ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO With its exquisite melding of styles and mediums evident in the creative collaboration of Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists in the new Aesthetic Movement style, the Veterans Room represents the exuberance and innovation of exceptional young artisans approaching the decorative arts with a new vision. Curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran, this new series features a diverse mix of contemporary classical, performative art, and an improvisational approach to jazz – all inspired by the exotic beauty of the newly-reopened space and the inventive spirit of the designers who conceived it. These cutting-edge interventions are created by dynamic artists and artistic pairings that harken back to the imagination present at the room’s inception, while testing the limits of the space and pushing their art forms in bold, new directions.
UPCOMING EVENTS: CONRAD TAO AND TYSHAWN SOREY MAY 20
MILFORD GRAVES AND DEANTONI PARKS JUNE 13
LUCY RAVEN SEPTEMBER 29—30
CAMILLE NORMENT AND CRAIG TABORN OCTOBER 16
RYAN TRECARTIN AND LIZZIE FITCH NOVEMBER 21
2016 ARTISTS STUDIO
IN THE NEWLY RESTORED VETERANS ROOM Friday, April 1 from 7:00pm to 10:00pm Saturday, April 2 from 3:00pm to 5:00pm
DEEP LISTENING INTENSIVE
PAULINE OLIVEROS AND IONE Saturday, April 2 at 8:00pm
SONIC MEDITATION
PAULINE OLIVEROS AND IONE JASON MORAN AND THE BANDWAGON Jason Moran, piano Tarus Mateen, bass guitar Nasheet Waits, drums
Sascha von Oertzen, Sound Designer Pianos provided by Steinway & Sons
SEASON SPONSORS
Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Kaplen Brothers Fund, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation.
ABOUT THE WORK Deep Listening is an investigation of the difference between hearing and listening. Our ears constantly deliver sound waves to the audio cortex in our brains. Listening takes place after the sound waves are delivered by the ears. The quality of listening differs for individuals depending on their experiences, memories, and variety of training they have received. We investigate listening by sharing our subjective experience with others and understanding the differences.
SCHEDULE Friday, April 1 from 7:00pm to 10:00pm
We will investigate listening Friday evening with two special Listening Processes. These investigations or sonic meditations require participation and will be explained as we do them. Ione will introduce Listening in Dreams, a unique practice she has created that has seeded Dream Communities worldwide. Participants are invited to explore Deep Listening on their own during their evening in the city, their overnight dreaming, and their day leading up to the next session.
Saturday, April 2 from 3:00pm to 5:00pm Participants will share their Listening and Dreaming experiences with each other and Ione will facilitate a group Dream improvisation. Pauline Oliveros will facilitate a Listening Meditation and a Sonic Meditation. Saturday, April 2 at 8:00pm
Pauline Oliveros will introduce the audience to The Tuning Meditation. Jason Moran and The Bandwagon begin their set by joining The Tuning Meditation.
THE TUNING MEDITATION BY PAULINE OLIVEROS All are welcome to participate regardless of training. Begin by taking a deep breath and letting it all the way out with air sound. Listen with your mind’s ear for a tone. On the next breath using any vowel sound, sing the tone that you have silently perceived on one comfortable breath. Listen to the whole field of sound the group is making. Select a voice distant from you and tune as exactly as possible to the tone you are hearing from that voice. Listen again to the whole field of sound the group is making. Contribute by singing a new tone that no one else is singing. Continue by listening then singing a tone of your own or tuning to the tone of another voice alternately. Commentary: Always keep the same tone for any single breath. Change to a new tone on another breath. Listen to distant partners for tuning. Sound your new tone so that it may be heard distantly. Communicate with as many different voices as possible. End when everyone else does. It happens. Sing warmly! Š Deep Listening Publications 1985 ASCAP tuning. Sound your
ABOUT THE ARTISTS Pauline Oliveros is a senior figure in contemporary American music, with a career that spans fifty years of boundary-dissolving music making. Her life as a composer, performer, and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the many facets of sound. Since the 1960’s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, ground breaking electronic music, myth, and ritual. Many credit her with being the founder of present day meditative music. All of Oliveros’s work emphasizes musicianship, attention strategies, and improvisational skills. Deep Listening, her lifetime practice, is fundamental to her composing, performing, and teaching. She serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer in Troy NY; Darius Milhaud Artist-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland, CA; and Founder of Deep Listening Institute, now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer in Troy, NY. Ione is a noted author, director, and dream specialist. Her works include her memoir Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, Listening in Dreams, Spell Breaking; An Anthology of Women’s Mysteries, and Nile Night. She is playwright and director of Njinga the Queen King (Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, BAM Next Wave Festival, Lincoln Center Out of Doors), the dance opera Io and Her and the Trouble with Him (Union Theater, Wisconsin; Zaccho DanceTheater, San Francisco), and The Lunar