Symposium: Art at Water's Edge

CONVERSATION SERIES: MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY SYMPOSIUM: ART AT WATER’S EDGE

sunday, october 9, 2022 at 11:00am, 2:00pm, & 4:00pm

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.

Cover image: Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, photo by Jeremy Dennis for 36pt5.org.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

BY TAVIA NYONG’O, CURATOR OF PUBLIC PROGRAMMING AT PARK AVENUE ARMORY

We all live at the water’s edge. New York City rests on an archipelago of over 30 islands, in a region that was recently re-designated as sub-tropical, according to a report in The New York Times. A recent Yale-led study forecasts the increased severity of hurricanes in global cities like New York, Beijing, and Tokyo due to climate change. And a Rutgers-led study warns that the city could face severe flooding up to twice a decade, if the effects of rising sea levels are not mitigated.

But if climate change is one thing that we share in common, art is another. Art at Water’s Edge is therefore not devoted to another round of catastrophism, but instead to listening to the resilience and adaptability of the more-than-human world.

In recent years a range of new artistic engagements have activated New York City’s coastlines in a new spirit of stewardship. Derelict piers have been transformed into parks; beaches and sand dunes have been restored. As May Joseph outlines in Fluid New York: Cosmopolitanism and the Green Imagination (2013), New York post-Sandy presents a prime opportunity for modeling world citizenship in a shifting environment. Linking the response to the COVID-19 epidemic with the quest for climate resilience, acclaimed director Peter Sellars says it is now time for “cultural thinkers and doers to really step forward and to create working examples of new sets of relationships, new types of shared and collaborative projects, and new ways of making a different kind of footprint on the earth.” Theater, performance, dance, and ritual along the waterfront all offer ways to encounter our maritime history and oceanic destiny.

Today begins with two talks from director Sellars and artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, followed by a film program that run through the afternoon, and concurrent sessions. At 2pm, sessions are gathered around crucial questions of memory and ritual at water’s edge, reflecting New York’s location on what the scholar Paul Gilroy has called “the Black Atlantic.” At 4pm, sessions turn to the question of where we go from here. We hope you weave in and out of rooms, meet old friends and strike up new ones, and stay for the closing remarks from May Joseph at 5:30pm.

Acknowledging that New York City exists on the lands and waterways of Lenape hoking, Art at Water’s Edge endeavors to be an event in the spirit of the Inaugural Lenape Pow Wow on Manhattan island held at Park Avenue Armory in 2018. Building upon that acknowledgement of indigenous sovereignty and survival, this symposium offers artist talks and roundtables that highlight interdependency and shared futurity.

Coastal risk maps available online are auto-generated each time you click them. What does this it mean that each time you follow visit the site the map changes? It suggests the future is yet unwritten. It is not too late to take action, but it will take imagination. Imagination is what artists have in unlimited supply, which is why they are integral to any sustainable climate solutions.

WALKING WITH CLIMATE

AN ARTIST STATEMENT BY MAY JOSEPH

Hurricane Fiona has deluged us with the reminder that the climate crisis knows no borders. New York shares the low-lying history of Puerto Rico and other archipelagoes across the world. Embracing New York City’s archipelago, my performance work has involved walking with climate since the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami wiped out over 200,000 people across East Africa and Asia. Hurricane Sandy underscored New York’s archipelagic vulnerability and our unpreparedness for rising oceans even today. Walking with climate offers an active, engaged, immersive, and compassionate practice to awaken ourselves and our cities to forms of shared ecological action. We are in the climate gyre. We have to walk ourselves out of this shared history together. Making art as we walk is one transformative way to grapple with the Anthropocene.

OPENING SESSION

LISTENING TO THE OCEAN

MID-DAY SESSION WATER, RITUAL, HISTORY

11:00AM — 12:00PM

Keynote Conversation with Peter Sellars

Veterans Room

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) director Peter Sellars delivers an address to the art world on the meaning and urgency of ‘ecological civilization’ in the next generation.

12:00PM — 1:00PM

Of Whales with Wu Tsang Board of Officers Room Artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang discusses three recent works—Moby Dick, Of Whales, and Moved by the Motion that look to CLR James’ classic text, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, among other influences, to envision transfuturity from a whale’s eye view of the cosmos. Moderated by Global Asia theorist and Dartmouth scholar Eng-Beng Lim.

