Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's FILLING STATION, Leslie Cuyjet's WITH MARION & More Set for The Kitchen Fall 2023 Programming

Today The Kitchen has revealed its Fall 2023 programming, amplifying the experimental and future-building possibilities of archival activations within varied modes of performance, film, and visual art. This season features the first program resulting from The Kitchen’s and Dia Art Foundation’s recently-announced long-term institutional partnership, and demonstrates the immeasurable possibilities cross-organizational collaboration can generate. 

As renovations continue on The Kitchen’s Chelsea building, the organization remains in its temporary home at Westbeth Artists Housing (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft) while continuing to explore the notion of a Kitchen without walls, with programming extending to other physical and virtual sites. The Kitchen celebrates the expansive organizational identity reflected by artists’ contributions within its vast archive, and acts on this moment of transition to embrace its mutability: with the launch of its new website in 2023, The Kitchen debuted a reimagined visual and graphic identity, designed by Pacific (Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull). The organization’s new site foregrounds live recordings, video, and archival storytelling, creating a more accessible and engaging experience for visitors and sharing its offerings with local, national and international audiences. 

The Kitchen Executive Director & Chief Curator Legacy Russell says, “The Kitchen celebrates its historic position in redefining, questioning, and exploding the avant-garde, with the artists of this next season putting forward unique and exciting propositions about what that future should look like.” 

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s Filling Station, a newly commissioned project by the Paris-based American multidisciplinary artist, is the first work co-presented by The Kitchen and Dia Art Foundation as part of their new collaboration. Filling Station reinterprets Lew Christenson’s 1938 one-act ballet of the same name (originally staged by the short-lived troupe Ballet Caravan), which shed light on the dynamics across industrializing American city and country spaces, and the politics of identity, gender, race, labor, and class therein. Often called on as a first American ballet wherein American music, dancers, costumes, and scenery were used, Lutz-Kinoy reframes the original work’s challenges to a European ballet canon, proposing new directions for how ballet itself can be engaged as a queered and decolonial practice. Mirroring the interplay of the rural and industrial, Filling Station comprises three dance performances sited at Horatio Street Gas Station in the West Village and at Dia Beacon, and includes an exhibition of a new series of paintings, archival materials, audiovisual elements and ephemera by the artist at The Kitchen at Westbeth (September 14–November 3). 

Dance artist Leslie Cuyjet, noted by The New York Times for her “potent choreographic voice” and “subtle, strong presence [that] unassumingly grounds the stage,” at The Kitchen presents a work that mines her family archive to construct a performance from memory and research surrounding her great aunt, Marion Cuyjet—who founded Judimar School of Dance in 1948, training Black dancers (including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director emerita Judith Jamison) in Philadelphia, where they were forbidden from training in white studios. The performance, With Marion (November 30–December 2), extends from Cuyjet’s work in The Kitchen’s Dance & Process series in 2021.

In a sonic and compositional response to a vital legacy, The Elder Ones bandleader and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi and alto saxophonist and composer Darius Jones musically adapt cosmological writings by Sun Ra with their collaboration Angels & Demons, December 9. Sun Ra’s poetry and these corresponding compositions oscillate between disparities, from dark to light, fear to hope, isolation to ecstatic exuberance, utilizing dissonance and consonance, tension and release, homophony and asynchrony, order and chaos. The music of the duo attaches to Ra’s poetic cycles and chant-like repetition, which can also be found in many of his compositions. Through insistent, even urgent repetition, the words simultaneously grow in their scope and significance and become increasingly absurd and meaningless. Ra’s words feel strikingly contemporary and prescient, hitting chords that can provide a potent release in a time of slow burning apocalypse.

In addition to these solo and collaborative artist presentations, the fall season will see culminating projects stemming from past and ongoing residencies. For The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 L.A.B. Research Residency, the organization partnered with the collective-in-residence School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) to form four Research Groups comprising Primary Researchers and Advisors to explore the histories of art, science, and technology represented in the institution’s archive. In August and September, this cycle of the L.A.B. Research Residency will conclude with a series of in-person and online programs organized by Primary Researchers Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, fields harrington, Romi Ron Morrison, and Asha Tamirisa. This collaboration will intersect with The Kitchen’s Montez Press Radio residency, with the radio collective broadcasting four episodes of discussion between the L.A.B.’s Primary Researchers, Advisors, and invited guests. Marking the next phase of a project Tyler Morse and nia nottage of steph christ collective conceived during their participation in The Kitchen’s 2021 Research Residency, the artists launch the NYC Performance Archive 1980–2005, on September 10 at Come Forever in Brooklyn in an event presented by The Kitchen. Containing its own multitudinous documentations of evolving performance practices in New York, the Archive will house video oral histories and digitized ephemera of artists and collectives involved in performance in New York City during the given period. 

