The Kitchen Announces Winter/Spring 2022 Season

The Kitchen today announced its Winter/Spring 2022 season, initiating new collaborations and activating the boundless potential of The Kitchen's spaces in advance of its building's upcoming renovation beginning Spring, 2022. Works this season, the organization's first programmed under the leadership of newly appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator Legacy Russell, expand uses and definitions of space to build bridges between history and futurity, as The Kitchen shapeshifts to hold new visions of cultural and social refuge and celebration. Here, distinctions-between arts institution and nightclub; archival exhibition and performance-are chiseled away as artists vividly reexamine cultural legacies along a timeline pointing infinitely forward.

The Kitchen Executive Director and Chief Curator Legacy Russell says, "As we reflect on The Kitchen's 50th anniversary and embrace this moment of transformation for the institution, this season holds a special significance as the final season of The Kitchen's program to be held inside of our 19th Street building as it currently stands. These artists have been brought together because they embody the ways in which the future of experimentalism can be expanded, redefined, refracted while continuing to honor and pay homage to the expansive histories and creative communities that have delivered us to this moment."

From January 18-March 6, in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, Sadie Barnette will reimagine the New Eagle Creek Saloon, the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, within The Kitchen's building. Established by the artist's father Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, CA chapter of the Black Panther Party, the bar (operated by Barnette between 1990-1993) offered a safe space for the multiracial queer community who were marginalized in other social spaces throughout the city.

The artist's first East Coast institutional presentation of The New Eagle Creek Saloon will come into lyrical and urgent intersection with madison moore, cultural critic, DJ, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and author of Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale University Press, 2018) who, over the course of Barnette's exhibition, will be in-residence with The Kitchen. Guided by moore, for the first time in The Kitchen's history, the institution will launch a nightlife and club culture residency, thinking deeply about the ways in which queer space has been impacted by city change and gentrification through and beyond New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. During the run of the exhibition, Barnette's installation will be activated by sound and DJ sets, performances, and talks.

A participating artist in the 2020 The Kitchen L.A.B. (which invites artists, authors, and curators to unpack ambiguous vocabularies in contemporary art by responding to them both in conversation and artworks), and a performer in 2019's ASSEMBLY co-organized by Kevin Beasley, E. Jane will return to The Kitchen, April 1-May 14, 2022, to have their first-ever solo exhibition in the space. E. Jane incorporates digital images, video, text, performance, sculpture, installation, and sound design in their work, exploring the life of the Black diva and of Black women in popular culture. Where there's love overflowing, their Spring, 2022 exhibition of digital and gouache wall drawings and video installation surrounding a central stage-and culminating in a performance by MHYSA, Jane's performance alter ego-continues this line of inquiry across the life of the "Home," the ballad originally sung by Stephanie Mills's Dorothy character at the close of The Wiz on Broadway.

stefa marin alarcon's Born With An Extra Rib: The Film, created in a residency in May 2021 in The Kitchen's former satellite space Queenslab, will premiere March 17, in an evening featuring STEFA* and their band.

The season's first months-through March 12-feature the continuation of the exhibition In Support, examining how support operates as an offering, practice, and position within and beyond institutional contexts, and featuring new commissions by Fia Backström, Francisca Benítez, Papo Colo, and Clynton Lowry. Online on The Kitchen OnScreen, a spotlight on two of Abbey Williams' works-examining the historical archive as a conflicted site of erasure and protective enclosure- will launch the year in The Kitchen's ongoing Video Viewing Room series in January.

In another unprecedented partnership for the organization, The Kitchen will team up with BOMB Magazine for an Instagram Live series, Across the Table, bringing together four pairs of artists with distinct ways of making and thinking, from both organizations' histories. They will share common ground through 30-minute conversations via Instagram Live. Additional details about this partnership will be made public in the coming weeks.

Programming Schedule and Descriptions

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon

January 18-March 6, 2022

For this work, Sadie Barnette will reimagine the New Eagle Creek Saloon, the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco which was established by the artist's father Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, CA chapter of the Black Panther Party. From 1990-93 Barnette's father operated the bar and offered a safe space for the multiracial LGBTQ community who were marginalized at other social spaces throughout the city at that time. Presented for the first time in New York City on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots and in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, where Barnette was a 2014-15 artist in residence, this project celebrates the history of queer Black space and resurrects its presence in a location in the city (Chelsea) where this legacy has been so instrumental to avant-garde art and performance. The installation will be activated by new media screenings, performances, talks, and other social events.

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, The Kitchen.

Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Carmago Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis; and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Guggenheim Museum, NY; JP Morgan Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Walker Art Center, MN; as well as a permanent, site-specific commission at the Los Angeles International Airport forthcoming in 2024. She is the inaugural Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley's Black Studies Collaboratory. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, where her first solo exhibition Inheritance is on view November 20, 2021 - January 8, 2022. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA.

madison moore: Nightlife-in-Residence

January 22-March 6

with Sonic Activations January 22, February 5 & 19, and March 5

and Programs and Presentations Throughout

For the first time in The Kitchen's history, the institution will launch a nightlife and club culture residency, responding to the occasion of Sadie Barnette's The New Eagle Creek Saloon being installed in its performance space by inviting madison moore to bring into conversation, collaboration, and community a cohort of cultural practitioners that engage nightlife and club culture as a critical tool, political vehicle, and site of intersectional queer praxis. The residency, running across, and set into, Barnette's installation, will activate the bar itself, creating an experiential and participatory environment for audiences to visit both in the daytime, and at night.

moore and their collaborators will bring the bar to life throughout its time at The Kitchen (January 18-March 6), with sonic activations January 22, February 5 & 19, and March 5, programs and presentations throughout. The space will become a site of discourse and exchange across generations and genres of music and sound. Across the weeks sonic traces of each activation in the space will be layered into Barnette's installation, to be cumulatively brought into The Kitchen's archive as an organic document of the artists' community and collaboration.

Organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, The Kitchen.

madison moore, Ph.D. (American Studies, Yale), is an artist-scholar, DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. They are broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the face of rolling catastrophe. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. Other articles have been published in venues including The Atlantic, Theater, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. madison has performed internationally at a range of nightclubs, parties and art institutions, including the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Tate Britain, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. madison is currently writing a book titled Dance Mania: A Manifesto for Queer Nightlife. In Summer 2022, madison will be an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

In Support

Group exhibition featuring works by Fia Backström, Francisca Benítez, Papo Colo, and Clynton Lowry

Through March 12, 2022

512 W. 19th Street

The word support commonly appears in language describing the aims and activities of mission-driven, nonprofit institutions like The Kitchen. This exhibition invites four artists to reflect on what this term means in practice within institutional contexts, asking: How do institutions rely on cycles of providing and receiving support? In what ways do institutions position themselves in support of people, projects, or causes? Is support inherently good? Participating artists present new works that animate the interlocking structural, fiscal, interpersonal, and ideological systems underpinning institutions. Highlighting interstitial spaces in which artists, staff, and audience members commonly enact or accept support in its manifold forms, these works are installed in sites such as The Kitchen's lobby, production workshop, administrative offices, and roof. While realizing In Support, the artists and the institution's staff members have worked collaboratively to negotiate the opportunities-and grapple with the limitations-of how support functions within and beyond The Kitchen.

Organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, Media and Engagement, with project management by Zack Tinkelman, Production Manager.

For artist bios, visit https://thekitchen.org/event/in-support

stefa marin alarcon: Born With An Extra Rib: The Film

March 17, 2022

Created in a residency in May 2021 at The Kitchen's former satellite space Queenslab, Born With An Extra Rib: The Film is a transdisciplinary experimental opera featuring multimedia artist and composer stefa marin alarcon in which the cast, creative team, and audience are invited to engage in an emergent process of collective liberation. This evening celebrates the film's premiere with a performance by STEFA* and their band, and elements from the rituals used in the making of the film.

Organized by Sienna Fakete, Curatorial Fellow, and Lumi Tan, Senior Curator.

stefa marin alarcon is a vocalist, composer and multi-media performance artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Using an amalgamation of punk, experimental pop and classical minimalism with queer ethereal aesthetix and video collages, stefa builds worlds that offer a somatic decolonial respite for the misfits and displaced who are yearning for a sense of home.

stefa has shared their work/spirit/song with Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museo Del Barrio, National Sawdust, Rough Trade, Elsewhere, Nublu, BAAD!, The Sultan Room, NUEVOFest, Abrons Arts Center, Dixon Place, Tulsa Artist Residency, Cine Las Americas, The Vienna Festival, Power of the People Combined, Body Hack, Fierce Futures and more.

They studied euro-centric classical music for 20 years (Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts '07, Central School of Speech and Drama '10), were an Artist-in-Residence at TrueQué Residencia Artística, Slippage Residency at Duke University, a Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics EmergeNYC Fellow (2019) and a Leslie Lohman Museum of Art Artist Fellow (2019-2020). Their debut EP Sepalina was released on Figure & Ground Records in 2018.

