A Dream You Dream Together: A Symposium Celebrating Yoko Ono
ABOUT YOKO ONO
Yoko Ono is an artist, musician, and activist.
Born in Tokyo, 1933, Ono grew up in Japan, with periods spent abroad in San Francisco and New York. In 1956 she settled in Manhattan and began to develop her own art practice.
By 1960 Ono had become a vital part of New York’s community of artists and composers. Over the next decade, she would go on to live and work in Tokyo and London, developing her pioneering practice in art, performance, music, and film, with legendary works including the performance Cut Piece, and her foundational book of instructions, Grapefruit, both 1964.
By 1968, Ono began collaborating in art, music, and peace activism with her partner and husband John Lennon.
As a singer and songwriter, Ono has released thirteen solo studio albums and nine collaborative albums, including the 1981 Grammy award winning Album of the Year, Double Fantasy
Ono’s work continues to be honored with numerous exhibitions in some of the world’s most prestigious international venues, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015) and Tate Modern in London (2024).
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ono’s work as an artist and activist remains singularly relevant and continues to challenge the boundaries of artist and audience.
WISH TREE FOR NEW YORK: A LOVE LETTER
TO A CITY
THAT REFUSES TO BOW
Yoko Ono’s art embraces incompletion, inviting others to complete it.
As a curator, my task is not to finalize but to extend this openness— allowing Wish Tree for New York to remain forever in flux, always shaped by its participants.
We are living through hard times—fear grips many, while others revel in intolerance. In the 1970s, John Lennon and Yoko Ono faced state harassment for their peace activism. They fought back with love and won. Yoko has never stopped campaigning with a smile. Wish Tree for New York continues, offering a space where hope defies fear.
Ono’s first artwork was an act of survival. As Tokyo burned, she told her younger brother to imagine eating ice cream when they had no food. From that moment, she began transforming grief and fear into art—turning deprivation into imagination, war into peace, silence into voice.
This act of imaginative survival shaped Ono’s lifelong practice. In Cut Piece (1964), she offered herself to the audience’s scissors, turning vulnerability into a meditation on trust. In Instruction Painting works(1960–), she replaced the artist’s hand with the
viewer’s mind, making participation the medium. In Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965), musicians played as they were wrapped in gauze, their sound eventually muffled—an elegy for voices silenced by war and repression. On “Walking on Thin Ice,” (1981) Ono sang of the need to surrender to the unpredictability of life. It became a number one dance hit years later and has been remixed continuously ever since.
With 92 living trees filling the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, a screening room, a listening room, a symposium of artists and scholars, and citywide educational outreach, Wish Tree for New York invites us to put our hearts together—to listen to a city that refuses to bow to tyranny, terrorism, or fear.
This is a living, collective work of art. You can make a wish, snap a selfie, set up a peace picnic, bring your white chessboard, call a loved one, or help plant trees throughout the five boroughs. We are just planting a seed over Valentine’s Day weekend, leading up to Yoko Ono’s 92nd birthday. The rest is up to you.
Tavia Nyong’o, Curator of Public Programming at Park Avenue Armory
CONVERSATION SERIES: MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY
A DREAM YOU DREAM TOGETHER: A SYMPOSIUM CELEBRATING YOKO ONO
saturday, February 15, 2025 from 1pm to 7pm sunday, February 16, 2025 from 1pm to 7pm presented concurrently with Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree
Citi and Bloomberg Philanthropies are Park Avenue Armory’s 2025 Season Sponsors. Leadership support for the Armory’s artistic programming has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, the Pinkerton Foundation, and the Thompson Family Foundation. Major support was also provided by the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and Wescustogo Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams. Making Space at the Armory is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF).
SCHEDULE
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15
1:00PM – 2:00PM
Kindred Spirits: Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi Veterans Room
Asia Society Museum Director Yasufumi Nakamori traces the partnership between Yoko Ono and the Julliard-trained Japanese composer and pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. It also touches on her collaborations with other Japanese creators including the artist collective Hi Red Center (Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Jiro Takamatsu) and filmmaker Takahiko Iimura in the 1960s.
The Musical Vocation of Yoko Ono Board of Officers Room
From the earliest days of her career, Yoko Ono enlisted musical terms to designate multimedia performances that audiences would not intuitively recognize as musical. Despite Ono’s insistence on musical terminology in her early work, and her lifelong fiercely experimental musical practice that scrambled genres from blues to kabuki to EDM across 22 albums, remarkably little scholarship recognizes Ono’s musical thought and creativity as a cornerstone of her artistic vocation. Featuring NYU historical musicologist Brigid Cohen
2:15PM – 3:15PM
Peace is Power: Yoko Ono’s Peace Activism in Art Veterans Room
From Yoko Ono’s earliest pieces, she works in messages of healing and non-violence; these messages are the seeds that grow into her full-blown peace activist campaigns in the 1960s. This talk follows the thread running through Ono’s art which lead to later works for peace activism. Featuring art historian and gallery director Midori Yoshimoto.