On Screen as part of the ongoing Video Viewing Room series, which makes new and recent video works and archival recordings available online, the season’s offerings begin with a collaboration with The Millennium Film Workshop, founded in 1966 to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios. This June, The Kitchen teams up with the organization to present both archival and contemporary materials reflecting on their  overlapping institutional histories. Later in the season, Video Viewing Room features work from troizel and Buffy (July 2023), Kearra Amaya Gopee (September 2023), and Wong Kit Yi (December 2023). 

The Kitchen Fall 2023 Programming Descriptions and Schedule 

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Filling Station

Dates: September 14 – November 3, 2023 

Site: Exhibition at The Kitchen at Westbeth & three offsite performances (Horatio Street Gas Station and Dia Beacon, dates for September performances to be announced)

A newly commissioned project by Paris-based American multidisciplinary artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Filling Station comprises three dance performances sited across two partner locations, and an exhibition of a new series of paintings, archival materials, audiovisual elements and ephemera by the artist at The Kitchen’s satellite loft space at Westbeth in the West Village.

For this project, Lutz-Kinoy reinterprets the one-act ballet "Filling Station" originally staged by the short-lived troupe Ballet Caravan—initially co-founded by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine as the American Ballet, touted as the first professional ballet company in the United States—as part of a presentation titled A Sunday in Town that debuted in Hartford, Connecticut on January 6, 1938.  The original performance featured music by composer Virgil Tomson, choreography by Lew Christensen (known for his direction of the San Francisco Ballet from 1952–1984), and costumes by artist Paul Cadmus. This ballet is credited as the first ballet directed by an American choreographer, danced by an American company, and based on an American theme, with music and designs by American artists. A response to—and refusal of—a Eurocentric canon of classical ballet, this work brought to the fore a group of collaborators that shone light on questions of American industry, capital, class, and gender roles. It also put new language to an idea of the "American pastoral," a renegotiation of city and country in a period where much of the material of American suburbanism was in the process of being built, deeply defined by the mobility of Americans via car transport. 

Lutz-Kinoy’s restaging views this 1938 work of American dance through a contemporary lens, creating a dynamic and queered space for a reflection on race, class, and gender. The project features a new music score made by American artist James Ferraro, a set design and new paintings by Lutz-Kinoy alongside archival material, and costumes by Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of fashion label Eckhaus Latta. 

The project Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Filling Station is commissioned by The Kitchen and organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen. 

The performance at Dia Beacon is co-presented with Dia Art Foundation and organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, The Kitchen, Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen, and Jordan Carter, Curator, Dia Art Foundation. 

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy (b. 1984, New York) lives and works in Paris. Working across various mediums including sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and painting, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s allegiance is not fixed to a single medium but depends on their shared developments in form and a simultaneity in practice. Embracing the spirit of collaboration as a means to expand knowledge and skills, the breadth of techniques and references used across his practice are the result of many collaborative ventures. Where his ceramics are influenced by working with artists in Europe and Brazil, his large-scale paintings unearth his fascination with the refined, sophisticated and carnal painting style of the 18th century. At the core of Lutz-Kinoy’s practice is performance. Influenced by histories of queer and collaborative practice as well as his background in theater and choreography, his live work explores the interplay of narratives that are created and constructed between individuals and social spaces. Constantly reflecting on his own positionally as an artist, Lutz-Kinoy places himself at the core of his practice–enabling him to manipulate and direct, whilst simultaneously undermining his own role as artist within the production of his work.