Opera; Deep Listening For_Tunes, (Lincoln Center Out of Doors). Ione and Oliveros are currently creating The Nubian Word for Flowers, A Phantom Opera, which is “a deep dream exploration in which Nubian Soul meets Colonial Mind.” Ione is also an improvising text-sound artist who conducts creative retreats throughout the world. She is Deep Listening Instructor at The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer in Troy, NY and Director of the Ministry of Maåt, Inc. Jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran has a rich and varied body of work that is actively shaping the current and future landscape of jazz. Having released nine of his own albums in addition to over 30 recordings with others, Moran has garnered international acclaim including a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Album in 2014. He has recorded with Cassandra Wilson, Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, Sam Rivers, Meshell Ndegeocello, and many others. Moran scored Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated film Selma, and his cross-disciplinary collaborators include the artists Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Theaster Gates, and Kara Walker. Commissioning institutions of Moran’s work include the Walker Arts Center, Chicago Symphony Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Monterey Jazz Festival, among many others.
Moran has a longstanding collaborative practice with his wife, the singer and Broadway actress Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of 30 performances featuring 95 participants. BLEED explored the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, and it was widely hailed as groundbreaking in the music and performance realm. Their collaboration Work Songs was commissioned by the 72nd Venice Art Biennial along with his first mixed-media installations STAGED: Savoy Ballroom and Three Deuces. He continues to collaborate with choreographers Alonzo King and Ronald K. Brown, as well as poets Elizabeth Alexander and Yusef Komunyakaa. Moran currently teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Moran earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Jaki Byard. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. Tarus Mateen is a master of the acoustic bass, electric bass, rhythm guitar, and piano, making him one of the most soughtafter musician/producers in hip-hop, house, blues, rock, reggae, soul, and straight ahead jazz. He began his journey as a professional musician with his two older brothers Roy (drums) and Radji (sax) who toured Jamaica with their group, opening for Freddie Mc Gregregor, as well as Judy Mowatt. In 1985 he moved to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College, majoring in music while sharpening his skills on both the upright and electric bass. Mateen moved to New York in 1988, and began working with legendary jazz master Betty Carter, with whom he recorded a Grammy-nominated CD. He performs and records most regularly with pianist Jason Moran, and has also worked with vibraphonist Stefon Harris, the New Directions band, drummer Nasheet Waits, and with trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard on the film scores for Sugar Hill and the Spike Lee film Malcolm X, as well as the Grammy-nominated Malcolm X Jazz Suite. He consistently works with R&B and hip hop artists including Outkast, Goodie Mob, Q-Tip, Lauryn Hill, Ghostface, Ice Cube, and The Roots. His last recording, Arising Saints: The Art of Solo, is scheduled for release in May. Son of legendary percussionist Freddie Waits, Nasheet Waits is an American jazz drummer and a New York native who has been active on the jazz scene since early in his life. Before pursuing a music career, he studied psychology and history at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He also holds a degree from Long Island University in music. L.I.U. instructor Michael Carvln secured Waits a spot in the percussion ensemble M’Boom, started by drummer Max Roach in 1970. Waits has recorded or performed with a myriad of talented musicians including Fred Hersch, Antonio Hart, Joe Lovano, Jason Moran, Andrew Hill, Bunky Green, William Parker, Eddie Gómez, Casimir Liberski, John Medeski, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner.
ABOUT THE ARMORY Part American palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory is dedicated to supporting unconventional works in the visual and performing arts that need non-traditional spaces for their full realization, enabling artists to create and audiences to consume epic and adventurous presentations that can not be mounted elsewhere in New York City. In its first eight years, the Armory opened its doors to visionary artists, directors, and impresarios who provided extraordinary experiences in a range of art forms. Such was its impact that in December 2011, The New York Times noted, “Park Avenue Armory… has arrived as the most important new cultural institution in New York City.” Built between 1877 and 1881, Park Avenue Armory has been hailed as containing “the single most important collection of nineteenth century interiors to survive intact in one building” by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The 55,000-squarefoot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, with an 80-foot-high barrel vaulted roof, is one of the largest unobstructed spaces in New York City. The Armory’s magnificent reception rooms were designed by leaders of the American Aesthetic Movement, among them Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler, and Herter Brothers. The building is currently undergoing a $200-million renovation designed by Herzog & de Meuron.