A Brief Genealogy of Cracks Board of Officers Room
Featuring Karen Shimakawa, author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage, in conversation with interdisciplinary researcher and experimental performance artist Allen S. Weiss
3:30PM – 4:30PM
The Harassed Subject: “RAPE” (dir. Ono 1969) Then & Now Veterans Room
The script for Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s film “RAPE” appears in Ono’s Thirteen Film Scores (1968): “The cameraman will chase a girl on the street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.” The film’s title is a provocation. In this lecture, art critic and professor Jennifer Doyle unpacks this experiment and situates it in relation to the contemporary political moment and its media ecologies.
Memories of a Supernatural AIDS Crisis Board of Officers Room
Celebrating Yoko Ono’s dedication to social justice through art, this performance reimagines the AIDS pandemic within a utopian landscape, reflecting the ideals of Ono and John Lennon’s Nutopia. A hundred years from now, Detroit, transformed by strange biomedical dust, stands as Earth’s last refuge. This queer sci-fi drama, directed by Marc Arthur, is brought to life Detroit-based performers Pink Flowers and Yolanda Jack in a presentation that follows a Black trans cybernetic heroine and her lover, an ancient vampire, as they inhabit memories from AIDS history.
4:30PM
Always Thinking About Cut Piece
Veterans Room
Featuring art historian and critic Julia Bryan Wilson. 5:00PM – 5:45PM
Occupation and the Body: Contours of Liberation Board of Officers Room
Featuring Founder of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative Nimmi Gowrinathan in conversation with Valeria Luiselli Drawing on two decades of work with women in the Tamil Tigers and other liberation struggles to break imaginative barriers limiting our view of the female fighter, this talk considers Yoko Ono’s work inside a new line of inquiry that returns to a body re-politicized through the mind. Anchored in the narratives of women in war zones, excerpted readings from a forthcoming text (Occupation and the Body: Five Acts) set forth a series of questions that excavate and make visible a deeper terrain for solidarity activism to take root. Gowrinathan asks, how does the violence of space designed toward occupation settle in the bodies of the besieged? How do gendered bodies adopt postures of preservation, sacrificing movement for life? How do contortions to accommodate pain reconfigure a stronger collective body politic?
6:00PM – 6:45PM
Interventions: Seizing the Moment Board of Officers Room
A conversation between Guggenheim fellow and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Grant recipient Claire Bishop and awardwinning gender and sexuality scholar Jack Halberstam.
ACTIVATION ROOMS
Screening Room
Parlor
Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking experimental films challenged cinematic conventions, transforming the medium into a provocative site for concept art. Spanning the mid 1960s and early 1970s, this program showcases some of Ono’s most iconic works, including Film No. 1 (‘MATCH’) / Fluxfilm No. 14, which deconstructs observation through a match burning down, and Film No 4 (Bottoms), a daring exploration of the human posterior that drew censorious outrage. The rarely seen “RAPE” (1969) interrogates invasion and consent, while the collaborative work with John Lennon Two Virgins (1968) revels in their artistic and personal intimacy with a soundtrack that is indelibly Ono. Films such as EYEBLINK / Fluxfilm No. 15 (1966), Fly, and Freedom further demonstrate Ono’s minimalist approach to film and her powerful feminist sensibility, returning, rerouting, and toying with the male gaze of cinema.
Program A: Film No. 1 (‘MATCH’) / Fluxfilm No. 14 (1966), Film No 4 (Bottoms) (1966/67), “RAPE” (1969), and Freedom (1970) Program B: EYEBLINK / Fluxfilm No. 15 (1966), Two Virgins (1968) with John Lennon, Fly (1970-71), and Freedom (1970)
Listening
Room: In This Approximately Infinite Universe 19K
Enjoy an immersive introduction to the full range of Yoko Ono’s music, including rarities not available on streaming. Curated by Connor Monahan. Books about Yoko Ono are also available for perusal in a parlor setting.
You are a Tree: An Installation by the Armory Youth Corps Field & Staff
The Youth Corps Advisory Board is a year-long leadership opportunity for select post-high school Youth Corps interns to be involved in artistic educational planning. This semester, the Advisory Board has curated selections from “You are a Tree” Armory Art Together artistic submissions based on their ability to start conversations, create a call to action and foster intergenerational engagement. They have transformed the Field and Staff into an intimate space that encourages visitors to make a wish inspired by wonder and exploration. The goal for this experience is for the audience to reflect on wishes for themselves, their communities, and the world—in conjunction with cultivating a space that organically builds community through collective artmaking.
Members of the Youth Corps Advisory Board are onsite to activate the installation on February 15th and 16th during A Dream You Dream Together: A Symposium Celebrating Yoko Ono, inviting participants to engage with the art and each other while reflecting on the wishes they want to make for the world.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16
1:00PM – 2:00PM
Yoko Ono’s Legacy: Art Meets Music
Veterans Room
Music is integral to Yoko Ono’s artistic practice and her recordings and live performances offered a new model for creating song structures, using the human voice and channeling intensity. Once derided, Ono is now recognized as a major influence on musicians in and beyond punk and art rock. The free-wheeling conversations with two artists who’ve forged their own paths with Ono’s light guiding them considers how her wild, open-hearted music changed things. Featuring pioneering musician and multidisciplinary artist Nona Hendryx, singer-songwriter and actor Justin Vivian Bond, and NPR Music critic and correspondent Ann Powers
Fly in Power: Asian Migrant Massage Workers and Anti-trafficking Board of Officers Room
Fetishized through a complex history of US military imperialism, Asian migrant massage and sex workers are pinned as both victims and criminals by anti-trafficking and prison industrial systems. Together, they create circles of care, mutual aid, and advocacy for labor rights and social justice. Presentation and conversation hosted by Yin Qi of Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of migrant massage and sex workers of Asian diaspora, based in Queens.
