Announcing The 2019-2020 PATHS And Jerome Foundation Residents

Abrons Arts Center (AAC), the Lower East Side arts institution that has long been a nexus of creative communities and local cultures, is pleased to announce its 2019-2020 Jerome Foundation AIRspace Residents, a group of four interdisciplinary artists engaged in the fields of visual arts, performing arts, and social practices. In addition, Abrons is launching its first-ever Promoting the Arts Throughout Henry Street (PATHS) residency program, selecting four artists for the program's inaugural cohort.

The Promoting the Arts Throughout Henry Street (PATHS) program uses the arts to build human connection, radical empathy, understanding, and implements responsive relationships with the organization's employees, clients, and constituents. This year, PATHS will expand with the introduction of an AIRspace cohort. Selected artists will work on in-depth projects within Henry Street's social service programs which serve over fifty thousand New Yorkers through housing, shelter, mental health and senior programs as well as education and workforce readiness programs. Over a two year period artists will collaborate closely with staff and the community to engage in art-making that is responsive and relevant while serving agency constituents and neighborhood residents. In addition, PATHS artists will explore the intersections of art, social justice, and social work in an effort to advance the social, political and cultural causes that are important to residents of the Lower East Side and the five boroughs.

"By inviting members of our community to explore cultural issues such as crime, displacement, racism, ageism, and classism through the arts, we aim to develop a shared understanding of both the root causes and the effects of social disenfranchisement. We believe that artists have an important role to play in addressing the issues and helping us to empower our communities to make change.," says Craig T. Peterson, AAC Artistic Director. "We're thrilled to deepen our investment and formalize this program through the selection and support of four PATHS Artists-in-Residence, with the goal of exploring and establishing a new model of social practice work for the next two years."

The Jerome Foundation AIRspace Residency Program offers a range of support to artists, including workspace; in-progress performances and exhibition opportunities; funds for commissioned works, along with opportunities to collaborate on projects with the broader Henry Street Settlement and Lower East Side communities. The four artists were selected to receive 200 hours of studio time, a commission of five thousand dollars for the creation of a new work as well as administrative support.

In addition, this year four finalists were also chosen to receive free studio hours at Abrons.

The 2019-2020 Jerome Foundation AIRspace Residents are:

It's Showtime NYC

Christopher "Venxm" Brathwaite IT'S SHOWTIME! NYC (IST) is a NYC-based dance team based in--and celebrating--NYC and its street culture. IST provides performance and professional development opportunities to street and subway dancers. Now in its fourth year of activity, IST has more than 30 members and is one of the largest street dance companies. Their project, WHAT TIME IS IT? (WTIS) is a multi-disciplinary performance which uses video and street dance movement to inject the voices and choreography of underground dancers into the larger dance landscape, inviting the audience to discover NYC through the embodiment of its own street culture.

Mette Loulou Von Kohl

LOU VON KOHL is a multimedia performer and wanderer who grapples with her past to complicate her present and conjure her future. Locating herself within a lineage of resistance, Mette Loulou explores her role in the struggle for Palestinian liberation by weaving movement, words, and video into the exploration of her embodied histories. Her project, NO ONE LIKES AN UGLY REVOLUTIONARY is a multimedia exploration of the historic figure, Leila Khaled -- a resistance fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Navigating the space between reverence and fetish, Mette Loulou grapples with Khaled as an idol to shed light on her diasporic longing, uncover her internalized racism, and orientalism of her own history and culture.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Image: Leila Jacue for DXIX Projects JEREMY TOUSSAINT-BAPTISTE is a New York-based artist, composer, and performer who received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design in 2018. He has presented visual and performance work at spaces including MoMA PS1 (NY); Performance Space New York (NY); The Brooklyn Museum (NY); The Kitchen (NY); The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY) and was a 2017 artist-in-residence at Issue Project Room. His project GET LOW (BLACK SQUARE) is a "hyperaudible" object-environment; a lightless and intensely intimate sensorium where inaudible tones are physically felt within the body, provoking feelings of pleasure, pain, or longing. The piece exists as two simultaneous events: a formal chorus and dance and a more fluid, social mode of performance.

Alexandra Tatarsky

Image: Katie Marshall ALEXANDRA TATARSKY makes art at the unfortunate in-between zone of comedy, dance, theater, and deluded rant... sometimes with songs. Her work seeks the logic of the clown as an antidote to despair and as a model of one who keeps trying despite (repeated) failure. Alexandra's work has been performed at venues including Brooklyn Museum; MoMA PS1; New Museum; The Kitchen; and Judson Church. Alexandra writes on spambot poetry, shanzhai lyrics, and grotesque politics for publications including New Inquiry; Hypocrite Reader; ArtReview Asia; Garlands; Spike; and Folder. Their project, SAD BOYS IN HARPY LAND, offers a savagely humorous feminist revisiting of Dante's Inferno where harpies peck at bleeding trees, their branches breaking and their thoughts disordered. It will explore what we can learn from the dark woods of despairs, in contrast to a moralizing, medicalizing discourse on depression.

The Inaugural PATHS Residents are:

Emily Johnson/Catalyst

Emily Johnson is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award who makes body-based work. Originally from Alaska, she is of Yup'ik descent. Since 1998, Emily has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment,interacting with a place's architecture, history, and its role in the community. Her ongoing project-KINSTILLATORY MAPPING and EMBODIED LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT-centers on Indigenous protocol and knowledge. Emily works with Henry Street staff and constituents from myriad programs to build understanding of Indigenous arts and social practices, bringing ancestral knowledge and human connection to the foreground of current-day New York City. Monthly ceremonial fires in Abrons' amphitheater-open to the community and involving participants from both Henry Street programs and invited groups-are opportunities to come together to share music, story-telling, dance and food.

Autumn Knight

AUTUMN KNIGHT is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks;, Project Row Houses; Crystal Bridges Museum; Skowhegan Space (NY); The New Museum; The Contemporary Art Museum (Houston); Optica (Montreal); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Autumn Knight's project WALL WORK is based on meetings with survivors of domestic violence, centering on performative/creative interventions and dialogue. These interventions can take many forms including developing text, reading as a group, movement-based exercises, engaging with visual imagery, sound experimentation and watching videos, among others.

Perfect City

PERFECT CITY is an artist collective that explores the effects of gentrification and displacement. Perfect City was begun in 2016 by theater artist Aaron Landsman and now works collectively to look historically at colonial land grabs and redlining, and forward toward policy change. Perfect City makes live performances, walking tours, mapping workshops, research and public conversations about street harassment, and the history of racist real estate practices. Perfect City provides information that will encourage and include low income/people of color in the process of urban planning; a process that often excludes them. Perfect City has presented performances and workshops at various institutions across NYC, written articles in ArtsEverywhere and Urban Omnibus, and built a cohort of collaborators, both artists and activists.

George Emilio Sanchez

GEORGE EMILIO SANCHEZ is a writer, performance artist and social justice activist. In the last two years, Sanchez has created and facilitated his 24-hour "performance filibuster" exporing gun violence -BANG BANG GUN AMOK-at Abrons Arts Center and University Settlement. Through collaborative performances of professional artists and community members, uniting in solidarity, Bang Bang Gun Amok explores America's gun culture and investigates the epidemic of gun violence. This ongoing project began in 2016.

To learn more about the AIRSpace and PATHS residency programs or to purchase tickets for upcoming performances, go to abronsartscenter.org.