Events at the New Museum

New Museum First Saturdays for Families: Bright Giant Saturday, July 4, 2009 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:35:25 -0500

Is it an airplane? Is it a building? Discover how you and your family can be part of the Bright Giant. Join artists in residence LEWIS FOREVER and band members of Twin Shadow and help create a multigenerational megaband. Create a costume and become part of a collective, live music spectacle.

From 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., families are invited into our theater to view a 30-minute program of short films provided by Brooklyn International Film Festival’s kidsfilmfest.

New Museum First Saturdays for Families are free of charge. This program is designed and recommended for families with children 4 to 15 years old, and includes free New Museum admission for up to 2 adults per family. Children under 18 are always admitted free. No preregistration is required. Tickets are given out on a first-come, first-served basis.

For more information about New Museum First Saturdays for Families, e-mail familyprograms@newmuseum.org

Saturday, July 4, 2009 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents: Armen Ra and Bora Yoon Thursday, July 9, 2009 | 7:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:41:00 -0500

HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents bring you an evening of music from the outer limits.

World-famous thereminist Armen Ra debuts METAL, a multimedia cycle of five arias selected from the repertoire of Maria Callas. Special guests narrate the content of the arias while the theremin voices the melodies, set against a backdrop of metallic black-and-white footage of Callas, projected in extreme slow motion so that every micro-expression in her face becomes apparent, simultaneously revealing a woman of great pride and profound vulnerability, creating a portrait that is both hauntingly mythological and painfully human.

Bora Yoon presents ( (( PHONATION )) ), an exploration of the point at which sound connects to the subliminal through the timbre languages of the voice, found sounds, new and antiquated instruments, and electronic devices. Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition steered by a penchant for a song, ( (( PHONATION )) ) engages with music as music, and not as part of a genre. ( (( PHONATION )) ) takes the means to one end, and uses it for another to form new utterances and the beginnings of a new sonic language, within its spatial and architectural context. In every case, a particular sonic geography is evoked that might be inspired by a simple, found sound in the world, or an expression of a sonic paradox bouncing around only in the mind.

Armen Ra is an American artist and performer of Iranian-Armenian descent. Born in Tehran, he was raised by his mother, a concert pianist, and his aunt, a renowned opera singer and ikebana master. He taught himself to play the theremin, and is one of the best-known players of the instrument alive today. His music fuses Armenian folk music with modern instrumentation, along with melodic lounge standards and classical arias. He lives and plays in New York. Armen Ra has played at The United Nations, Wiener Konzerthaus Mozartsaal Vienna, CBGBs, Knitting Factory, La MaMa E.T.C., Joe's Pub, Boulder Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, The Gershwin Hotel, B.B. King Museum, and Dietch Projects.

Bora Yoon is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer, featured in WIRE magazine and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for creating architectural soundscapes from everyday objects, chamber instruments, digital devices, and voice. She has toured her innovative sound work internationally with solo performances at Lincoln Center, Bang on a Can Marathon, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, with releases on Swirl Records, SubRosa, and the Journal of Popular Noise. She has created unique concepts for live sound design, including one in a 55,000-square-foot abandoned WPA pool in Brooklyn for seven sopranos on bicycles. She has been commissioned by the Young People's Chorus of NYC and the SAYAKA Ladies' Consort of Tokyo to create surround-sound choral performance works: Semaphore Conductus (2008) and CPS/RPM (2009). Collaborators include Reykjavic sound artist Ben Frost, poet Sekou Sundiata, DJ Spooky, Kaki King, and the League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots.

Launched in 1991 as an initiative of Dixon Place, HOT! Festival (July 1-August 1) is a pioneering festival of queer performance and culture. In fact, it’s the longest running festival of its kind. 2009 sees a dynamic expansion of the festival with the new, state-of-the-art Dixon Place theater complex at the heart of five weeks of performance, literary events, and humanities programming. Dixon Place is located at 161A Christie St. (between Rivington and Delancey).