2:00PM – 2:15PM
Plastic
Veterans Room
In this virtual presentation from Oceania in proximity to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Filipino-American cultural critic, writer and queer studies scholar Karen Tongson reconsiders the slogan “YOU are the Plastic Ono Band” through the apparatuses of telecommunication, while working through Ono’s equation: “total communication equals peace” from 1971.
2:15PM – 3:15PM
Unfinished Grief Symphony: Yoko Ono and the Art of the Breakdown
Veterans Room
A meditation on the dynamics of grief, shattering, and coming undone in the work of Yoko Ono as these things occur in the unending season of glass in which we find ourselves. Featuring leading performance studies scholar Joshua Takano Chambers-Leston
Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4 (Bottoms) and the aesthetics of jelly Board of Officers Room
Scholar and critic Kyla Wazana Tompkins considers gelatinousness as an aesthetic that indexes how deviant life persists beyond and despite the aesthetic strictures of normativity. Putting Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking Film No. 4 (Bottoms) video into conversation with late twentieth century pornographic art, Tompkins shows how the haptic, movemental, and tactile quality that we might term “the gelatinous” allows for authors and artists to theorize different forms of collective movement and sociality.
3:30PM – 4:30PM
Dialogue at Forest Edge
Veterans Room
In 1971, Yoko Ono claimed to have released a swarm of flies in MoMA’s sculpture garden, which then invaded the museum and the city at large. The talk will take this gesture as a starting point to trace the place of the non-human in New York and beyond. Featuring New York-based artist Michael Wang in conversation with environmental, architectural, and memorial artist Maya Lin
In the (event of) blink Board of Officers Room
In this talk, Yoko Ono’s early work will be taken as a point of departure for a speculative history of performance art, a history filled with penumbral spaces and decisive singular acts. NYU professor André T. Lepecki attends to some of Ono’s early actions, showing how they mobilized obscurity and duration, decisive acts and incisive lingerings that created what Barbara Haskell called, appropriately, “a new mode of performance art.” Ono’s actions propose, in their singularity, a renewed understanding of performance in 20th century art history, and therefore, and inevitably, an alternative performance theory.
4:45PM – 5:45PM
A Black Forest for Poetic Justice
Veterans Room
Black Forest is an initiative founded by Ekene Ijeoma to record over 40,000 stories about Black lives (past, present, and future) and plant over 40,000 trees for Black lives across all 50 states within eight years. In partnership with local governments, nonprofits, and communities, he’s planted over 500 trees across parks, lawns, and sidewalks across eight states: Michigan, Massachusetts, San Francisco, Florida, Missouri, Rhode Island, Washington, and New York. He is developing partnerships to start recording stories via a phone hotline and linking them to the trees via extension and QR codes.
WAR IS OVER (PAINTING TO BE DESTROYED)
Veterans Room
“PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT’S COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED: Let People copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the originals. Spring 1964.” A painting-performance by Waseem Nafisi engaging the aforementioned prompt from Yoko Ono’s collection of instructions in Grapefruit. With collaborator Taya Serrao
Archiving and Inheriting the Avant-Garde—A Scream in the Dark Board of Officers Room
A conversation featuring curator, writer, and archivist Sur Rodney (Sur); visual artist, film maker, writer, media artist, choreographer and performer Jack Waters; Co-Founder and Executive Director of Culture Push Clarinda Mac Low; and multimedia artist Peter Cramer
6:00PM – 7:00PM
Closing Panel
Board of Officers Room
A conversation featuring Armory Curator of Public Programming
Tavia Nyong’o, art historian and critic Julia Bryan-Wilson, and NYU historical musicologist Brigid Cohen.
ACTIVATION ROOMS
Screening Room
Parlor
Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking experimental films challenged cinematic conventions, transforming the medium into a provocative site for concept art. Spanning the mid 1960s and early 1970s, this program showcases some of Ono’s most iconic works, including Film No. 1 (‘MATCH’) / Fluxfilm No. 14, which deconstructs observation through a match burning down, and Film No 4 (Bottoms), a daring exploration of the human posterior that drew censorious outrage. The rarely seen “RAPE” (1969) interrogates invasion and consent, while the collaborative work with John Lennon Two Virgins (1968) revels in their artistic and personal intimacy with a soundtrack that is indelibly Ono. Films such as EYEBLINK / Fluxfilm No. 15 (1966), Fly, and Freedom further demonstrate Ono’s minimalist approach to film and her powerful feminist sensibility, returning, rerouting, and toying with the male gaze of cinema.
