The Kitchen Announces Spring 2018 Season

The Kitchen, founded in 1971, has continued to serve as an important catalyst for a broad community of groundbreaking artists working across disciplines. In today's landscape, where contemporary artists and arts institutions are collaborating in new ways and generating new contexts for the continuing evolution of multi-disciplinary art, The Kitchen, as a nimble, smaller-scale organization, plays an especially vital role. It provides emerging and established artists a hot-house environment for the presentation and discussion of their work, supporting and seeking to foster a vibrant, living dialogue among artists from every field and area of culture. Engaging both The Kitchen veterans and newcomers who challenge the given formations of art and politics, lifestyle and social structures, the Spring 2018 (March 28-July 27) season probes everything from the police state to the racial imaginary to self-construction and identity, utilizing the flexibility of the institution's spaces for art that itself eludes definition.

Since 1974, when Charles Atlas first appeared in an irreverent two-minute performance in Jean Dupuy's marathon soiree, Soup and Tart, The Kitchen has fostered a close relationship with the pioneering video artist. Atlas, known for his collaborations with Merce Cunningham that radically innovated the ways dance and film interact, and for mediating the personas of numerous artists in his circle through film, has become a standout presence in the institution's rich history. Atlas will kick off The Kitchen's Spring 2018 season with his return to gallery with the past is here, the futures are coming (March 28-May 12) and performance space with The Kitchen Follies (May 3-5, 10-12), for a multimedia project that harnesses his artistic past-and the Downtown New York club culture in which he immersed himself-in its multidimensional understanding of time, place, and identity. From April 5-7, Abraham Cruzvillegas will continue his autoconstrucción (self-construction) work, for which he creates sculptures through improvisation with found objects. The work will be activated in twenty-minute performances by choreographer Bárbara Foulkes, whose improvised, aerial dance mirrors the suspension of the objects on display, and will also feature a musical intervention by Andrés García Nestitla. Playwright Sibyl Kempson, dubbed by Hilton Als in The New Yorker a "vital talent...making an indelible mark on the downtown theatre scene," will bring a cycle of live ritual performance installations to The Kitchen. She and her company, 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co., will perform Sasquatch Rituals, inspired by online accounts of encounters with the folkloric beast, April 24-28.

In 2014 the NYPD implemented a new strategy-"Omnipresence." As it manifested across New York, Vice wrote, "In a city where stop-and-frisk is no longer politically acceptable, but not necessarily over, this bizarro version of community policing deploys a platoon of patrolmen at corners and in the centers of buildings in more dangerous neighborhoods. It also bathes those neighborhoods in floodlights. Eyes, ears, and lights are now on every corner." From May 22-June 9, Omnipresence, curated by Elisa R. Linn, Joseph Lubitz, Ellen Pavey, and Manabu Yahagi, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP), will examine the aesthetics of control. From June 20-June 27, The Racial Imaginary Institute-founded by poet Claudia Rankine with funding she received with her 2016 MacArthur Genius Grant-will bring the results of their first year of research to On Whiteness, a project that includes a large-scale group exhibition, a symposium, a residency series, and performances.

The Kitchen will host the MATA Festival for its 20th year of presenting bold contemporary classical music to New York audiences, April 10-14. Presenting works by composers from every inhabited continent, this year's lineup-featuring the East Coast debut of Mexico's only independent new music ensemble, Liminar, a celebration of the future directions of new music with Contemporaneous, an evening musically recreating dreams and nightmares with newly commissioned work from Erin Rogers and a performance by Ken Ueno and MATA Artistic Director Du Yun, and much more-continues MATA's legacy as "the city's leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers" (The New Yorker). The Kitchen's longest-running series, Dance and Process, will return, this year facilitated by Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen, with performances culminating the 10-week collaborative group process, June 8-9.

More information on The Kitchen's Spring 2018 programming is below. Tickets are available online at thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; and in person at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2:00-6:00 P.M.

THE KITCHEN SPRING 2018 FULL PROGRAMMING

[EXHIBITION/PERFORMANCE]

Charles Atlas

the past is here, the futures are coming

March 28-May 12

The Kitchen Follies

May 3-5 and 10-12, 8pm.

Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members

Atlas presents a multimedia project in The Kitchen's gallery and theater spaces. In the gallery, two new video installations take a retrospective look at Atlas' art-making while offering a counterpoint to his 2003 Instant Fame! and its portraits of downtown figures. The exhibition concludes with two weekends of performances in The Kitchen Follies, featuring Julianna Barwick and Jodi Melnick, Laurie Berg, Johanna Constantine, DANCENOISE, the Illustrious Blacks, Solo Termite, Stanley Love, and many others to present the ultimate variety show hosted by Tyler Ashley, The Dauphine of Bushwick, while Atlas records, mixes, and projects footage live. Organized by Katy Dammers and Tim Griffin.

[EXHIBITION/PERFORMANCE]

Abraham Cruzvillegas

April 5-7

Performances April 5-6, 6:30pm & 8:30pm; April 7, 3:30pm, 5:30pm, 8:30pm

A conversation with the artist takes place Saturday, April 7, at 5pm

For his first institutional work in New York since 2007, Cruzvillegas combines elements of sculpture, dance, and music in a harmonic activation of an assemblage of found objects. This performance builds on his working methodology of autoconstrucción (or "self-construction"), which activates effects of improvisation, transformation, and decay upon his works and materials. First performed in 2017 at Pista, an abandoned dance space in Colonia Roma, Mexico City, this iteration of Autorreconstrucción: To Insist, to Insist, to Insist... sees the artist producing a sculpture using everyday objects and refuse sourced in the vicinity of The Kitchen in Chelsea, a neighborhood currently under large-scale construction and development. The work will be activated in twenty-minute performances by choreographer Bárbara Foulkes, whose improvised, aerial dance mirrors the suspension of the objects on display. The performance will also feature a musical intervention by Andrés García Nestitla. Organized by Tim Griffin and Rachel Valinsky.

[MUSIC]

MATA

20th annual Festival of New Music

April 10-14, 8pm

Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members

MATA returns to The Kitchen to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its internationally recognized new music festival. The program features composers from every inhabited continent, eight world premieres, including four MATA-alumni commissions, singing apples, showering sopranos, a MATA's Greatest Hits event, and the return-after 20 years-of Randy Hostetler's P(l)aces. Performers include Mexico's Liminar, Sandbox Percussion, FOM: The Friends of MATA, and Contemporaneous.

[PERFORMANCE]
Sibyl Kempson/ 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co.

Sasquatch Rituals

April 24-28, 8pm

Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members

Sasquatch Rituals is a cycle of performance ritual installations initiated by Sybil Kempson that tracks and responds to her spiral-shaped experiences as an investigator for the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. It begins with the patterns of language Americans use on the Internet to describe something they can't explain. Organized by Lumi Tan.

The Kitchen Spring Gala honoring Nan Goldin and Lydia Lunch

The Kitchen

May 16

The Kitchen celebrates two essential artists: photographer Nan Goldin, renowned for capturing her generation's post-punk, New Wave scene (notably, early versions of slides from Ballad of Sexual Dependency were first shown at The Kitchen in 1980 as part of Edit deAk's "Dubbed in Glamour"); and musician and artist Lydia Lunch, a radical progenitor of No Wave music whose numerous films and performance works at The Kitchen have engaged power structures and political systems from an unapologetically feminist perspective. For more info, see thekitchen.org.

[EXHIBITION]

Omnipresence
May 25-June 17

Bright white LED lights that never go out. Sidewalk fencing painted an all-too-natural shade of "hunter green." The soul and feelings of a worker plotted in geometric patterns of color. This exhibition presents a diverse range of critical strategies that render the infrastructure, media, and iconography of authority in the lived everyday. Through architectural intervention, sculpture, performance, and the moving image, the works displayed here explore how control becomes an environmental condition, and how "Omnipresence"-the name of New York City's new strategy for a heightened saturation of police presence-calls for hyper-vigilance. In Kafka's words, "there are only control agencies." Curated by Elisa R. Linn, Joseph Lubitz, Ellen Pavey, and Manabu Yahagi, Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellows in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP).