1:00PM — 2:00PM

Film Screening Room

19K

Includes moving image work by Jim Bowermaster, Coco Fusco, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Tourmaline, Wu Tsang, Kiyan Williams, and Geo Wyex, among others.

2:00PM — 4:00PM

Knowledge of Wounds Veterans Room

S.J Norman, Joseph M. Pierce, and devynn emory in conversation regarding their collaborative work centering indigenous sovereignty and survivance in Lenapehoking and beyond.

Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word Board of Officers Room

Coco Fusco in conversation with Adrienne Edwards on Fusco’s recent acclaimed film mourning the unidentified or unclaimed dead buried on Hart Island—New York City’s potter’s field.

The Sacred and Profane in The Ruins of Empire Company D

Poet and artist Pamela Sneed in conversation with artist Kiyan Williams about their recent work engaging sites of loss, memory, and ritual remembrance on the shoals of the Black Atlantic. Moderated by curator Journey Streams

underCURRENTS and Blackprints: A conversation with nia love and Jerome W Haferd Company A

Dancer and choreographer nia love discusses her work in intersectionality, transnationalism, Blackness, and the tools of embodied memory in conversation with architect Jerome W Haferd, who discusses how architecture establishes a dialogue with contemporary phenomena, nonhegemonic users, and spaces.

Film Screening Room

19K

Includes moving image work by Jim Bowermaster, Coco Fusco, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Tourmaline, Wu Tsang, Kiyan Williams, and Geo Wyex, among others.

AFTERNOON SESSION

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

ALL-DAY EXHIBITS

4:00PM – 5:15PM

At the Sea’s Edge Veterans Room

Sociologist Macarena Gomez-Barris in conversation with durational artist and activist Sarah Cameron Sunde on Sunde’s durational performance with the sea.

Signe Nielsen in conversation with Mitchell Joachim Board of Officers Room

Landscape architect Signe Nielsen (Little Island) in conversation with Mitchell Joachim (The Monarch Sanctuary) on resilience and adaptation in the built environment.

Atlantic is a Sea of Bones Company D

Artist and activist Tourmaline in conversation with performer Egyptt Labeija, star of Tourmaline’s film Atlantic is a Sea of Bones on linking past, present, and future on the West Side Piers of Manhattan.

Metabolism | Photosynthesism Company E

Eco-systems artist Michael Wang in conversation with Global Asia theorist Eng-Beng Lim regarding micro and megastructures of plant ecology on Purple Earth.

4:00PM – 6:00PM

Film Screening Room

19K

Includes moving image work by Jim Bowermaster, Coco Fusco, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Tourmaline, Wu Tsang, Kiyan Williams, and Geo Wyex, among others.

5:30PM – 6:30PM

Closing Remarks with May Joseph Veterans Room

Author and director May Joseph (Fluid New York, Terra Aqua) shares some of her recent work and reflects upon the day’s proceedings. Moderated by Tavia Nyong’o

11:00AM – 6:30PM

Map Projection

Drill Hall Entryway

Under the direction of Topographical Engineer Egbert L. Viele, this 1865 topographical map drawn shows the original shoreline and underground waterways of Manhattan Island, detailing the canals, swamps, rivers, ditches, ponds, and drainage basins as they existed prior to the city’s urban development. Three different types of land are shown— Marsh, Made Land, and Meadow—with a street grid and sewer lines superimposed on top, making it one of the most enduring maps ever published. Jerome W Haferd has reconceived this map with design assistance by Tiffany Gonzalez to provide a jumping off point for architectural engagement with the idea of the Blackprint: an exploration of the transhistorical, the ephemeral, and the Black.

Photo Exhibition: Neo-Animism: Luck is Alive Library and Second Floor Hallway Renowned photographer Pieter Hugo presents a portfolio of provocative images “Neo-Animism: Luck is Alive” in creative collaboration with Mami Wata Surf that express the vitality of surfing traditions in Africa and its diaspora. Speaking about the concept behind the use of distortion and reflection in the photo shoot, creative director Peet Pienaar explains that it is a way of representing how, as a surfer, you might “see yourself within the ocean.”

Reading Table

Second Floor Hallway Peruse reading materials that tackle the intersection of climate change with art and design, including puppeteer, theater director, and Founder of Harmattan Theater company May Joseph’s Fluid NewYork and Terra Aqua as well as Mami Wata’s Afro Surf, among others.