E. Jane: Where there's love overflowing

April 1-May 14, 2022

New York-based artist E. Jane will present a new exhibition of digital and gouache wall drawings and video installation surrounding a central stage. These works draw upon the artist's archive of performances of the powerful ballad "Home," originally sung by Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in The Wiz in its Broadway premiere in 1975. The song's lyrics reclaim the idea of a home full of love as one of your own imagination. Jane considers its relevance to generations of Black femme divas from Diana Ross in the film adaptation of The Wiz, to Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, and Jazmine Sullivan. Within this expansive timeline, Jane asks where love can be found in archival spaces and how the exhibition can function as a score. A culminating performance by Jane's performance persona MHYSA-a pop star diva who questions the potency of Black celebrity- will premiere their own version of "Home"; during rehearsals, the exhibition will be closed to the public who will be invited to eavesdrop from the lobby.

Organized by Lumi Tan, Senior Curator, and Sienna Fakete, Curatorial Fellow.

E. Jane (b.1990, Bethesda, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by Black liberation and womanist praxis, their work incorporates digital images, video, text, performance, sculpture, installation, and sound design. E. Jane's work explores safety and futurity as it relates to Black femmes, as well as how Black femmes navigate/negotiate space in popular culture and networked media. Since 2015, Jane has been developing the performance persona MHYSA, an underground popstar for the cyber resistance. MHYSA operates in Jane's Lavendra/Recovery (2015-)--an iterative multimedia installation--and out in the world. Jane considers this project a total work of art--or Gesamtkunstwerk--that honors and examines the life of the Black diva and of Black femmes in popular culture. In 2018, MHYSA followed her critically acclaimed debut, fantasii, with a live EU/US tour. Highlight performances include the ICA and Cafe OTO in London and Rewire in The Hague. Her second album NEVAEH came out in February 2020 on Hyperdub records in London.

E. Jane received their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and a BA in Art History with minors in English and Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College in New York in 2012. E. Jane has also performed at The Kitchen, MoCADA and MoMA PS1 as one-half of the sound-performance duo SCRAAATCH; exhibited their solo work in dozens of international institutions and galleries, from MoMA PS1 and Studio Museum 127 to MCA Chicago and IMT Gallery and Edel Assanti in London; written the widely-circulated NOPE manifesto, recently featured in Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism; won the 2016 Wynn Newhouse Award; and have been a 2019-2020 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. They are currently a Harvard College Fellow in New Media as a part of SCRAAATCH.

Video Viewing Room

Abbey Williams

January, 2022

Other Artists to Be Announced for February-June

For its first Video Viewing Room of its 2022 season, The Kitchen presents Abbey Williams and her two moving image works Overture (2020) and Intermission (2018). Across these works the artist negotiates the structural question of a historical archive as a conflicted site of simultaneous erasure and protective enclosure, alongside systems of visual culture as they intersect with Black womxnhood, complicating what is necessarily seen and what is necessarily left unseen. Williams shapes intimate anti-portraits that, in directly refusing Black figural representation, apply what feminist author and activist bell hooks terms an "oppositional gaze", a counternarrative and counterviewership that disrupts the power embedded in the act of looking.

Organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, The Kitchen.

Abbey Williams lives and works in New York City, where she was born and raised. Her work has been exhibited at TATE Britain, London, UK; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Williams was a part of the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. Solo exhibitions in New York include Foxy Production, Bellwether Gallery, Sargent's Daughters, and in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Williams holds a BFA from the Cooper Union, an MFA from Bard College, and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Flash Art, and Artforum.

Across The Table

Across The Table brings together The Kitchen and BOMB Magazine in critical dialogue and creative collaboration at the turning of anniversaries across both dynamic institutions. With The Kitchen celebrating its 50th and BOMB celebrating its 40th, each has built a community that centers artists and their voices first. In a moment where models of care continue to be central to the ways the future of art can be imagined, The Kitchen and BOMB have teamed up to present a series of conversations that invite two artists with distinct ways of making and thinking to share common ground. Bringing together folks who have never-before been in public conversation with each other, Across The Table gives space to center the creative process as its own site of exploration ripe with mutual points of departure.

About The Kitchen

As one of New York City's oldest nonprofit alternative art centers (founded as an artist collective in 1971 and formalized as a 501c3 in 1973), The Kitchen is dedicated to offering emerging and established artists opportunities to create and present new work within, and across, the disciplines of dance, film, literature, music, theater, video, and visual art. Recognizing its longstanding legacy for innovation, The Kitchen remains devoted to fostering a community of artists and audiences, offering artists the opportunity to make-and for audiences to engage with-work that pushes the boundaries of artistic disciplines and strengthens meaningful dialogues between the arts and larger culture.

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

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