Program A: Film No. 1 (‘MATCH’) / Fluxfilm No. 14 (1966), Film No 4 (Bottoms) (1966/67), “RAPE” (1969), and Freedom (1970) Program B: EYEBLINK / Fluxfilm No. 15 (1966), Two Virgins (1968) with John Lennon, Fly (1970-71), and Freedom (1970)
Listening Room: In This Approximately Infinite Universe
19K
Enjoy an immersive introduction to the full range of Yoko Ono’s music, including rarities not available on streaming. Curated by Connor Monahan. Books about Yoko Ono are also available for perusal in a parlor setting.
You are a Tree: An Installation by the Armory Youth Corps Field & Staff
The Youth Corps Advisory Board is a year-long leadership opportunity for select post-high school Youth Corps interns to be involved in artistic educational planning. This semester, the Advisory Board has curated selections from “You are a Tree” Armory Art Together artistic submissions based on their ability to start conversations, create a call to action and foster intergenerational engagement. They have transformed the Field and Staff into an intimate space that encourages visitors to make a wish inspired by wonder and exploration. The goal for this experience is for the audience to reflect on wishes for themselves, their communities, and the world—in conjunction with cultivating a space that organically builds community through collective artmaking.
Members of the Youth Corps Advisory Board are onsite to activate the installation on February 15th and 16th during A Dream You Dream Together: A Symposium Celebrating Yoko Ono, inviting participants to engage with the art and each other while reflecting on the wishes they want to make for the world.
WISHES FOR THE FUTURE: ENGAGING STUDENTS WITH THE MESSAGES OF YOKO ONO
Although it has been almost 30 years since Yoko Ono first unveiled her iconic installation, Wish Tree, its messages of hope and community ring true now more than ever. Park Avenue Armory’s Arts Education program, which provides free access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, is engaging students with Wish Tree and Yoko Ono’s legacy through a variety of workshops, programs, and residencies through the spring semester.
The Armory’s Production-Based Programming invites school groups to experience the Armory’s unconventional works of music, theater, dance, visual arts, and more in conjunction with workshops cofacilitated by Armory’s talented corps of multi-disciplinary Teaching Artists—all free of cost to schools. On Friday, February 14th, 500 New York City Public School students ranging from elementary school to high school have come to Armory during the school day to participate in onsite Wish Tree programming, including having lunch together in a “Peace Picnic” in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, atop specially designed picnic blankets created by the Armory’s Youth Corps.
The Armory’s Partner School Program offers long-term, customized residencies that support school curriculum and community goals at eight partner schools. Two Armory Partner Schools will participate in residences inspired by Wish Tree throughout the spring semester, following their attendance at the February 14th Peace Picnic. 4th graders at PS 106 The Parkchester School will embark on creating their own community wishing. Each class will be tasked with creating a base layer of ‘community wishes’ to be affixed/wrapped across a branch, enshrouding it in hopes and dreams for all people as well as leaves of individual wishes to be affixed to the ends of the branches. These branches will be displayed and take root across school hallways with a specially made audio soundtrack for all students to enjoy. 9th and 10th grade theater classes at Partner High School Claremont International School will create devised theater pieces or visual installations that include includes aspects of Fluxus inspired audience participation, using wishes from Wish Tree that resonated with them as the prompts from which to create.
The Armory’s year-round paid and closely mentored internship program, Youth Corps, is involved in Wish Tree in a variety of ways this spring. The program, which begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing provides interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as
well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college creative and career goals.
Interns have been participating in Armory Art Together , an asynchronous, remote art commissioning program. This semester’s Armory Art Together project is called “You are a Tree” and has offered three weeks of creating inspired by Wish Tree by Yoko Ono as well as her artistic practice over the decades. In the first week Youth Corps explored how to activate an audience through visual art, designing picnic blankets that encourage folks sitting on it them to connect with each other, ten of which were selected to be used during the student Peace Picnic. The second week of Armory Art Together asked Youth Corps to pivot from visual art to performance; artists were asked to collect wishes from others around and create a performance documented through photography or videography that would communicate these wishes to the world around them.
In the final week, Youth Corps focused on their personal wishes for the world. Following reflection on the question “What do you wish for?” Youth Corps then created a final piece of art in any medium they desired that would bring their wish into the universe.
To showcase the Youth Corps’ work throughout the three-week long project, the Youth Corps Advisory Board has curated a selection of artworks to be on display throughout the duration of Wish Tree and during the A Dream You Dream Together symposium. Also called “You are a Tree,” the curated exhibit invites audiences to engage with student-created art and each other. The Youth Corps Advisory Board members—who are part of a year-long leadership opportunity for select post-high school Youth Corps to be involved in educational planning—are on site to activate the salon exhibit on February 15th and 16th.
In a moment of increasing anxiety and concern in the present, Wish Tree asks audiences to consider their vision for the future and how that future can be in community with others. Students and their engagement with this work and Ono’s legacy as a whole bring a powerful new layer to the piece, as they envision their own futures and that of all of us.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
MARC ARTHUR
Marc Arthur is a research-based artist, writer, and educator whose current body of work examines political encounters surrounding the AIDS pandemic. Integrating theater, dance, and painting, his practice explores issues of time, gender, race, and memory in social narratives and worlds. He is an Assistant Professor in Theatre & Dance at Wayne State University in Detroit, and earned his PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan (2019–2022), where he investigated community-based performance methods, and Head of Research and Archives at Performa (2011-2017).
