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY, NY (2006), Jessica Murray Projects, NY, NY (2006), Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY (2006) and others.   

She has received grants from: Creative Capital (2019), The National Association of Latino Arts & Culture (NALAC), San Antonio, TX (2018), Fulbright Scholar Program (2015), The Jerome Foundation (2015), The New Jersey State Council in the Arts in photography (2015), The New York State Council on the Arts, Film and Electronic Arts, NY (2010), Urban Artist Initiative, NY, NY (2006), Puffin Foundation, Teaneck, NJ (2006) and others.  

She has participated in the following artist in residence programs including: Office Hours, El museo del barrio, NY, NY (2015), The Laundromat Project, NY, NY (2011), MacDowell Artist in Residence Program, Peterborough, NH (2005 & 2010), Cuts and Burns Residency, Outpost, Artist in Residence Program, Brooklyn, NY (2008), Harvestworks New Work Residency, NY, NY (2006), Swing Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY, NY (2005), Institute of Electronic Arts Residency, Alfred University, Alfred, NY (2005), Center for Book Arts, Artist in Residence, NY, NY (2005), Smack Mellon Artist in Residence, Brooklyn, NY (2004), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Workspace, Woolworth Building, NY, NY (2003), Cyberart Residency, Longwood Arts Project, Bronx, NY (2003) and others.

Skvirsky is represented by Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid and is a member of the EFA Studio Program.

This event will bring together two of the movers and shakers of the performance art and art in everyday life fields in the U.S. for a participatory engagement with the audience dealing with the presenters’ experiences with aging and dying. Montano sees her body as a canvas, a sculpture that is chiseled by time as she grows older. Curmano has daringly orchestrated his own funeral in order to perform for the dead, and as an act of self- transformation: a rite of passage.

MY MOTHER ARTIST TEACHER AND FRIEND documents Mildred Kelly Montano's art-life and ability to make art a tool of healing and self therapy.  She was my first art teacher and demonstrated how I could do the same, that is, turn my pain into beauty. During the video, we will all be invited to performatively interact with sound and use my mother's courage as inspiration and a way to create  good medicine for ourselves. Transformation is always available. 

Curmano says: “Artists often paint fantasies, I've tried to live mine and as such I was buried alive for three days in 1983. The trappings of a traditional Italian Wake, New Orleans style Jazz Funeral and International Postal Exhibition about death were primarily for the living. The strenuous preparations followed by a seven-day fast, burial and creative output in extreme and isolated conditions served as an initiation and perhaps doorway to new levels of artistic development for me, but in the end it was all quite simply a "Performance for the Dead."

PARTICIPANTS

Linda Mary Montano is a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art and her work since the mid 1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation. Montano’s influence is wide ranging – she has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MOCA San Francisco and the ICA in London.

Billy X. Curmano is an award winning artist/adventurer and former McKnight Foundation Interdisciplinary Art Fellow. He was trained as a painter and sculptor (If, of course, painters and sculptors can be trained). His more traditional objects have been exhibited both here and abroad since a first solo show at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 1970. Notably, some of his paintings represented the USA in the “III Vienna Graphikbiennale” (Austria). His works have also found their way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other prestigious collections. Billy X. came to music through the back door using soundscapes in “live art” and is probably best known for edgy performances. His more eccentric pieces include a 3-day live burial, 2,000 plus mile Mississippi River Swim, 40-day Death Valley Desert Fast and a sojourn to the Arctic Circle on public transport. He’s won awards for performance and film as well as a solo CD. Billy X. has toured every way imaginable including 6,200 miles and 15 cities in 45 days on a Greyhound Bus and intrigued audiences from the Dalai Lama's World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles to New York City's famed Franklin Furnace. He's been a "Pick of the Week" in the L.A. Weekly and on the City Pages "A List". Journalists have dubbed him the court jester of Southern Minnesota. He has been fortunate to study briefly with John Cage, Rachel Rosenthal, Babtundi Olatunji and Joseph Shabalala.

This event takes place in conjunction with As Far as the Heart Can See (September 21 – November 17, 2018).  Additional support provided by: Reimagine End of Life — a citywide event exploring big questions about life and death.

A performance series in the gallery hosted in conjunction with EFA Open Studios. Performers were nominated by artists featured in As Far as the Heart Can See, and include former mentees, current students, assistants, and younger artists whose work they admire: Nina Isabelle, Sindy Butz, Elena Bajo, Xinan (Helen) Ran, and Larissa Gilbert.

PARTICIPANTS

Elena Bajo is an artist, choreographer and cofounder of the LA collective D’CLUB dedicated to climate action. Her artistic practice occurs at the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology and metaphysics, engaging ideas of nature, and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. She works both individually and collectively, using an interdisciplinary approach, sculpture, performance, architecture, life sciences, text and video. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Audemars Piguet award, ArcoMadrid and the Botin Foundation International Visual Arts Grant award. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between America and Europe. Bajo’s performance at EFA is supported by a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and in-kind support from Spain Arts and Culture.

Sindy Butz is a New York-based interdisciplinary visual artist, somatic movement educator, and Butoh dancer. Butz's research-based practice spans the disciplines of performance art, body art, multisensory installation, performance-based photography/video art, contemporary ceramics, and olfactoric projects. In her time-based work, she investigates belief systems, ideologies, sociopolitical transformation processes, identity, human biology, memory formation, and the collective unconscious. Butz recently concluded the Linda Mary Montano Art/Life Institute residency in Kingston and has been nominated for the Greenwich House Pottery Residency. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. She earned a B.F.A. in sculpture from AKI- ARTez Netherland, and an M.F.A. in Art in Context from the University of the Arts (UdK), Berlin Germany.

Larissa Gilbert is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. They received their BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City. Larissa’s work investigates the presence of European myth, fairytale, and ritual in cinema and pop culture and how this affects community segregation, racial hierarchy, and gender binaries in the United States. Past and current research includes My Little Pony, Greek Mythology, Playboy, Barbie, Sorority Hazing, and Cults. Recently, they have exhibited and screened their work at the Nakanojo Biennial in Japan, Anthology Film Archives, and the historic Cooper Union Great Hall.

Nina Isabelle is a process-based artist working with language, perception, action and phenomena. As a way to reveal information lateral to everyday awareness, Isabelle builds systems designed to locate, decipher and authenticate instinct, choice, action and awareness. Her approach aims to tether the collective, personal, and regional narratives that drive the performance space machine toward trajectories of new perception, belief, and possibilities.

Born and raised in China, Xinan (Helen) Ran received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2017 and is an incoming Hunter College MFA Painting candidate. Her multimedia exploration constructs fabricated memories via defamiliarized norms and textures. Xinan is a 2016 Ox-Bow fellow and an alumnae of Pearson College UWC (2013).

This event takes place in conjunction with As Far as the Heart Can See (September 21 – November 17, 2018).