James Ferraro is an American experimental musician, producer, composer and contemporary artist. He has been credited as a pioneer of the 21st century genres hypnagogic pop and vaporwave, with his work exploring themes related to hyperreality and consumer culture. His music has drawn on diverse styles such as 1980s electronic music, easy listening, drone, lo-fi, sound collage, and R&B. Ferraro began his career in the early 2000s as a member of the Californian noise duo The Skaters, after which he began recording solo work under his name and a wide variety of aliases.[2][3] He released projects on labels such as Hippos in Tanks and New Age Tapes. Ferraro received wider recognition when his polarizing 2011 album Far Side Virtual was chosen as Album of the Year by The Wire.

Eckhaus Latta Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta are the founders of Eckhaus Latta, a New York and Los Angeles-based label that distinguishes itself from its peers with its gender-neutral designs and has built a reputation for casting models of all genders, ages, shapes and sizes in their runway shows and campaigns.

Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta met at Rhode Island School of Design, where Latta studied textile design and Eckhaus studied sculpture. After graduating in 2010, the duo cut their teeth working for a number of brands and institutions: Eckhaus worked as an accessories designer at Marc by Marc Jacobs , while Latta was a knitwear designer at Opening Ceremony and also ran a textile company that supplied fabric to Calvin Klein and Proenza Schouler. In 2011, the two came together to launch Eckhaus Latta and showed their first collection in New York for Spring/Summer 2013.

As authentic as it is influential, the brand has stood out through gender-neutral designs and casting non-models in its shows. The designers are also known for using unconventional fabrics like plastics and fishing lines. Eckhaus and Latta started working with European fabric mills for the first time in 2017, although the designers still use deadstock materials—a key element of their early collections.

In 2016, the label opened its first store in front of its studio space in Los Angeles. The brand is stocked in 55 locations around the world, including Nordstrom, Ssense and Opening Ceremony, and was one of the finalists for the LVMH Prize in 2018.

Leslie Cuyjet: With Marion

Dates: November 30–December 2, 2023, 7pm

Site: The Kitchen at Westbeth 

In this new evening-length work, choreographer Leslie Cuyjet mines family archives and narratives to refract her own notion of selfhood. With Marion is built from memories of and research about Cuyjet's great aunt Marion Cuyjet, a pioneer of dance education for students of color in the 1950s. In a densely mediated performance environment, Cuyjet builds video loops in real time combining archival footage with her own pre-recorded and live-captured video. Questioning the proximity of objects and self, Cuyjet assembles a fragmented, unstable repository of the past in order to redirect a future out from under its thumb. The origins of this work began in The Kitchen's Dance and Process program over the course of 2020-2021, with monthly writings published on The Kitchen's website and an in-process showing in May 2021. 

Leslie Cuyjet: With Marion is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

Leslie Cuyjet is an award-winning choreographer and performer whose work aims to conjure life-long questions of identity, confuse and disrupt traditional narratives, and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Since 2004, her tenure in the New York dance world is decorated with performances and collaborations, both formal and informal; with contemporaries, legends, and counterparts; on rooftops, good and bad floors, and alleyways; on stage, in film, art, on tour, and on the fly. “A strong, subtle presence unassumingly ground the stage,” says The New York Times. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists (Dance), Princeton Hodder Fellowship, and an Outstanding Choreographer/Creator “Bessie” Award for her 2021 work, Blur. Cuyjet was a Dance and Process participant at The Kitchen (2020-2021).

Angels & Demons 

Date: December 9, 2023, Time to be announced

Site: The Kitchen at Westbeth 

Longtime collaborators Amirtha Kidambi (voice) and Darius Jones (alto sax) join sonic and compositional forces to materialize Angels & Demons, musical adaptations of cosmological writings by iconic composer and bandleader Sun Ra. The duo formed to honor the intellectual, literary, and spiritual contribution of Sun Ra, as a philosopher and teacher. Dancing between Ra's prophetic poetic verse, abstract phonemes and syllables, sound, noise, tone, melody and rhythmic interplay, Jones and Kidambi use their unique compositional and improvisatory voices to amplify Ra's poetry to contemporary audiences.

Amirtha Kidambi and Darius Jones: Angels & Demons is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator.

Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of African-American music. Jones has been awarded the Van Lier Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Commission, Jerome Artist-in-Residence at Roulette, French-American Jazz Exchange Award, and, in 2019, the Fromm Music Foundation commission at Harvard University. Jones has released a string of diverse recordings featuring music and images evocative of Black Futurism. His work as a new music composer for voice culminated in a major debut performance at Carnegie Hall in 2014. Jones has collaborated with artists including Gerald Cleaver, Oliver Lake, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Craig Taborn, Wet Ink Ensemble, Jason Moran, Trevor Dunn, Dave Burrell, Eric Revis, Matthew Shipp, Marshall Allen, Nasheet Waits, Branford Marsalis, Travis Laplante, Fay Victor, Cooper-Moore, Matana Roberts, JD Allen, Matthew Shipp, Nicole Mitchell, Georgia Ann Muldrow, and many more. In 2021, Darius released a new album on Northern Spy Records, entitled Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation). Jones’ music is a confrontation against apathy and ego, hoping to inspire authenticity that compels us to be better humans.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to experimental bands and new music. She is an educator, activist and organizer, informed by anti-racism, decolonization and anti-capitalism, and is co-founder and co-organizer of South Asian Artists in Diaspora and Musicians Against Police Brutality. As a bandleader, she is the creative force behind Elder Ones and has received critical praise for dual releases on Northern Spy records from the New York Times, Pitchfork, Downbeat and WIRE magazine. Kidambi topped the categories of "Rising Star Vocalist", "Rising Star Composer" and "Rising Star Jazz Group" in the Downbeat Critics Poll for 2019. She is active in several improvising duos with Luke Stewart, Maria Grand, Matt Evans and Matteo Liberatore, with releases on Astral Spirits. Kidambi is a key collaborator in Mary Halvorson's latest sextet Code Girl, the duo Angels & Demons with Darius Jones and in various collaborations with William Parker and has worked with the late Muhal Richard Abrams and the late Robert Ashley. She has performed and presented her music in the U.S. and internationally at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Whitney Museum, EMPAC, Berlin Jazzfest and various DIY/punk spaces. Kidambi has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Asian Cultural Council and artist residencies at EMPAC, Roulette, Pioneer Works and Bucareli 69 in Mexico City. She holds degrees from Brooklyn College and Columbia University and has taught at The New School and Brooklyn College.

The Kitchen x Dia Art Foundation 

Date: Ongoing

Site: Various sites

Dia Art Foundation and The Kitchen continue a cross-institutional partnership to further the path-breaking energy that has defined both institutions over the past fifty years. 

As responsive, artist-centered organizations, Dia and The Kitchen will collaborate across media and genres to blur boundaries, propose collective exhibition and performance models, and cultivate experiences that unfold through multiple temporalities and platforms, both embodied and virtual. Artists will have the opportunity to draw upon both institutions’ deep histories of experimentation, engaging with the ephemeral practices cultivated and indexed by The Kitchen and its archive, while being in dialogue with questions of duration and permanence posed by Dia’s sites, collection, and program.

With Dia’s recent revitalization of its West 22nd Street location—Dia Chelsea—and The Kitchen about to embark on its own renovation, this partnership invites these two risk-taking organizations to build upon decades of dialogue, reinvest in their relationship to the Chelsea neighborhood, and propose collaborative, daring work that will expand engagement with artists, publics, and each other.

Dia Art Foundation is committed to advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists. Dia fulfills its mission by commissioning single artist projects, organizing exhibitions, realizing site-specific installations, and collecting in-depth the work of a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x School for Poetic Computation Culminating Programs

Dates: August–September, 2023, program dates to be announced

Site: Various Sites

Through support from the Simons Foundation, The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 L.A.B. Research Residency pays homage to The Kitchen’s new media roots by partnering with the collective-in-residence School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) to explore the histories of art, science, and technology represented in the institution’s archive. To guide this collective investigation, The Kitchen and SFPC have worked together to form four Research Groups comprising Primary Researchers and Advisors to pursue research inquiries related to the thematic "Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe"—a concept that proposes that "instruments" drawn from critical theory, electronics, and networked performance practice can be deployed to probe and counter the opaque world of computing and the racial biases embedded within computational systems. “Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe” is inspired by extracurricular connections between two recurring SFPC courses: Dark Matters, a critical theory class taught by American Artist that investigates the surveillance of Blackness and the construction of whiteness as “neutral” within high technology, and Hardware, a hands-on electronics class taught by the collective CW&T (Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy). Since fall 2022, members of the L.A.B. Research Groups have been engaging with The Kitchen's archive of performance recordings, program ephemera, posters, oral histories, and more to glean precedents for how artists and programs throughout the institution's history have confronted "the Black Gooey Universe."