CLAIRE BISHOP
Claire Bishop is an art critic and Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), a book of conversations with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Cisneros, 2020); Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024); and Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts (Koenig, 2024). She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, a Contributing Editor of Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages.
JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND
Justin Vivian Bond is the recipient of an Obie, a Bessie, The Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Non-Fiction for their memoir Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels, and was recently named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Their visual art and installations have been seen in museums and galleries in the US and UK, and will be part of the inaugural exhibition of the V&A East in May of 2025. Described by The New Yorker as “the greatest cabaret artist of their generation” Viv was nominated for a Tony Award and has appeared on and off Broadway, London’s West End, and will appear from May 6th to 11th of 2025 at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater.
JULIA BRYAN-WILSON
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University and Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Her books include Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009; Japanese translation 2024); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (2023). Her texts on Yoko Ono have been published in the Oxford Art Journal (2003), New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition (2015), and a forthcoming volume in the Arts Writers Grant Cookie Jar series.
JOSHUA TAKANO CHAMBERS-LESTON
Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Completing a book on queer love and loss for NYU Press (forthcoming 2025), JCL is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; Co-Editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.
BRIGID COHEN
Brigid Cohen is a Professor of Music at NYU specializing in music and migration. Her first book Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (2012) won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Her second book Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (2022) won the Irving Lowens Book Award of the Society for American Music. She is currently writing her third book manuscript, The Musical Vocation of Yoko Ono. Cohen’s research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Academy in Berlin.
PETER CRAMER
Peter Cramer (aka Peewee Nyob)—Featured in i-D Magazine as “radical queers creating a powerful community through progressive politics, community gardens, wild parties, and colorful performance,” Cramer is multi-media artist/performer, Co-Founder of the art garden Le Petit Versailles and nonprofit arts organization Allied Productions, Inc. His work has been presented by Anthology Film Archives, Danspace Project, ABC NO Rio, MIX NYC, Hermann Nitsch Museum, Microscope Gallery, FRISE/Hamburg, Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, New Museum, Deitch Projects, Visual AIDS, Venice Biennale, Whitney Museum and Moma/ PS1. Peter Cramer lives and works in New York City.
JENNIFER DOYLE
Jennifer Doyle is the author of Shadow of My Shadow, a reflection on stalking and harassment dynamics and the forms of grief and grievance they generate. She and Jeanne Vaccaro are Co-Curators of Scientia Sexualis, on view at ICA LA until March 2. She teaches at UC Riverside and is President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
NIMMI GOWRINATHAN
Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan is a Tamil activist, writer, and scholar and Founder of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, a global project to understand the political impact of gender-based violence. She is the Founder and Publisher of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine to rehumanize policy, and Creator of the “Female Fighter” Series at Guernica Magazine. Her book, Radicalizing Her (Beacon Press 2021), examines the complex politics of the female fighter. She is also a Senior Scholar at the University of California Berkeley’s Political Conflict, People’s Rights and Gender Initiative. Her political essays, which have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Freeman’s Journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Guernica Magazine, and Foreign Affairs, among others have been described as “searing in a search for answers” (Publisher’s Weekly).
JACK HALBERSTAM
Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995); Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998); In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005); The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011); Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012); and a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a book for MIT Press titled Anarchitecture After Everything. Halberstam was the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton in 2022 and he was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
NONA HENDRYX
Nona Hendryx is an art-rock vocalist, composer, technologist, and multidisciplinary artist whose career spans decades of sound and style evolution. She is a founding member of the rock, gospel, R&B Afrofuturistic group Labelle, responsible for the No.1 hit “Lady Marmalade”(“Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi C’est Soir?”), and she currently holds the post of Ambassador for Artistry in Music for Berklee College/Boston Conservatory. Her audio-visual productions, inspired by Afrofuturism, have been presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mass MOCA, MoMA, Park Avenue Armory, Moog Fest, Miami Basel, London’s Serpentine Gallery, and Somerset House. Her groundbreaking project, The Dream Machine Experience, a music-driven Mixed Reality installation combining AI, AR, and VR applications, was presented at Lincoln Center in the Summer of 2024. Hendryx is passionate about music, visual art, and technology and continues to be a prolific artist.
EKENE IJEOMA
Ekene Ijeoma researches how systems unjustly affect people and develops artworks that poetically expose inequity or engage people in collaboratively changing society. From 2019 to 2024, he founded Poetic Justice, the first artist-led and arts-focused group at MIT Media Lab. His lab researched how artists can work at the scale of injustice and developed large-scale participatory artworks. In 2022, he founded Black Forest, an ongoing initiative recording 40,000 stories about Black lives in the US and planting over 40,000 trees for them across all 50 states. In the last few years, he has developed partnerships with local governments, organizations, and communities to plant over 500 trees of many species and sizes across 8 states.