Installation: Island (Phragmites autralis) Company E Island (Phragmites australis) by eco-systems artist Michael Wang presents a ring of reeds radiating from a central void. The reed species, Phragmites australis subsp. australis, is native to Europe and Asia and is considered invasive in the New York City region, where it forms dense monocultural stands in coastal wetlands. In some areas, these stands have become important storm surge barriers and slow coastal erosion. On the eastern coast of China, where Phragmites australis is native, the species is being displaced by the Atlantic American salt marsh species Sporobolus alterniflorus (smooth cordgrass).

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS

ADRIENNE EDWARDS

Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney and Co-Curator of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Previously Curator of Performa and Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center. Curatorial projects include: Blackness in Abstraction exhibition and catalogue, Pace Gallery (2016); travelling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, Wexner Center for the Arts (2018-19); Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise (2020), a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney; Dave McKenzie's first solo museum exhibition in New York The Story I Tell Myself and its pendant performance commission Disturbing the View (2021) at the Whitney; and My Barbarian’s 20th anniversary exhibition and catalogue (2021-22) at the Whitney and ICA Los Angeles. She was part of the Whitney’s core team for David Hammons’ public art monument Day’s End. Professor, Art History and Visual Studies, NYU and The New School. Contributor, African American Art World and Black Modernisms.

DEVYNN EMORY

devynn emory is a choreographer/dance artist, dual licensed bodyworker, ritual guide, medium, educator, and registered nurse practicing in the fields of acute/critical care, hospice, COVID, and integrative health in New York. emory’s performance company devynnemory/beastproductions finds the intersection of these fields, walking the edges of thresholds, drawing from their multiple in-between states of being, holding space for liminal bodies, bridging multiple planes of transition while finding reciprocity practice as a constant decolonial pathway. they are currently working on and touring a multimedia performance trilogy centering medical mannequins holding the wisdom of end of life experiences in collaboration with land and waters. 1. deadbird (film) + can anybody help me hold this body (altar) + global archive. 2. Grandmother Cindy (film + live performance) + Cindy Sessions: LOVE, LOSS, LAND (3 films) and in process 3. boiling-rain. born on Lenape Land, emory is a descendent of mixed Lenape/Blackfoot/ settler ancestry. they live on Lenape Munsee and Canarsee land (Brooklyn, New York).

COCO FUSCO

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Latinx Art Award, a Fulbright fellowship, and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Centre Pompidou, Imperial War Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is a Professor of Art at Cooper Union.

MACARENA GÓMEZ-BARRIS

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar who works at the generative intersections of decolonial theory and practice, environmental crisis, land, sea, and river restitution, and cultural memory. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence, and Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents. Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge: Beyond Colonial Extinction. She was recently featured in Artists in Presidents at Blackwood Gallery. Gómez-Barris is University Professor in Modern Culture and Media at Brown.

JEROME W HAFERD

Jerome W Haferd is an architect, public artist, and educator based in Harlem and the Hudson Valley. Haferd’s expanded practice critically engages with historically marginalized subjects, built environments, and non-hegemonic histories to unlock a new imaginary for architecture. He is one of the core initiators of Dark Matter University, a BIPOC led trans-disciplinary network geared towards new models of design pedagogy and knowledge production. Haferd is an Assistant Professor at CCNY Spitzer School of Architecture and an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia and Yale University. His recent projects include BLK BOX, an experimental arts and performance venue, and Beautiful Browns, awarded second prize in the 2021 OnOlive emerging Black architect housing competition. In addition to his independent practice, Haferd is Co-Founder of the award-winning architecture and research firm BRANDT : HAFERD, a studio grown out of civic engagement, producing public-oriented projects and collaborations with artists in New York and nationwide.

PIETER HUGO

Pieter Hugo is a photographic artist living in Cape Town, South Africa. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museu Coleção Berardo; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Hague Museum of Photography; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Fotografiska, Stockholm; MAXXI, Rome; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Barbican Art Gallery; Tate Modern; Folkwang Museum; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; and São Paulo Biennale. His work is represented in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Rijksmuesum, MoMA, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Met Museum, Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum, and Huis Marseille. Awards include the Discovery Award, Rencontres d’Arles Festival; KLM Paul Huf Award; Seydou Keita Award, Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial; ‘In Focus’ artist, Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery in London. Shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2012) and Prix Pictet (2015).