Thursday, July 9, 2009 | 7:00 PM

TropiChat: Conversations with Latin American Filmmakers: Fernando Eimbcke Saturday, July 11, 2009 | 3:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:34:14 -0500

TropiChat, an ongoing series that features conversations with renowned Latin American filmmakers, presents a talk with one of Mexico’s most accomplished young filmmakers, Fernando Eimbcke. He will be discussing his work, including his acclaimed Minimalist debut feature film Temporada de patos (Duck season), as well as his follow-up, the award-winning deadpan dramedy Lake Tahoe, a Film Movement release opening at Anthology Film Archives on July 10. The conversation will be moderated by Gavin Smith, editor of Film Comment.

Fernando Eimbcke was born in Mexico City in 1970, and completed his cinematography studies in 1996 at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos. His work includes several short films and music videos. In 2004, he wrote and directed his first feature film Temporada de patos (Duck season), which was featured in the 43rd Critics’ Week at Cannes 2004, and nearly ninety international festivals. Co-written with Paula Markovitch, his most recent film, Lake Tahoe, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and has won numerous awards internationally.

Photo courtesy of the filmmaker

Saturday, July 11, 2009 | 3:00 PM

David Goldblatt and Richard Flood in Conversation Thursday, July 16, 2009 | 7:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:45:37 -0500

Artist David Goldblatt will discuss his forty-year body of work documenting South Africa with the New Museum Chief Curator Richard Flood.

Over the last fifty years, David Goldblatt has documented the complexities and contradictions of South African society. His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, Goldblatt was forced into a peculiar situation, being at once a white man in a racially segregated society and a member of a religious minority with a sense of otherness. He used the camera to capture the true face of apartheid as his way of coping with horrifying realities and making his voice heard. Goldblatt did not try to capture iconic images, nor did he use the camera as a tool to entice revolution through propaganda. Instead, he reveals a much more complex portrait, including the intricacies and banalities of daily life in all aspects of society. Whether showing the plight of black communities, the culture of the Afrikaner nationalists, the comfort of white suburbanites, or the architectural landscape, Goldblatt’s photographs are an intimate portrayal of a culture plagued by injustice.

“Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt” is organized by Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal and presented by the New Museum, New York. The exhibition is curated by Ulrich Loock, Curator, Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea. Its presentation at the New Museum is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator, New Museum.  Major support is made possible by the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Fund.

Richard Flood was appointed in September 2005 as Chief Curator of the New Museum, where he oversees all programming at the museum in conjunction with the Director. Flood came to the New Museum from the Walker Art Center, where he was the Chief Curator for nine years and subsequently the Deputy Director and Chief Curator for two years. At the Walker, he organized a number of well-received exhibitions, including “Brilliant!: New Art from London,” “Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972,” “Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing,” and an exhibition of the works of Sigmar Polke, among others. Flood previously served as the Director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Curator at P.S.1, and Managing Editor of Artforum magazine.

Thursday, July 16, 2009 | 7:00 PM

New Music Greats: An Evening with Rashaad Newsome Friday, July 17, 2009 | 7:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:26:50 -0500

New York artist Rashaad Newsome creates powerful, original collage and performance through composite parts. His practice is based in sampling and interested in the ways picking apart and recombining culturally specific material, like a hip-hop track, can, in the artist’s words, “elicit emotional and visceral responses that can be universally recognized and felt.” For this event, Newsome will discuss his new work, The Conductor, an ambitious six-part video installation that breaks down and re-composes the visual and aural language of hip-hop music videos and top hits. The artist will also discuss his ambitious, recent project Shade Compositions, a live performance featuring a chorus of more than twenty black women that was simultaneously recorded and remixed in real time using a hacked Nintendo® Wii™ game controller.