ANDRÉ T. LEPECKI
André Lepecki is an essayist, dramaturge, and independent curator based in New York City. Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. Editor of several anthologies on performance and dance theory. Author of Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement and Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016). Lepecki curated festivals and projects for HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, the Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, Sydney Biennial 2016, among others. 2008 “Best Performance Award” from AICA-US for co-curating and directing the redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Haus der Kunst 2006 and PERFORMA 07). He recently curated the online exhibit of Paul McCarthy’s early video works for Xavier Hufkens gallery, Brussels.
MAYA LIN
Maya Lin has maintained a remarkable interdisciplinary career, encompassing large-scale environmental installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works, and memorials. She redefinted the idea of monument with her very first work, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and has since gone on to pursue a body of work in both art and architecture. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, and has created permanent outdoor installations for public and private collections from New York to New Zealand. A committed environmentalist, Lin is also at work on her final memorial, focused on the environment, entitled What is Missing?, a project that raises awareness and poses solutions to both biodiversity and loss and climate change.
VALERIA LUISELLI
Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and Tell Me How It Ends (An Essay in Forty Questions). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive was included in The New York Times’ 10 Best Books, won the Rathbone Folio Prize, the Dublin Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize among others. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. Her work is published in more than 30 languages. She is a professor at Bard College.
CLARINDA MAC LOW
Clarinda Mac Low was brought up in the New York City avantgarde arts scene in the 1970s and began performing at the age of four with her father Jackson Mac Low and with Meredith Monk. Mac Low started out working in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience. She is a professor in design and technology programs and a former HIV/AIDS researcher and medical journalist, Executive Director of Culture Push, and Co-Director of Works on Water. Awards from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Franklin Furnace, among others, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, among others. From 2022 to 2024 she was an embedded artist at Genspace, a community biology laboratory in Brooklyn, through the Creatives Rebuild New York Artist Employment Program.
WASEEM NAFISI
Waseem Nafisi (b. 1996) is an American-born, Palestinian artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a BFA from The Cooper Union, and has recently exhibited work at Kapp Kapp in Tribeca. He is currently enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in Chelsea. Nafisi’s practice spans painting and assemblage, sifting the art-historical canon and scenes of Occidental fantasy.
YASUFUMI NAKAMORI
Dr. Yasufumi Nakamori is the Director of Asia Society Museum and Vice President of Arts and Culture, Asia Society in New York. In this capacity, he leads to develop the museum’s exhibitions and programs. A noted scholar of modern Japanese art and architecture, he has organized numerous exhibitions and authored catalogues, including Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010). He contributed an essay Kindred Spirits: Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi in the catalogue for the 2024 exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Tate Modern where he served Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) from 2018 to 2023.
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 Afro-Fabulations: 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 Wiliam Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale and Curator of Public Programming and Scholarin-Residence at Park Avenue Armory. He was recently awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in Theatre Arts and Performance.
ANN POWERS
Ann Powers is NPR Music’s critic and correspondent. Throughout a long career she has worked at The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and many other publications. She is the author of four books, most recently Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, which Publisher’s Weekly chose as one of the Ten Best Books of 2024. With Evelyn McDonnell, she edited the classic anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop (1995).
RED CANARY SONG
Red Canary Song’s (RCS) is a grassroots collective of migrant massage and sex workers of Asian diaspora, based in Queens. Their work centers on mutual aid, community care, and decriminalization. RCS provides workers with resources including groceries, legal assistance, emergency funds, interpreters, and connection to health services. In response to multiple murders of Asian massage workers (Flushing 2017, Atlanta 2021), RCS vigils have brought together thousands of allies across a range of ethnic, gender, economic, and political orientations to participate in art activations and cultural rituals of grief and healing.
SUR RODNEY (SUR)
Sur Rodney (Sur) is an archivist, curator, artistic collaborator, community activist, and essayist—most renowned for his position as Co-Director of the Gracie Mansion Gallery (1982-1988). He currently manages the Estate of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks (1931-2018), his late spouse of 23 years, and long-time friend of Yoko Ono and their shared interest in sky, having him adopt the moniker “Cloudsmith”.
TAYA SERRAO
Taya Serrao is an artist born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2018 and recently developed a film project that was featured in documenta fifteen, in collaboration with Port-of-Spain based collective Alice Yard. Her work is research based—using a combination of image-making, film, sculpture and installation to create abstract systems that express the situations of life as theatrical spaces. Her works serve to articulate presence as intermediate—and the realities of our political, social and economic contexts as ever-changeable.
KAREN SHIMAKAWA
Karen Shimakawa is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2003) and co-editor of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001) with Kandice Chuh. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American performance. She is currently researching a project on the political and ethical performativity of discomfort.
KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS
Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (2012) and the co-editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (2021) and a two-part special issue of GLQ: On the Visceral (2014). She just completed a new book, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Jelly, Intoxication, Rot
KAREN TONGSON
Karen Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (one of Pitchfork’s “Best Music Books of 2019”), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she was awarded Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She directs the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture at USC Dornsife, where she is also Chair of Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, English, and American Studies & Ethnicity. Tongson hosts the podcasts The Gaymazing Race with Nicole J. Georges, and The Art of Grief with Dr. Megan Auster-Rosen. She’s currently a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University (2024-25), as well as a LeBoff Distinguished Scholar in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt (2025).