In August and September, this cycle of the L.A.B. Research Residency will culminate with a series of in-person and online programs organized by Primary Researchers Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, fields harrington, Romi Ron Morrison, and Asha Tamirisa. One set of programs will take part in partnership with Montez Press Radio: four episodes of discussion between the Primary Researchers, Advisors, and invited guests. This slate of programs will unfold as an intersection with Montez Press Radio's own 12-month residency with The Kitchen. Primary Researchers and Advisors will host four radio segments drawing out themes including influence and the avant-garde, approaches to sonic improvisation, the boundaries between reproduction and repetition, and more. This series of episodes will broadcast on radio.montezpress.com, and will be archived for future listening on The Kitchen's website. Select segments will be recorded on site with live audiences at Montez Press Radio’s Canal Street headquarters. Information on the radio series and additional programs organized by the Primary Researchers will be announced later this summer.

The Research Groups for the 2022–2023 L.A.B. Research Residency include Primary Researcher Lillian-Yvonne Bertram with Advisors Melanie Hoff, Erik Loyer, and Eileen Isagon Skyers; Primary Researcher fields harrington with Advisors Zainab Aliyu, mayfield brooks, and Sebastián Morales Prado; Primary Researcher Romi Ron Morrison with Advisors Neta Bomani, Ryan C. Clarke, and Mendi Obadike; and Primary Researcher Asha Tamirisa with Advisors Galen Macdonald, Chakeiya Richmond, Tiri Kananuruk. Three additional artists—American Artist, Taylor Levy, and Che-Wei Wang—are participating as General Advisors to offer feedback across all four Research Groups.

The Kitchen L.A.B. Residency x Simons Foundation, in partnership with School for Poetic Computation Co-Directors Zainab Aliyu, Todd Anderson, American Artist, Neta Bomani, Melanie Hoff, Galen Macdonald, and Celine Wong Katzman, is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator and Alison Burstein, Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, and Daniella Brito, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation Fellow.

The School for Poetic Computation is an experimental school in New York that was founded in 2013. Our school supports interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory. It is a place for unlearning and learning. Our programs challenge the capitalistic, heteronormative and patriarchal canon of social and computer sciences. SFPC attracts self-motivated creative thinkers and radical teachers. All participants are treated as collaborators and we formally encourage the power of learners to determine their experience & education. The unique culture of our institution is one based on communal care and solidarity across social differences. This pedagogical space framed in intimacy ideally allows for participants that are LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, and/or Disabled to feel empowered that their ideas are important, necessary and central. 

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Negative Money (Soft Skull, 2023), and the poetry collection Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series. Travesty Generator received the 2020 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize for interdisciplinary and venturesome work. They are also the author of Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. Bertram’s other publications include the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books, 2012), winner of the Phantom Books chapbook award; the artist book Grand Dessein (commissioned by Container Press), a mixed media artifact that meditates on the work and writing of the artist Paul Klee and was recently acquired by the Special Collections library at St. Lawrence University; and Tierra Fisurada, a Spanish poetry chapbook published in Argentina (Editoriales del Duende, 2002). They collaborated with the artist Laylah Ali for the exhibition booklet of her 2017 art show The Acephalous Series. 

Their honors include a 2017 Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Grant; a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship; finalist nomination for the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship; and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, and others. Bertram holds a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, along with degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

fields harrington is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He works across disciplines and media to investigate the social and political dimensions of race, value, and the complex history of science. harrington studied at San Antonio Community College and received his BFA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program (2019–2020). He has presented solo exhibitions at David Salkin Gallery (2020) and Y2K Group (2021). He has also exhibited in group shows at Parsons S in chool of Design, Recycled Artist In Residence, 52-07 Flushing Avenue, and Automat Gallery. He participated in the research residency Site to be Seen at RAIR (2021), and teaches at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, Parsons School of Design, and The Cooper Union. 

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator.  Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art. They have been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, New York University (ITP), The Joan Mitchell Foundation, and FemTechNet. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Logic Magazine. 

They have taught courses at Parsons School of Design and the University of Southern California (USC). They are currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC in Los Angeles.