Image courtesy Jamie Diamond

Friday, July 17, 2009 | 7:00 PM

Emory Douglas Introduced by Rigo 23 Thursday, July 23, 2009 | 7:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:48:02 -0500

Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, will discuss his work in the context of the current exhibition “Emory Douglas: Black Panther.” Douglas created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for. The exhibition includes more than 150 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1966 to 1977. Artist and activist Rigo 23, a longtime friend and collaborator of Douglas’s, whose installation The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes is on view at the New Museum through October 11, will introduce the talk.

Emory Douglas was born in 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been a resident of the Bay Area since 1951. He was trained as a commercial artist at City College of San Francisco and has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. Douglas’s work has also been in numerous exhibitions about the history of the Black Panther Party, including shows at the Arts & Culture Conference of the Black Panther Party in Atlanta, GA in 2008 and “The Black Panther Rank and File” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in 2006. Most recently his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Urbis, Manchester, UK in 2008-09. In 2007, artist Sam Durant curated a solo exhibition of Douglas’s work at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas,” which is the inspiration for the presentation at the New Museum. The same year, Rizzoli published a book with the same title that included essays and interviews about Douglas’s work and his relationship to the Black Panther Party. Douglas’s work has also been presented at the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Australia; the African American Art & Cultural Complex, San Francisco; Richmond Art Center, VA; and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston.

Rigo 23 was born in 1966 on Madeira Island, Portugal; he has lived and worked in San Francisco since the mid-1980s. His work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Art Institute; San Francisco State University; de Young, San Francisco; Richmond Art Center, Richmond; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); IT-Park Gallery, Taipei; The Royal College of Art, London; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Brasil; and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago. He was the recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999 and has been awarded public commissions including murals for the San Francisco International Airport, the Gerbode Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Thursday, July 23, 2009 | 7:00 PM

Get Weird: Tarek Atoui + U.S. Girls Friday, July 24, 2009 | 7:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:58:36 -0500

Artist and musician Tarek Atoui opens his New Museum residency with his debut New York performance. He is joined by U.S. Girls.

Constructed from hyperactive breakbeats, menacing drones, and disconcerting field recordings, Tarek Atoui’s electronic music creates a midpoint between the hissing emotion of Christian Fennesz and the percussive assault of Muslimgauze. His debut CD, released by Amsterdam's legendary experimental label Staalplaat, presents a multilayered fit of rhythms split between uncontrollably forceful stomping and jarring, asymmetrical collapse. His concerts are intensely physical workouts, with Atoui manipulating samples in real time and engaging his body in a way that upends the entire canon of laptop live performance.

Meghan Remy is U.S. Girls. Her music is built from the scratchiest, most resilient elements of pop songs, as if the world has ended and all that remains are blown-out snare drums and guitar echoes. Nestled in among these eerie, hollow sounds is Remy's haunted voice.According to dustedmagazine.com, "she sings as if she’s a ghost with a grudge." Notorious for otherworldly covers of Bruce Springsteen and the Ronettes, the U.S. Girls performance is a sometimes-bleak sometimes-glorious reinvention of pop music.

Produced by the Sharjah Biennial 9

Photo by Alyssa Grenning

Friday, July 24, 2009 | 7:00 PM

Maysles Cinema at the New Museum presents Living With Conviction: A Black Panther Party Film Series Saturday, July 25, 2009 | 3:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:20:53 -0500

In conjunction with the exhibition “Emory Douglas: Black Panther” at the New Museum, Philip Maysles of Maysles Cinema has selected a series of films illuminating the history and legacy of the Black Panther Party. The series features three screenings at the New Museum on July 25, September 12, and October 17 with three additional screenings at Maysles Cinema in Harlem (dates TBD). Screening topics include: “Building a Panther Iconography” (June 25, New Museum); “Women with Guns;” “Panthers and Hippies;” “Panther Legacy;” “Still Fighting;” and “Policing.”