MICHAEL WANG
Michael Wang is an artist based in New York. His practice uses systems that operate at both planetary and regional scales 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 Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2022); LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, New York (curated by Swiss Institute, 2019); and the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2017). His work has also been included in Elevation 1049 in Gstaad (2023); the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018); and the XX Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in Valparaíso (2017). In 2017, he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Wang teaches at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
JACK WATERS
Member of NYOBS, the alternative Queer-skinned experimental free-association “kitchen” band. Co-writer, composer, and lead of “Jason and Shirley,” a feature screened at MoMA, and on the Criterion Channel; Co-founder of community art garden Le Petit Versailles, and the multipurpose member-based nonprofit arts umbrella Allied Productions, Inc. Queer experimental/hybrid filmmaking includes “Percodan And Wisdom” based on the poem by Sur Rodney (Sur). Member of performance collectives POOL, and DanceTube; Co-steward of ABC No Rio’s archival collections; Scribe, and the creator of “Pestilence,” a multi-media musical opus tracing culture from single-cell organisms to the end of society as we know it.
ALLEN S. WEISS
Allen S. Weiss is a writer, theorist, curator, playwright and photographer, and is the author and editor of over forty volumes in the fields of art history, performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theater. He divides his time between New York, Paris, Nice, and spends a month every Autumn in Kyoto. His work on Japanese culture includes the literary anthology Le goût de Kyoto (Mercure de France), Zen Landscapes: Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics and The Grain of the Clay: Relections on Ceramics and the Art of Collecting (both from Reaktion Books), and most recently Illusory Dwellings (Stone Bridge Press), as well as Radio Gidayū, a Kyoto soundscape (Deutschlandfunk Kultur). He has been the recipient of Fulbright, Étant Donnés, and Japan Foundation grants, and teaches in the departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University.
MIDORI YOSHIMOTO
Midori Yoshimoto is professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. Yoshimoto specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and its diaspora with a focus on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia. Her 2005 book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, led to numerous publications including an essay in Yoko Ono One Woman Show (MoMA, 2015). Yoshimoto co-curated Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota, presented at three museums in Japan in 2021 and 2022. Last year, she guestcurated the exhibition, Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus at the Japan Society Gallery.
PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Andrew Lulling, Max Helburn Production Audio
Dan Santamaria Production Video
Cassey Kivnick, Eoghan Hartley Stage Managers
Five Ohm Productions
Premier Stagehands
Trees by Hardscrabble Farms
Planters by Urban Garden Center
Liam O’Malley Davy
Odeum Labor Services
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; multi-day symposia; intimate salons featuring performances, panels, and discussions; Artist Talks in relation to the Armory’s Drill Hall programming; and other creative interventions, curated by professor and scholar Tavia Nyong’o
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; 100 Years | 100 Women, a multiorganization commissioning project that invited 100 women artists and cultural creators to respond to women’s suffrage; a Queer Hip Hop Cypher, delving into the queer origins and aesthetics of hip hop with Astraea award-winning duo Krudxs Cubensi and author and scholar Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls; the Archer Aymes Retrospective, exploring the legacy of emancipation through an immersive art installation curated by Carl Hancock Rux and concert performance by mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran and pianist Aaron Diehl, presented on a three-part
NEXT IN THE SERIES
LENAPEHOKING: AN EVENING WITH BRENT MICHAEL DAVIDS
MAY 30
Marking the 400th anniversary of the start of construction of New Amsterdam on what is now lower Manhattan, this evocative evening of chamber music and storytelling by Brent Michael Davids incorporates unique Native American instruments as well as a string quartet and chorus of singers, engaging audiences with Indigenous cultural expressions to envision decolonial futures through the power of music and narrative.
Juneteenth series with Harlem Stage and Lincoln Center as part of the Festival of New York; legendary artist Nao Bustamante’s BLOOM, a cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of the vaginal speculum and its use in the exploitative and patriarchal history of the pelvic examination; Art at Water’s Edge, a symposium inspired by the work of director and scholar May Joseph on artistic invention in the face of climate change, including participants such as Whitney Biennale curator Adrienne Edwards, artist Kiyan Williams, Little Island landscape architect Signe Nielsen, and others; Symposium: Sound & Color – The Future of Race in Design, an interdisciplinary forum exploring how race matters in creative design for live performance hosted by lighting designer Jane Cox, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, set designer Mimi Lien, and sound designer and composer Mikaal Sulaiman in collaboration with Design Action and Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and Corpus Delicti, a convening of artists, activists, and intellectuals enacting transgender art and music as a vehicle for dialogue across differences, in collaboration with the NYC Trans Oral History Project
Notable Public Programming salons include: the Literature Salon hosted by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins with participants Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Jeremy O. Harris; a Spoken Word Salon co-hosted 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-inResidence Tania Bruguera, curated by Sonia Guiñansaca and CultureStrike, and featuring undocu-artists Julio Salgado and Emulsify; a Dance Salon in partnership with Dance Theater of Harlem, including New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and choreographer Francesca Harper, among others; and Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation, a salon exploring Black visual complexity and spirit, led by visionary artist Rashaad Newsome and featuring Saidiya V. Hartman, Kiyan Williams, Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes, Ms.Boogie, Puma Camillê, and others.