Asha Tamirisa is an artist and researcher, primarily working with sound and video in performance and installation. Her work often explores matereality and metaphor, history and archives, and gender and technology. Asha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and has taught at Street Level Youth Media, Brown University, RISD, and Bates College.

NYC Performance Archive 1980–2005 Launch Event

Date: September 10, 2023, 4pm

Site: Come Forever, 342 Hewes St, Brooklyn, New York 11211 

In an event held at Come Forever in Brooklyn, Tyler Morse and nia nottage of steph christ collective introduce the NYC Performance Archive 1980–2005, an open-source platform launching in fall 2023 that will house video oral histories and digitized ephemera of artists and collectives involved in performance practice during a particular period of the discipline’s evolution in New York City. The archive centers the voices of LGBT individuals, women, and artists of color. Morse and nottage conceived the NYC Performance Archive while conducting research as participants in The Kitchen’s 2021 Research Residency. The platform will be available for access online as well as in person as a permanent installation at Come Forever.

To mark the launch of the new platform, Morse and nottage host a screening of excerpts from the newly released oral history videos followed by a panel discussion between artists represented therein.  

Tyler Morse currently works alongside Willie Kearse, developing the Archive-Based Creative Arts workshop and press in collaboration with artists and authors incarcerated in NY (archivebasedarts.org). In the past few years, she’s collaborated with Rider Alsop (Porosity Press; BAILFRONT; Rewriting the Given Workshop), Nia Nottage (NYC Performance Oral History Archive 1980-2005; The Kitchen Research Residency; Come Forever @ 342 Hewes), Sarah Steadman (Come Forever @ 342 Hewes; Porosity Press @ Mt. Lebanon Residency), co/hosted workshops at Wendy's Subway and The Poetry Project, and published the work of Mohammed Zenia and Kamal Fardan. She's interested in open-access archival models, book-making, and collective practice.

nia nottage is an archivist, media artist, and arts organizer. Their projects aim to transform markers of time and place in contemporary media. Their focus includes community activism, internet pornography, performance, and somatics. They were a 2021 Kitchen Research Resident in collaboration with Tyler Morse and Steph Christ Collective. 

steph christ is a fag communist collective of artists, archivists, and activists, as well as a small press. http://stephs.net. 

Come Forever (CFE) is a forthcoming social space for cross-accessible contact opening in June of 2023. It’s home to a variety of free health resources as well as public archives, a bookmaking collaborative, public restroom and a small library. CFE is a mask non-optional space for the promotion of rest and physical and mental health and well-being.

Video Viewing Room On Screen: Millennium Film Workshop: Open Screenings

Date: June 2023

Site: thekitchen.org/on-screen

Since its founding in 1966, The Millennium Film Workshop has maintained a mission to make the tools and practice of moving-image art accessible for all. These efforts historically have included educational workshops; low-or-no-cost equipment rentals; and, importantly, exhibition opportunities for burgeoning, radical, and unsung talents. For this Video Viewing Room, Millennium and The Kitchen collaborate on a presentation of archival and contemporary materials that explores the overlapping histories of these two institutions' efforts to support experimental video art and film practice. Centering on a program format that was central to both The Kitchen and Millennium's founding ethos—the “Open Screening” model that invites artists to screen their work without any barriers to submission—this Video Viewing Room looks at The Kitchen and Millennium's shared investments in open access and resource sharing as modes of promoting advancements in artistic practice. 

Video Viewing Room: Millennium Film Workshop is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen, and Joe Wakeman, Executive Director, Millennium Film Workshop.

The Millennium Film Workshop was founded in 1966 by a group of filmmakers with a vision to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios. Millennium has put on countless educational workshops, artist-hosted screenings, printed our renowned publication The Millennium Film Journal, served as a production hub kickstarting the careers of many prominent filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Todd Haynes, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow, Barbara Hammer, and Nick Zedd; and has played a large role in dismantling the monetary and educational barriers separating the art and craft of filmmaking from the general public. 

Video Viewing Room On Screen:  troizel and Buffy: waves

Date: July 2023

Site: thekitchen.org/on-screen

troizel xx is black and alive and the queerness of this fact means much more than even these words can express. a thinker/doer, troizel received their PhD in performance studies at New York University in 2023, with a dissertation entitled black performance studies: queer/trans experiments. Radically departing from their traditional theatrical training, then returning to it, their performance form oscillates between experimental theater, performance art, installation, and visual art. On the whole, their praxis wrestles with the laborious and spectacular nature of blackness, limitations of the body as a concept, and queer/trans socialities and intimacies. For The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, troizel enters into dialogue with Buffy, The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 Curatorial Fellow, to present a selection of video, media, and text engaged with the concept of waves—the ebbs and flows of the transitive, transitory, transmissional, transdimensional, transatlantic, transpoetic (im)materialities of trans life. 

troizel and Buffy: waves is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

troizel xx  (pronouns: troizel/she/they) holds a bachelor of art in theater studies from Emory University and a master of art, master of philosophy, and Ph.D. in performance studies from NYU. they held a teaching fellowship position at New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC and are an alum of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics New York Emerging Performers Program (EMERGENYC). she is currently in residence at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.

 

Buffy is an artist and writer. She produces and researches live performance and digital media. Buffy reads and writes about sex, science, fiction, and language. She composes text, dance, video, music, image, installation, and public programs. Her work examines embodied experiences of movement and sound in procedural settings, horror, and medical technology, usually with a spatter or a gush of transsexual glamour and gore.

Video Viewing Room On Screen: Kearra Amaya Gopee: Ca(r)milla

Date: September 2023

Site: thekitchen.org/on-screen

Kearra Amaya Gopee is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago, currently based in New York. Gopee works across video, installation, and text to investigate the reverberations of coloniality and historical anti-Black violence in the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas. In doing so, the artist unearths embodied practices of maroonage, speaking to legacies of Black resistance, rage, and catharsis. For The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, Gopee will premiere a new video work that converges archetypes from Trinidadian folklore with logics of speculative fiction to process grief. 

Kearra Amaya Gopee: Ca(r)milla is organized by Daniella Brito, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation Fellow.

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal--leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present, and possible afterlives. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place—after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. They hold an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (Interdisciplinary Studio); BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University, and are an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently, they are a fellow at Queer|Art. In 2023, they will participate in residencies at MacDowell and The Center for Photography at Woodstock.

Video Viewing Room On Screen: Wong Kit Yi

Date: December 2023

Site: thekitchen.org/on-screen

Wong Kit Yi is an artist who explores biological answers to metaphysical questions, dealing with odd scientific findings and the dysfunctional relationship between what is considered science and pseudoscience. Wong also investigates the contractual relationship, working with such ideas as patron collaboration through ninety-nine-year leases for her artworks. Her interests are always subject to change. For The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, Wong will present a selection of video and media related to her explorations of The Kitchen’s archival holdings.

Video Viewing Room: Wong Kit Yi is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator.

Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in projects organized by Tate Modern (London, 2023); FRONT Triennial (Cleveland, 2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2021); Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019); Surplus Space (Wuhan, 2018); the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga, 2017). She was a resident at the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021), received an MFA from Yale University, and has been teaching university courses about performance, video art, and new media. When she is not teaching, she loves lecturing people in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. She is the co-chair of LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Hong Kong, and a die-hard member of KFC (kombucha fan club).

About The Kitchen

Founded in 1971 as an artist-driven collective, The Kitchen today reaffirms and expands upon its originating vision as a dynamic cultural institution that centers artists, prioritizes people, and puts process first. Programming in a kunsthalle model that brings together live performances, exhibition-making, and public programming under one roof, The Kitchen empowers its audiences and communities to think creatively and radically about what it means to shape a multivalent and sustainable future in art. The Kitchen seeks to cultivate and hold space for wild thought, risky play, and innovative and experimental making, encouraging artists and cultural workers alike to defy boundaries and sending them into the world to remake art history and catalyze creative change.

Among the artists who have presented significant work at The Kitchen are Muhal Richard Abrams, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, Kevin Beasley, Beastie Boys, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Leslie Hewitt, Darius James, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Devin Kenny, Simone Leigh, Ralph Lemon, George Lewis, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Michelson, Tere O’Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Sondra Perry, Vernon Reid, Arthur Russell, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Spiegel, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Cecil Taylor, Urban Bush Women, Danh Vō, Lawrence Weiner, Anicka Yi, and many more.

Website: thekitchen.org

Instagram: instagram.com/TheKitchen_NYC 

Facebook: facebook.com/TheKitchenNYC

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