Maysles Cinema is a nonprofit theater dedicated to the presentation of documentary film and video. The cinema fosters a democratic viewing experience by selecting and presenting movies in collaboration with independent filmmakers, programmers, critics, local film clubs, and organizations. Maysles Cinema is located at 343 Malcolm X Blvd/Lenox Avenue, between 127th and 128th Streets.

Saturday, July 25, 2009 | 3:00 PM

New Museum Block Party Sunday, July 26, 2009 | 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:11:45 -0500

The New Museum Block Party is a day of art activities and performances in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. First, enjoy a range of artist- and educator-led interactive projects and programs related to the neighborhood and the New Museum. Then join the Block Party Parade in a raucous processional marching from the park to the New Museum. Explore the current exhibitions with a free docent-led highlights tour, culminating in a special performance at the New Museum.

The New Museum Block Party is free and open to the public. Participants receive a complementary guest pass to visit the New Museum on the day of the event.

New Museum Block Party is supported by Goldman, Sachs & Co. Community TeamWorks.

Sunday, July 26, 2009 | 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM

HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents: La JohnJoseph and Joseph Keckler Thursday, July 30, 2009 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:17:57 -0500

HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents bring you an evening of confession, digression, and song with two Josephs—from both sides of the pond.

You Don't Know The Half Of It is La JohnJoseph's high-octane travel memoir. Spanning Europe’s art capitals and embracing all the dropouts in between, telling of French-kissing sailors in Greece, terrorizing celebrities with London's trannie mafia, and crying in the cathedrals of Dublin (both of them), the show unravels in La JohnJoseph’s characteristically witty, poignant style. An irreverent mix of told tales, original songs, and outré covers, video work and live satellite appearances, the show even includes the debut appearance of The Future Legendary Children Gospel Choir.

Drawing on his signature blend of vocal acrobatics, funny, trenchant language, and uncanny characterizations, Featured Creatures is a new multimedia cycle by monologist/singer Joseph Keckler in which he evokes stories of adolescent transformation, the vengeance and longing of an incompetent receptionist, and an imagined encounter with a biological hybrid hiding out in Brooklyn. Joined by violinist Dan Bartfield, Keckler heightens the everyday to the level of operatic.

La JohnJoseph is a transdrogynous, transatlantic performance artist. A protégé of the legendary Penny Arcade, he has appeared across the USA and Europe, performing Patti Smith songs saturated in wall paint, dancing at strip clubs, opening art fairs, and creating baroque installations in swimming pools. His previous solo show “I Happen To Like New York”was a sell-out success and Time Out critic’s pick in London this spring, and tours the UK this summer. After contributing to the OPA Performance Festival in Athens and the Zagreb Theatre Festival he will co-star in a seven-week run of a brand-new production, Infinite Variety, in London this fall. As the Village Voice wrote: “In La JJ's weird and wonderful world, anything and everything is possible.”

Joseph Keckler is a singer, monologist, and interdisciplinary artist. His solo play with music, Human Jukebox, became a big hit with audiences and critics alike at both its recent Dublin Fringe premiere and subsequent run at La MaMa ETC. He has been presented at such venues as HERE, Performance Studies International, SF MOMA, Spiegelworld, and The Stone, and has been featured on NPR and The Sundance Channel. Keckler has appeared in various traditional and experimental operas and plays and enjoyed the privilege of collaborating with artists such as John Moran, Holly Hughes, Erin Markey, Jeff Mangum, Dan Fishback, and others. Keckler holds a BFA in painting from The University of Michigan and trained operatically under George Shirley. He throws a monthly performance and art salon "Inner Beauty Parlor" at Envoy Gallery. New York Press writes, “Keckler commands the stage with erotic bravado, launches into dramatic monologues and embodies so many different personae that you wonder whether he’s possessed by spirits or if his body cannot help but channel all the of voices in his head.”