BLACK THEATER ADVANCE
SEPTEMBER 6
Building on a multi-year initiative to catalyze growth and permanence for Black theaters across the nation, this dynamic salon tackles the issues facing us all in reimagining the future of American theater as a space for bold artistic expression and social change. Co-presented with National Black Theatre.
NEXT AT THE ARMORY
DOOM
MARCH 3 – 12
WORLD PREMIERE – AN ARMORY COMMISSION
Radical art world superstar Anne Imhof takes hold of the entirety of the Armory for her largest performative work in the US to date. Utilizing the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, this all-encompassing work fuses space, bodies, sound, and sculpture in response to our present in which anxiety and hope find a fragile balance between apathy, activism, and resistance. This sequential durational performance takes audiences on a journey to ultimately find a sense of community through our own shared experiences. The culminating happening serves as a seismographic meter of our times, while projecting into our own possible futures to find a new form of hope.
CONSTELLATION
JUNE 5 –AUGUST 17
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Diane Arbus’ stark, documentary style of capturing people outside the boundaries of ordinary society has influenced countless artists with iconic images that seem to reflect Arbus’ restless attraction to the unfamiliar in all its guises. These dynamic pictures are given an evocative new life at the Armory in an immersive installation that brings together all of the photographs—some still unpublished— from the set of more than 450 prints. Marking the largest and most complete showing of her works in New York to date, this unprecedented collection of Arbus’s works provides a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity. Co-presented with LUMA Arles
MONKEY OFF MY BACK OR THE CAT’S MEOW
SEPTEMBER 9 – 20
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Centered on a stunning Mondrian-like colored grid spanning the length of the Drill Hall, choreographer, dancer, and Guggenheim fellow Trajal Harrell’s dancing runway show is turned on its head with iconography that juxtaposes everyday gestures and artificial poses with historical references, pop culture, and political rhetoric. And while drawing on the Declaration of Independence as a foundation for the US and its urgent call for freedom, this vivid mosaic of a double-edged paradigm also explores the resulting inequalities to the forebearers of the land affected by those actions while celebrating the unifying power of community.
RECITAL SERIES KONSTANTIN KRIMMEL & AMMIEL BUSHAKEVITZ
FEBRUARY 22 & 24
Capturing several competition prizes early in his career as well as being named a BBC New Generation Artist, baritone Konstantin Krimmel has graced some of the finest concert and operatic stages in Europe with a richness of nuance schooled in lieder singing and a naturalistic interpretive approach. Krimmel makes his North American recital debut with a program of lieder by Schubert and Loewe, as well as a song cycle by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
ERIN MORLEY & GERALD MARTIN MOORE
APRIL 11 & 13
One of today’s most sought-after lyric coloratura sopranos, Erin Morley has stepped into the international spotlight with a string of critically acclaimed appearances in the great opera houses of the world. Morley comes to the Armory with an artfully curated program of works from her recent album Rose in Bloom, including repertoire connected to flowers, gardens, and nature from Schumann and Berg to Saint-Saëns and Rimsky-Korsakov and a song cycle by Ricky Ian Gordon.
ARTISTS STUDIO ROBERT AIKI AUBREY LOWE
MARCH 22
Adventurous artist, curator, and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe comes to the Veterans Room with a modular synth and vocal performance in the realm of spontaneous music, blending analog synthesizers with organic vocal expression to create auditory passageways with trancelike suspensions.
SOFIA JERNBERG & SPECIAL GUESTS TUESDAY, MAY 20
Swedish experimental singer, improviser, and composer Sofia Jernberg harnesses unconventional techniques and sounds with a focus on the human acoustic voice in durational performances that freely mix between improvisation and composed song. This singular talent is joined by some additional musicians and guests for a unique performance of some of her own pre-existing and new compositions that embrace her creative practice of communion and collaboration.
ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.
The Armory both commissions and presents performances and installations in the grand Drill Hall and offers more intimate programming through its acclaimed Recital Series, which showcases musical talent from across the globe within the salon setting of the Board of Officers Room; its Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in the restored Veterans Room; Making Space at the Armory, a public programming series that brings together a discipline-spanning group of artists and cultural thought-leaders around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture Series that features presentations by scholars and writers on topics related to Park Avenue Armory and its history. In addition, the Armory also
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman Emeritus
Elihu Rose, PhD
Co-Chairs
Adam R. Flatto
Amanda J.T. Riegel
President
Rebecca Robertson
Vice Presidents
David Fox
Pablo Legorreta
Emanuel Stern
Treasurer
Emanuel Stern
has a year-round Artists-in-Residence program, providing space and support for artists to create new work and expand their practices.
The Armory’s creativity-based arts education programs provide access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, engaging them with the institutions artistic programming and outside-the-box creative processes. Through its education initiatives, the Armory provides access to all Drill Hall performances, workshops taught by Master Teaching Artists, and in-depth residencies that support the schools’ curriculum. Youth Corps, the Armory’s year-round paid internship program, begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college and career goals.
The Armory is undergoing a multi-phase renovation and restoration of its historic building led by architects Herzog & de Meuron, with Platt Byard Dovell White as Executive Architects.
