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Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, 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 Marc Haas Foundation, The Prospect Hill Foundation, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Park Avenue Armory is deeply grateful for Senator Charles E. Schumer’s visionary leadership of the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program.
saturday, september 10, 2022 at 3:00pm
Cover image courtesy of Nao Bustamante.
CONVERSATION SERIES: MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY BLOOM BY NAO BUSTAMANTE
And conversation with Professor Wendy Kline, Chair in the History of Medicine at Purdue University
Featuring performances by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Pamela Martínez, and Geo Wyex
2 Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street
This presentation of BLOOM was made possible with the support of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, with special thanks to Scarlett Kim, Mei-Ann Teo, Mia Theodoratus, Our Ancestors, Heather Maria Acs, Jennifer Doyle, Jay, Maia, DL Alvarez, Chantal Nightingale, Artists At Work, Artpace San Antonio, USC Roski School of Art and Design, and the 18th Street Arts Center.
— Tavia Nyong’o, Curator of Public Programs, Park Avenue Armory
Nao Bustamante (b. 1969, US) is a California-based Chicana artist whose practice spans performance, video, photography, sculpture, and installation. This afternoon’s performance of BLOOM is the product of an ongoing artistic research project into the patriarchal origins of gynecology. Using her trademark humor and vulnerability, Bustamante transports the historic Veterans Room in the Armory back to the Victorian era, there to stage a séance in which the ghosts of the medical crimes of the past can be evoked and dispelled. J. Marion Sims (1813-1883) is known as both the “father of American gynecology” for his innovations in medicine and a “butcher” for his conduct of surgical experiments on unanesthetized enslaved women. A statue commemorating his role in founding the Woman’s Hospital in New York was removed from Central Park in 2017, as part of the ongoing racial reckoning in public statues and monuments that began with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
This performance and artist talk picks up a conversation initiated at the Armory with 100 Years | 100 Women, a project initiated in 2020 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave some women the right to vote. That project was part of a broader showcasing of “women’s contributions to the past, present, and future.” BLOOM is a work of art that is very much in that spirit. It imagines a feminist future for the gynecological exam at a moment when the reproductive and sexual autonomy of people with vaginas is the subject of coordinated assault. Through a grant from the University of Southern California, Bustamante is partnering with material scientists to prototype a new design for the speculum, the first significant revision since 1943, planned to debut in 2024. Bustamante’s artwork, related to the BLOOM project, will be on view at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art as part of the group exhibition, “INDECENCIA,” September 16 to January 8, I2023.have followed Nao Bustamante for my entire career as a scholar and critic and had the pleasure to curate an earlier work of hers, Soldadera, in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2012. Whether investigating the role of women soldiers in the Mexican Revolution or devising a ritual to expiate the accumulated white guilt occasioned by the quincentennial of the Columbian encounter, Bustamante is gifted at transfiguring history through the body. With wry humor and trademark vulnerability, Bustamante has a knack for making a space through performance for charged and overdue conversations. Joined by Geo Wyex, Pamela Martínez, and Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Bustamante brings a community of performers to work out elements of a troubled history through performance. The Making Space at the Armory Public Programming series is pleased to present the first presentation of BLOOM in New York City, in collaboration with our visionary partners at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
PAMELA MARTÍNEZ
WENDY KLINE
Pamela Martínez is a composer, reiki master, educator, multiinstrumentalist, and musician in healing who creates music and immersive experiences under the moniker Teletextile. Martinez brings to life music-centered rituals through Teletextile that explore our connections with our inner voices and to each other through a mixture of performance and spiritual practice. Her recent directing and performing credits include Teletextile: Connected and Whisperlodge The New York Times dubbed Whisperlodge “an unusual mix of theater and therapy”; the work has also been featured in BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, Netflix, Vice, and other outlets. Her “Bjork-like” sound (The Boston Globe) moves from vocal layering and “electronic wizardry” (Metronome Magazine) to “dense, stormy guitar, piano and electronics” (Time Out New York). Martinez has toured extensively in the US, Europe, the UK, and Asia. Martinez holds a bachelor’s degree in Music Education from Berklee College of Music.
Nao Bustamante is a Los Angeles-based artist whose precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, and writing. Bustamante has presented in galleries, museums, universities, and underground sites around the world, including London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the MoMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival/New Frontier, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile, and Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. Her 2020 VR film, “The Wooden People” presented at REDCAT in 2021 received producing grants from the Mike Kelley Foundation and National Performance Network. She appeared on Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” She has received Anonymous Was a Woman (2001), New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), Lambent, and CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research (2013) fellowships. Awards include the Chase Legacy Award in Film and Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation. Bustamante has served as Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and UC MEXUS Scholar in Residence at LA’s Vincent Price Art Museum. Education includes San Francisco Art Institute and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Honorary doctorate SFAI. Professor of Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design. Her work, Bloom, has been supported by a COLA (City of Los Angeles) fellowship, an Artpace Residency, and a USC Arts and Humanities award.