Photo by Joseph Keckler and La JohnJoseph

Thursday, July 30, 2009 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

New Museum First Saturdays for Families: David Goldblatt’s Lens Saturday, August 1, 2009 | 10:00 AM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:30:35 -0500

Explore the work of South African photographer David Goldblatt and how he points out a connection between people (including himself) and the environment, and the way the environment reflects the ideologies that built it. Learn how to make your own pinhole camera and capture the people and environs of the Lower East Side. One camera per family will be available.

From 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., families are invited into our theater to view a 30-minute program of short films provided by Brooklyn International Film Festival’s kidsfilmfest.

For more information about New Museum First Saturdays for Families, e-mail familyprograms@newmuseum.org

Saturday, August 1, 2009 | 10:00 AM

Tarek Atoui: Empty Cans Saturday, August 8, 2009 | 3:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:43:27 -0500

During Tarek Atoui’s monthlong residency, he continues his Empty Cans projectand conducts a two-week music and technology workshop with New York City teenagersfrom the New Museum’s high school program, G:Class, in collaboration with New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Tonight’s engagement is the culmination of this workshop, in which the participants present work they have created using Wii controllers to manipulate original video in live performance.

Atoui initiated his practice of working with youth in France in 2005 with Empty Cans, a music and video workshop for teenagers based on Atoui’s software program of the same name. Atoui developed the performance software Empty Cans as a tool that is accessible and easy for youth. The application runs synchronized music and video manipulated with Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Wii controllers. He subsequently brought the project to several groups of Palestinian teenagers in refugee camps in Lebanon, and has since realized workshops in the Netherlands, France, and Egypt.

Atoui’s final work from this workshop as well as documentation of the performance, will be included in the Museum as Hub “In and Out of Context” project opening August 2009. Atoui will also host an artist talk in the Museum as Hub space to discuss this work and his wider varied practice.

Tarek Atoui is an electro-acoustic musician who creates a distinctive soundscape using digital technology in intensely expressive performances. Using dedicated programs of his own design for each composition, Atoui’s experimental practice draws on traditions of electronic music, performance art, and digital technology to create a unique method of working across disciplines and social groups. Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Atoui moved to France in 1998 to study contemporary and electronic music at the French National Conservatoire at Reims. He currently lives and works in Beirut and Amsterdam. In addition to the Empty Cans workshop, Atoui will perform as part of the New Museum’s Get Weird music series in a special showcase of electronic music July 24, 2009.

Saturday, August 8, 2009 | 3:00 PM

New Museum First Saturdays for Families: Posters for the Future Saturday, September 5, 2009 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:45:47 -0500

Explore the exhibition “Emory Douglas: Black Panther.” This images in this show are nearly forty years old, but they are still as powerful as when Emory Douglas first created them: thought-provoking pictures, meant to change the world. Inspired by Douglas’s work, create a poster sharing your stands on contemporary issues through a variety of graphic techniques, such as printing and collage.

From 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., families are invited into our theater to view a 30-minute program of short films provided by Brooklyn International Film Festival’s kidsfilmfest.

For more information about New Museum First Saturdays for Families, e-mail familyprograms@newmuseum.org

Saturday, September 5, 2009 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

New Museum First Saturdays for Families: Sign and Intervene Saturday, October 3, 2009 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:49:30 -0500

For over twenty years, artist and activist Rigo 23 has challenged the status quo and advocated for social and political change through his murals, interventions, sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, and zines. Informed by both the history of punk and DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetics Rigo 23’s practice comfortably adapts itself to the environment in which it is presented. Inspired by this artist’s installation at the New Museum, The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes, create a sign advocating for political change and participate on a one-day intervention. Sings created by the participants of this workshop will be projected on adjacent wall of the New Museum on the evening of Saturday, October 3, 2009

From 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., families are invited into our theater to view a 30-minute program of short films provided by Brooklyn International Film Festival’s kidsfilmfest.

For more information about New Museum First Saturdays for Families, e-mail familyprograms@newmuseum.org

Banner image: Truth (detail), 2002. Site-specific mural, San Francisco, CA. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim

Saturday, October 3, 2009 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM