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2021 ARTISTS STUDIO IN THE NEWLY RESTORED VETERANS ROOM
THE PHONEMOPHONIC ALPHABET BRASS BAND: RADAR Reflections from the Veterans Room jaimie branch & Carol Szymanski wednesday, october 13 at 7pm and 9pm Featuring jaimie branch, high brass Heru Shabaka Ra, high brass Zekkereya El-Magharbel, low brass with sculpture by Carol Szymanski, conceptual artist The performance is 50 minutes with no intermission, baby.
2021 SEASON SPONSORS
Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. The artistic season is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Thompson Art Center at Park Avenue Armory
ABOUT THE ARTISTS jaimie branch
jaimie branch is a Colombian-American Brooklyn-based musician and artist working in the areas of improvisation and composition. Through her musical practice, her main interests lie in extending and expanding the technical limitations of the trumpet and the musical language of free jazz and improvised music. branch has a Bachelor of Music in jazz trumpet performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. Before moving to Brooklyn in 2015, she was an active member of Chicago and Baltimore creative music scenes as a performer, presenter, and recording engineer. She has collaborated with many musicians across the globe including: William Parker, Matana Roberts, Moor Mother, Rob Mazurek, Chad Taylor, Nicole Mitchell, and Tomeka Reid. Her own projects FLY or DIE and Anteloper have been met with critical acclaim by The New York Times, The Wire, NPR, Sterogum, The Guardian, and many others. jaimie branch has performed all over North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom at many festivals and venues such as the Chicago Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, The Kennedy Center, Bimhuis, Lollapalooza, and more. In 2020, branch became a Jerome Foundation at Roulette resident and recently won the inaugural 2021 Deutscher Jazzpreis for Wind Instruments International Award. branch is a storyteller whose artistic output has continuously dealt with themes of social justice, gender and racial equality, and getting folks to wake the fuck up.
Carol Szymanski
Carol Szymanski pursues an idea of the artist as a kind of translator, recoding and transmitting messages received from other sources and transforming them in the process. Her work has never been limited to a single medium, but has encompassed drawing, painting, photography, performance, video, writing, and sculpture—and within the realm of sculpture, everything from inflatable Mylar balloons to brass horns, neon signs to miniature clothing. As one critic from Hyperallergic put it, her work is “based in language, bound up in the syntax of human communication, without being reduced to it…makes lateral moves and jumps across various types of description.” She has become particularly known for a series of sculptures in the form of invented musical instruments, and particularly brass horns shaped from the alphabet, that she has been making since 1993. Szymanski has collaborated with numerous composers and musicians including Ekmeles, Ben Neill, Dewey Redman, and Wadada Leo Smith. Most recently these horns were exhibited and performed at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, NY, 2017, as part of the WNYC New Sounds Live Series curated by John Schaefer. Recent solo and collaborative exhibitions have taken place at signs and symbols, New York, 2019; TOTAH, New York, 2018; Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York, 2017 and 2015; and Elga Wimmer PCC, New York, NY 2016. She has been a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Szymanski lives and works in New York.
armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory
ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO “…it was a block of music that made you think as the room does: Take note. Listen deeply. The rest of the world is not like this…that sublime and exclusive room, almost too opulent for this world.” —The New York Times Curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur fellow Jason Moran, this series of interventions in the Veterans Room includes a diverse mix of artists and musicians whose practices defy categorization and expressly mirror the innovative spirit of the exceptional young artists present at the room’s inception.
ABOUT THE VETERANS ROOM The Veterans Room is among the most significant surviving interiors of the American Aesthetic Movement, and the most significant remaining intact interior in the world by Louis C. Tiffany and Co., Associated Artists. The newly formed collective led by Tiffany included some of the most significant American designers of the 19th century at early stages of their very distinguished careers: Stanford White, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler among them. The design of the room by these artists was exotic, eclectic, and full of experimentation, as noted by Decorator and Furnisher in 1885 that “the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque, and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian, and the Japanese in the appropriate places.” A monument of late 19-century decorative arts, the Veterans Room is the fourth period room at the Armory completed (out of 18). The revitalization of the room responds to the original exuberant vision for the room’s design, bringing into dialogue some of the most talented designers of the 19th and 21st centuries – Associated Artists with Herzog & de Meuron, Platt Byrd Dovell White Architects, and a team of world-renowned artisans and experts in Tiffany glass, fine woodworking, and decorative arts. The revitalization of the Veterans Room follows Herzog & de Meuron’s design approach for the Armory building, which seeks to highlight the distinct qualities and existing character of each individual room while interweaving contemporary elements to improve its function. Even more so than in other rooms at the Armory, Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to the Veterans Room is to amplify the beauty of the room’s original vision through adding contemporary reconstructions of lost historic materials and subtle additions with the same ethos and creative passion as the original artisans to infuse a modern energy into a harmonious, holistic design. The room’s restoration is part of an ongoing $215-million transformation, which is guided by the understanding that the Armory’s rich history and the patina of time are essential to its character, with a design process for the period rooms that emphasizes close collaboration between architect and artisan. Park Avenue Armory acknowledges that the Lenape Nation is the original owner of the land on which we stand.
The restoration and renovation of the Veterans Room was made possible by The Thopson Family Foundation, Inc., Susan and Elihu Rose, Charina Endowment Fund, Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Assemblymember Dan Quart and the New York State Assembly, Emanuel Stern, Adam R. Flatto, Olivia Tournay Flatto, Kenneth S. Kuchin, R. Mark and Wendy Adams, American Express, Rebecca Robertson and Byron Knief, Amy and Jeffrey Silverman, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anonymous (2). Cover photo by James Ewing. armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory
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Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street
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Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street