MITCHELL JOACHIM

Mitchell Joachim is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Formerly, he worked as an architect at the of offices of Frank Gehry in Los Angeles, Moshe Safdie in Massachusetts, and I.M. Pei in New York. He has won numerous awards including a Fulbright Scholarship, Architect R+D Award, AIA New York Urban Design Merit Award, and he is a TED Senior Fellow. He has co-authored four books: Super Cells: Building with Biology (TED Books) and Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014). His design work has been exhibited in numerous locations including MoMA, DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, MASS MoCA, and Venice Biennale. PhD, MIT; MAUD, Harvard; MArch with honors, Columbia.

MAY JOSEPH

Climate artist May Joseph is author of Fluid New York, Aquatopia, and Terra Aqua. Joseph has created over 20 durational performances engaging with oceans, islands, seawalls, and superfund sites reviving forgotten knowledges along the Arabian Sea in Cochin, Cape of Good Hope, Tagus River of Lisbon, Amstel River in Amsterdam, Atlantic Ocean, East River, Buttermilk Channel, Tevere of Rome, Yamuna River of Delhi, Venice Lagoon, and Bhosphorous in Istanbul as well as the Hudson River of New York.

KNOWLEDGE OF WOUNDS

Knowledge of Wounds is the collaborative curatorial practice of S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation). Seeing its first iteration in Lenapehoking/New York City in 2020, and currently operational as a hybrid live/ digital program, KoW is continually evolving in its mission to foreground the work of Indigenous creators and knowledge makers across hemispheres and disciplines.

EGYPTT LABEIJA

Egyptt LaBeija the overall godmother of the House of LaBeija. A multi-crown title holder. Newest crown is New York princess 2022. An activist for HER trans community. Has been entertaining over 30 plus years and has traveled all over the place to entertain. Has done quite a few films, TV shows, videos, and is in four books.

ENG-BENG LIM

Eng-Beng Lim is Founding Director of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality (RMS) and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. His award-winning publications include Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press, 2014), which was reviewed in over 20 journals and publications across the disciplines. Lim’s latest work considers the megastructure as an imaginary for Asian futurity in botanical, cultural, and geopolitical terms. He is also examining the foibles of queer friendship at the intersection of nature and technology.

NIA LOVE

nia love is a choreographer and somatic practitioner. Driven always by the social force and weight of Blackness, she aims to breach the propriety of “dance,” redressing it as gesture—the memory of movement, geographies, and scales and ruptures of time held in our flesh. Graduate of Howard University and Florida State University. Fulbright Fellow, Urban Bush Women Choreographic Initiative 2.0 Fellow, an Embodying Anti-Racism Fellow (Wesleyan University). Professor-adjunct at Queens College and The New School.Two-time Bessie award winner. Recipient of the MAP Fund, Herb Alpert Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, LMCC Space Grant, and the National Dance Project Production Grant | NEFA 2022.

SIGNE NIELSEN

Signe Nielsen has been practicing as a landscape architect and urban designer in New York since 1978. Her body of work has transformed the quality of spaces for those who live, work and play in the urban realm. A Fellow of the ASLA, she is the recipient of national and local design awards and is the former President for the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Born in Paris, Nielsen holds degrees in Urban Planning from Smith College; in Landscape Architecture from City College of New York; and in Construction Management from Pratt Institute.

S.J NORMAN

S.J Norman is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and cultural worker. He is a non-binary trans-masculine Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the continent known to many Native tribes as Turtle Island (US). His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. His creative and curatorial praxes are sites of ongoing, situated research into the body and its extended field of political, cultural, physical, and metaphysical interactions. He is the recipient of numerous awards for fine art and performance, including the 67th Blake Prize, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and an Australia Council Fellowship. His most recent exhibitions include the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial. He is also a poet and storyteller: his first full-length work of fiction, Permafrost, won the Kill Your Darlings Prize for Unpublished Manuscript in 2017, and upon publication in 2021, was shortlisted for six major literary awards in Australia, including the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and the Stella Prize.

TAVIA NYONG’O

Tavia Nyong’o is a scholar and curator of performance. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race: Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), which won the Erroll Hill Award for Best Book in Black Performance Studies, and AfroFabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award for Best Book in Theater and Performance Studies. He writes regularly for Frieze, ArtForum, The Baffler, and other venues. He is currently Chair and William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale, and Curator of Public Programs at Park Avenue Armory.

JOSEPH M. PIERCE

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with S.J Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

PETER SELLARS

Opera, theater, film, and festival director Peter Sellars has gained international renown for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative and performing artists. He has staged productions at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opéra national de Paris, and the Salzburg Festival, among others. Projects include: John Adams’ Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic; Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, Only the Sound Remains; Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with video artist Bill Viola; Handel’s Theodora, Hercules; Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, Idomeneo; Euripides’ The Children of Herakles; Desdemona with novelist Toni Morrison and Malian composer/ singer Rokia Traoré. Park Avenue Armory: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with the Berliner Philharmoniker, FLEXN, FLEXN Evolution, Monochromatic Light (Afterlife). Awards and positions: MacArthur Fellowship, Erasmus, Gish and Polar Music prizes; Professor, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA; Resident Curator, Telluride Film Festival; leader, 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles, 2002 Adelaide Arts, and 2016 Ojai Music festivals; Artistic Director, Vienna’s 2006 New Crowned Hope; member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

PAMELA SNEED

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in October 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net, and won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award. In 2021, she was a panelist for David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at the Bard Center for Humanities, Ford Foundation, Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, DIA, NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets, and more. She won the 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award for her leadership and literary talent. She is an online professor in the SAIC low-res program and teaches poetry and art across disciplines in Columbia’s MFA in Visual Arts program. In October her visual work appears in a group show at the Ford Foundation.

JOURNEY STREAMS

Journey Streams is an arts producer, curatorial steward, and Programs Associate at BOFFO Residency Fire Island.

SARAH CAMERON SUNDE

Sarah Cameron Sunde is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art. She plays with scale and duration to investigate deep time, climate crisis, and embodied experience. Sunde’s series of nine sitespecific performances and video artworks, 36.5 /A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 – present), has been exhibited and created with communities around the world including the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Aotearoa-New Zealand, and most recently, New York. In 2017, she instigated and cofounded Works on Water, an artist-driven experimental triennial dedicated to art made on/in/with bodies of water. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, MAP Fund, and NYSCA.

MAMI WATA SURF

Mami Wata Surf is a surf apparel and surfboard company manufactured in Africa. Inspired by the West African pidgin English term Mami Wata, meaning “Mama Water” or “Mother Ocean,” the company seeks to create jobs in and build the skills of African people through its business. Mami Wata Surf uses local materials such as African cotton and sustainable packaging in its manufacturing, and a portion of company proceeds support world-leading African surf therapy organizations Waves for Change and Surfers Not Street Children.

TOURMALINE

Tourmaline is June 2022 winner of Art Basel’s biggest prize, her work lives in the permanent collection of every major museum in NYC + beyond. Her self-portraits are centerpieces of the new Afrofuturist Period Room of the Met, unveiled in early 2022. She is currently writing the official biography of Marsha P. Johnson (Tiny Reparations/Penguin Randomhouse, 2024). Her work is on view right now at the 59th Venice Biennale; she dropped her first clothing collection with Chromat in 2021, a first-of-its kind bathing suit line for trans girls who don’t tuck; she was a Time 100 Most Influential Person awardee (2020); she’s made Dove’s Pride campaigns for the last 3 years and counting; she’s a Guggenheim fellow; an activist for a decade changing NYC laws around the targeting of and discrimination against trans and gender nonconforming people. Her works explores ethics and pleasure, foregrounding the beauty of deviance and the possibilities of collective and opulent dreaming. She highlights and centers, always, the transmutational experiences and groundbreaking aesthetics of Black, queer, and trans communities, and their deep capacity to impact the world. From limiting conditions she dreams and executes limitless things.

WU TSANG

Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. Tsang’s work crosses genres and disciplines, from narrative and documentary films to live performance and video installations. Tsang is a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow, and her projects have been presented at museums, biennials, and film festivals internationally. Awards include 2016 Guggenheim Fellow (Film/Video), Creative Capital, and Rockefeller Foundation. Tsang received her BFA (2004) from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2010) from UCLA. Currently Tsang works in residence at Schauspielhaus Zurich, as a theater director with the collective Moved by the Motion.

MICHAEL WANG

Michael Wang is an artist based in New York. His practice uses systems that operate at a global scale as media for art, addressing climate change, species distribution, resource allocation and the global economy. Wang’s work was the subject of solo exhibitions at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island (curated by Swiss Institute, 2019) and the Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2017). His work has also been included in the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2021), Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Italy (2018) and the XX Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in Valparaíso, Chile (2017). In 2017, he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant.

armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory

KIYAN WILLIAMS

Kiyan Williams is an artist and scholar from Newark, New Jersey who works fluidly across performance, sculpture, video, and 2D realms. Rooted in a process-driven practice, they are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective bodies. They frequently collaborate with soil as material and metaphor to unearth obscured histories and consider the relationships between human and nonhuman life. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Recess Art, Lyles and King, The Shed, and more. Their debut New York solo exhibition opened in May 2022 at Lyles and King Gallery.

PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Aidan Nelson Production Manager

Laura Aupert Assistant Production Manager

Angela Griggs, Eoghan Hartley, Colt Luedke Stage Managers

Danny Gomez, Silas Rodriguez Youth Corps Production Assistants

Lucille Vasquez Public Programming Intern

NEXT AT THE ARMORY

ARTISTS STUDIO

RODNEY MCMILLIAN

october 15

Conceptual artist Rodney McMillian presents his musical performance Hanging with Clarence, based on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1985 commencement address at Savannah State University that was rich with conservative views on social programs, race, and sexual harassment. Performed by McMillian and two back-up singers, the theater work uses Thomas’ speech as its text, while weaving in the artist’s music and poetry.

RECITAL SERIES

YING FANG & KEN NODA

october 26 & 27

“Star in the making” (The New York Times) soprano Ying Fang is cultivating a burgeoning international career on some of the world’s most important opera stages. Appearing in the Board of Officers Room with pianist Ken Noda, her program includes works by J.S. Bach, Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, Reynaldo Hahn, Claude Debussy, Ernest Chausson, and Dominick Argento, as well as a selection of traditional Chinese songs.

EUPHORIA

november 29, 2022 – january 8, 2023

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 multichannel 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 arena-like 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, featuring a stereophonic score by composer Samy Moussa. Thoughts and musings 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.

ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMMING AT THE ARMORY

Park Avenue Armory’s Public Programming series brings diverse artists and cultural thought-leaders together for discussion and performance around the important issues of our time viewed through an artistic lens. Launched in 2017, the series encompasses a variety of programs including large-scale community events; multiday symposia; intimate salons featuring performances, panels, and discussions; Artist Talks in relation to the Armory’s Drill Hall programming; and other creative interventions.

Highlights from the Public Programming series include: Carrie Mae Weems’ 2017 event The Shape of Things and 2021 convening and concert series Land of Broken Dreams, whose participants included Elizabeth Alexander, Theaster Gates, Elizabeth Diller, Nona Hendryx, Somi, and Spike Lee, among others; a daylong Lenape Pow Wow and Standing Ground Symposium held in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the first congregation of Lenape Elders on Manhattan Island since the 1700s; “A New Vision for Justice in America” conversation series in collaboration with Common Justice, exploring new coalitions, insights, and ways of understanding question of justice and injustice in relation moderated by FLEXN Evolution creators Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and director Peter Sellars; Culture in a Changing America Symposia exploring the role of art, creativity, and imagination in the social and political issues in American society today; the 2019 Black Artists Retreat hosted by Theaster Gates, which included public talks and performances, private sessions for the 300 attending artists, and a roller skating rink; and 100 Years | 100 Women, a multiorganization commissioning project that invited 100 women artists and cultural creators to respond to women’s suffrage.

Notable Public Programming salons include: the Literature Salon hosted by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose participants included Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Jeremy O. Harris, a Spoken Word Salon cohosted with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; a Film Salon featuring the works of immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth; “Museum as Sanctuary” led by installation artist and Artist-in-Residence Tania Bruguera, curated by Sonia Guiñansaca and CultureStrike, and featuring undocu-artists Julio Salgado and Emulsify; and a Dance Salon presented in partnership with Dance Theater of Harlem, including New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and choreographer Francesca Harper, among others.

Artist Talks have featured esteemed artists, scholars, and thought leaders, such as: architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in conversation with Ai Wei Wei, moderated by Juilliard president Damian Woetzel; director Ariane Mnouchkine and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Tony Kushner in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick; director Ivo van Hove in conversation with James Nicola, Artistic Director of New York Theater Workshop; artist William Kentridge and his collaborators Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi in conversation with Dr. Augustus Casely Hayford, Director of the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art; Lehman Trilogy director Sam Mendez and adapter Ben Power in conversation with playwright Lynn Nottage; artist and composer Heiner Goebbels in conversation with composer, vocalist, and scholar Gelsey Bell; and choreographer Bill T. Jones in conversation with architect Elizabeth Diller and designer Peter Nigrini, moderated by vocalist and performance artist Helga Davis.