MARCUS KUILAND-NAZARIO
MEET THE PARTICIPANTS
3armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory
Wendy Kline, PhD, Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine at Purdue University, is internationally recognized for her scholarship in the history of medicine, women’s health, and childbirth. She is the author of Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth (Oxford University Press, 2019), Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (U. of Chicago Press 2010), and Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (U. of California Press, 2001). Her current book project, Exposed: A History of the Pelvic Exam, is under contract with Polity Press. She has appeared in the documentaries Sex, Explained (Netflix), The Eugenics Crusade (PBS), and Pharma (Showtime, upcoming 2023). Her research has been funded by major fellowships, including Fulbright, British Academy, and Huntington fellowships. Kline is also a professional violinist.
NAO BUSTAMANTE
Los Angeles native Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an interdisciplinary artist, performance curator and producer. He is a founding artist of 18th Street Arts Center and Highways Performance Space as well as co-founder of Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, a contemporary art center in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and LA Community Health Project, a harm reduction, street-based needle exchange program. Kuiland-Nazario’s works are long-term research-based crossgenre projects exploring extreme states of emotion such as grief, anger, and loss influenced by the cultural and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora. His performance works have been included in national and international festivals including the Rapture Festival, ICA London, London; the Rompeforma Festival, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, Los Angeles. Kuiland-Nazario is the recipient of the 2020 Santa Monica Artist Fellowship award.
EMILY D’ANGELO SOPHIA
november 29, 2022 – january 8, 2023
RECITAL SERIES
Lucille Vasquez Public Programs Intern
16 & 18
september
GEO WYEX
PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
september 27 – october 8
ARTISTS STUDIO
Chelsea Knight Video Editor, “Gruesome History”
Fifty years ago, composer Morton Feldman wrote music to commemorate the opening of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. A half-century later, composer, conductor, multiinstrumentalist and MacArthur “Genius” Tyshawn Sorey has created a new piece, commissioned by the Armory, as a tribute to both the deeply contemplative space and the work by this composer that has influenced his creative output. The resulting score provides the listener with the feeling of being enveloped in sound in much the same way that Mark Rothko’s paintings give in that space, revealing ever changing shades of color and texture. Visionary director Peter Sellars returns to the Armory following his unforgettable stagings of St. Matthew Passion (2014) and FLEXN (2015, 2017) to ritualize this deeply moving work. Within the confines of a ceremonial chamber, audiences are immersed in Sorey’s composition, works by celebrated visual artist Julie Mehretu, and choreography by flex pioneer Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray to gain new perspectives on time, space, and movement.
María Fernanda Snellings Producer, Park Avenue Armory Wednesday Derrico Stage Manager
Jared leClaire Slideshow/Video Editor
MONOCHROMATIC LIGHT (AFTERLIFE)
Artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt continues his examination of the power of language and the conventions of cinema as an allegory for societal and individual behaviors with the multi-channel film installation Euphoria, which explores capitalism, colonialism, and the influential effects of unlimited economic growth in society. This immersive new work, commissioned by the Armory, is presented in an arenalike setting, fully surrounding the viewer with life-size projections of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and acclaimed jazz drummers Terri Lynne Carrington, Peter Erskine, Yissy Garcia, Eric Harland, and Antonio Sanchez, with stereophonic score by Samy Moussa. Quotations from a variety of sources from economists, business magnates, and celebrities take on new meaning as they are reinterpreted as poetic monologues in real and imagined scenes of euphoric production and consumption. The result is a searing monument to the history of greed that raises seminal questions around the success and enduring legacy of entrepreneurship.
4 Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street
RODNEY MCMILLIAN
october
15
MUÑOZ
&
NEXT AT THE ARMORY
Geo Wyex is an artist and educator who works in music, performance, sculpture, sound, and video. His most recent record, ATM FM (2020), was released through Muck Studies Dept.—a constellational narrative framework and imaginary city agent that surveys the bottom of low-lying water areas, “looking for stars out of what stinks.” Muck Studies Dept. merges inherited Black Atlantic funk and folk poetics with investigative journalism; it connects mud, water, ass, rocks, coins, keys, extractive industry, and sensual expression of belonging to that flood. Wyex has presented work at MoMA PS1, The New Museum, Stedelijk Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Dutch National Opera, L’Arsenic, Joe’s Pub, etc. He was a resident at the Rijksakademie in 2015-2016. Recent collaborators include AK Burns, Every Ocean Hughes, Colin Self, and Tourmaline. Wyex’s project “The Muck Studies Department” opens September 11 at OCDChinatown, deemed a “Must See” by Artforum. He lives and works in Rotterdam, NL next to the Maas River.
EUPHORIA
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