NEXT AT THE ARMORY HOPELESSNESS: ANOHNI
THE BACK DOOR: MARTIN CREED
“Hopelessness is the genius of Anohni and her masterful songwriting. The long low sexy beats, the skittering colorful and playful rhythms surround her voice, which is the silky center. Anohni has replaced the stories of abandonment, pain and desire with the biggest issues of our time. This revolutionary move is truly astounding.” —Laurie Anderson
“Clever, dumb, smart and stupidly gorgeous. Whatever Creed does ...he brings a joyousness, lightness and objectivity to the task.” —The Guardian (UK)
may 18–19
Park Avenue Armory and Red Bull Music Academy present the world premiere of Anohni’s live show for her new album Hopelessness on two consecutive evenings in New York. Featuring original films co-directed by Anohni and Australian artist Lynette Wallworth, the celebrated singer, composer, and visual artist will bring her politically charged masterpiece to audiences in an environment unlike any other. With her haunting work in Antony and the Johnsons and her flooring contributions to the Hercules & Love Affair project, Anohni has established herself as one of the most fragile and fiercest vocalists around. Expect to see another breathtaking chapter to her story take shape for the first time ever.
june 8–august 7
Turner Prize-winning, British artist Martin Creed continues his ongoing exploration into rhythm, scale, and order in his largest installation in the U.S. to date, a survey of his work from its most minimal moments to extravagant, larger-than-life installations. Crossing all media including painting, drawing, music, dance, theater, film, sculpture, fashion, and more unclassifiable items such as runners or lights going on and off, his practice transforms the everyday into surprising meditations on existence and the invisible structures that shape our lives.
ABOUT THE VETERANS ROOM “...the Armory, a once-crumbling landmark, has transformed itself into one of the world’s most sought-after venues for performance, music, and supersized art projects. And in a sense, the Veterans Room, of all the Armory’s opulent reception rooms, has the deepest spiritual kinship with a work of contemporary art, the feel of an installation by a young collective whose members were reacting to one another and making it all up as they went along.” – The New York Times The Veterans Room is among the most significant surviving interiors of the American Aesthetic Movement, and the most significant remaining intact interior in the world by Louis C. Tiffany and Co., Associated Artists. This newly formed collective led by Tiffany included some of the most significant American designers of the 19th century at early stages of their very distinguished careers: Stanford White, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler among them. The design of the room by these artisans was exotic, eclectic, and full of experimentation, as noted by Decorator and Furnisher in 1885 that “the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian and the Japanese in the appropriate places.” A monument of late 19th-century decorative arts, the Veterans Room is the fourth period room at the Armory completed (out of 18). The revitalization of the room responds to the original exuberant vision for the room’s design, bringing into dialogue some of the most talented designers of the 19th and 21st centuries – Associated Artists with Herzog & de Meuron, Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, and a team of world-renowned artisans and experts in Tiffany glass, fine woodworking, and decorative arts.
The revitalization of the Veterans Room follows Herzog & de Meuron’s design approach for the Armory building, which seeks to highlight the distinct qualities and existing character of each individual room while interweaving contemporary elements to improve its function. Even more so than in other rooms at the Armory, Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to the Veterans Room is to amplify the beauty of the room’s original vision through adding contemporary reconstructions of lost historic material and subtle additions with the same ethos and creative passion as the original artisans to infuse a modern energy into a harmonious, holistic design. The room’s restoration is part of an ongoing $210-million transformation, which is guided by the understanding that the Armory’s rich history and the patina of time are essential to its character, with a design process for the period rooms that emphasizes close collaboration between architect and artisan.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The restoration and renovation of the Veterans Room was made possible by The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc., Heidi and Thomas McWilliams, Susan and Elihu Rose, Charina Endowment Fund, Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Assemblymember Dan Quart and the New York State Assembly, Liz and Emanuel Stern, Olivia and Adam Flatto, Kenneth S. Kuchin, R. Mark and Wendy Adams, American Express, Rebecca Robertson and Byron Knief, Amy and Jeffrey Silverman, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anonymous. Cover photo: James Ewing