[DANCE]

Dance and Process

June 8-9

Tickets: $20 General / $15 Members

This event features new works and is the culmination of a ten-week group process of sharing work and feedback. Facilitated by Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen, and featuring work by Lauren Bakst, NIC Kay, Athena Kokoronis, and Angie Pittman. Initiated in 1995, Dance and Process is The Kitchen's longest running series. Dance and Process stages an interrogation of methods of choreographic and dance practice, whereby artists challenge default structures in their own work and the field at large.

[EXHIBITION/PERFORMANCE]

The Racial Imaginary Institute

On Whiteness

June 27-August 3

In their first year, The Racial Imaginary Institute has focused on whiteness as a starting point, stating, "Whiteness as a source of unquestioned power, and as a 'bloc,' feels itself to be endangered even as it retains its hold on power." On Whiteness seeks to create a collaborative space to disorient bodies habituated to spaces of white dominance through a large-scale group exhibition; symposium chaired by Claudia Rankine; residency series with artists Dark Noise Collective, Vijay Iyer, and Jackie Sibblies Drury; and performances with artists Marguerite Hemmings, Seung-Min Lee, and Angie Pittman. Organized by the curatorial teams of The Racial Imaginary Institute and The Kitchen.

FUNDING AND CREDITING

Charles Atlas is made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Luhring Augustine, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Suzy Coue-Wilson & Edward Wilson, Eileen & Michael Cohen, Jeffrey Deitch, and Barbara & Howard Morse.

Abraham Cruzvillegas is made possible with support from Shelley Fox Aarons & Philip E. Aarons, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo / The Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, Eleanor Cayre, Katherine G. Farley & Jerry I. Speyer, Christen & Derek Wilson, Jill & Peter Kraus, and The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico with the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. Project supported by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA).

Sibyl Kempson/ 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co.: Sasquatch Rituals was developed with support from Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Art Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Jerome Foundation.

The Racial Imaginary Institute is made possible with support from the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and Poetry Foundation.

Annual program support provided by The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., Cowles Charitable Trust, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and National Endowment for the Arts.

The Kitchen thanks the following foundations and businesses for their support: 47 Canal; 303 Gallery; Ace Hotel New York; Alvarez & Marsal Holdings, LLC; The Amphion Foundation, Inc.; Marianne Boesky Gallery; Gavin Brown's enterprise; Calvin Klein, Inc.; Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; Christie's; James Cohan Gallery; Contemporary Art Partners; Paula Cooper Gallery; The Aaron Copland Fund for Music; The Cowles Charitable Trust; Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc.; Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York; Debevoise & Plimpton LLP; The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; The Durst Organization; Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation; FACE Contemporary Theater Fund; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson LLP; Galeria Franco Noero; Galerie Gisela Capitain; Galerie Perrotin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber; Howard Gilman Foundation; Goethe-Institut New York; Goldman Sachs; Marian Goodman Gallery; Greene Naftali; Hand, Baldachin and Amburgey LLP; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; Hauser & Wirth; Marta Heflin Foundation; Hannah Hoffman Gallery; HSBC Private Bank, a division of HSBC Bank USA, N.A.; IAC; Jerome Foundation; Mayer and Morris Kaplan Family Foundation; Lagunitas Brewing Company; Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation; David Lewis Gallery; Lisson Gallery; The Margaret and Daniel Loeb-Third Point Foundation; Luhring Augustine Gallery; LUMA Foundation; The MAP Fund; Grace R. and Allen D. Marcus Foundation; Matthew Marks Gallery; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Metro Pictures; J.P. Morgan; J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation; Morgan Stanley; New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project; New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project; New Music USA; New York Community Trust; Orentreich Family Foundation; The Overbrook Foundation; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, LLP; Petzel, New York; Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The James E. Robison Foundation; The Rolex Initiative; Andrea Rosen Gallery; Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation; Reena Spaulings Fine Art; Team Gallery; Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; Tumblr; UBS Financial Services; Van Doren Waxter; VIA Art Fund; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and David Zwirner, New York/London.

ABOUT THE KITCHEN

The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists' talks, and lecture series. Since its inception in 1971, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence.

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