Work by Yoko Ono & More to be Featured in Park Ave Armory's 2025 Season

Park Avenue Armory revealed its 2025 season that features bold, transformative artistic experiences from Jamie xx, Yoko Ono, Anne Imhof, Diane Arbus, Trajal Harrell, and more that subvert and expand expectations of what contemporary music, visual art, and performance can be. Comprised predominantly of world and North American premieres, the 2025 season builds on the Armory's history of presenting masterpieces in spatial music, site-specific concert experiences, genre-defying theatrical works, and elevating singular artistic perspectives from across the world. In the expansive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, these productions will engage with the Armory's iconic architecture in unexpected ways, offering unique settings for audiences to experience music, photography, and performance. The historic period rooms will host intimate Recital Series performances and Artists Studio programs curated by Jason Moran, showcasing the talents of visionary artists across genres. These programs will be complemented by Making Space at the Armory, a series of talks and symposia.

“This season's Drill Hall programs encompass a thrilling spectrum of settings and moods that capture the complexity of our current moment,” said Pierre Audi, the Anita K. Hersh Artistic Director of Park Avenue Armory. “We will explore a range of performance styles that reimagine traditions of pageantry and storytelling, from a large-scale performance commission by the fearless Anne Imhof, to Trajal Harrell's fashion- and freedom-forward catwalk, to a musical staging of the revolutionary idealism of the 1970s. We are also celebrating the legacies of Diane Arbus and Yoko Ono, and welcoming two incredible musical innovators back to the Armory—Jamie xx and Georg Friedrich Haas—as they undertake new immersive concert projects.”

“This season, some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories, contemporary society, and visions of the future,” said Rebecca Robertson, Adam R. Flatto Founding President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory. “Within the historic architecture and massive scale of the Drill Hall, and with the collaboration of our partners, co-commissioners, and curators, their visions will unleash the fullest potential of what art can be and do.”

The Armory's 2025 Wade Thompson Drill Hall programming begins in January with Jamie xx's In Waves, a co-presentation with Bowery Presents that launches the North American tour for the artist's first solo album in 10 years. Returning to the Armory following his sold-out residency with The xx in 2014, Jamie xx will perform a career-spanning set with an emphasis on his newest album, In Waves, which captures the bliss, volatility, and introspection of a night out.

Revolutionary artist and activist Yoko Ono will bring the largest installation to date in North America of her ongoing work Wish Tree to the Armory in February. Featuring a grove of 92 trees installed in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to mark the artist's 92nd birthday, the work will invite visitors to write and attach wishes to the branches, creating a large-scale yet personal activation. Ono's work will be the topic of a two-day symposium as part of the Armory's Making Space series, which will emphasize her legacy of advancing female empowerment, creativity, and peace.

Multifaceted contemporary artist Anne Imhof will transform the Armory with her new performance piece DOOM. Working across painting, drawing, video, music, and sculpture, Imhof is best known for creating large-scale installations that meld various media, including endurance performance, to create singular compositions—one of which, Faust, received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Commissioned specifically for the Armory and curated by Klaus Biesenbach, DOOM marks Imhof's largest performative work to date and will take over the Drill Hall. This sequential, durational performance punctuated by dramatic tableaux vivants of performers, sound, and scenography, will invite audiences into a shared experience that juxtaposes apathy and anxiety with resistance and optimism.

One of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century, Diane Arbus captured the wide breadth of humanity in postwar America with iconic documentary-style photographs that continue to resonate with artists and viewers today. Following Arbus' death in 1971, a photographer and student of hers Neil Selkirk began printing for the Arbus Estate and remains the only person authorized to create prints from her negatives. Presented at the Armory in its North American premiere, Constellation brings together all prints from the set of more than 450 that Selkirk produced—the largest and most complete assemblage of Arbus's work to date. Presented as an unconventional “constellation” of photographs, the exhibition invites visitors to wander freely among the works, revealing new connections between the images and highlighting the imperceptible architecture of chance, chaos, and exploration that underlies all creations.

Acclaimed choreographer, dancer, and Guggenheim Fellow Trajal Harrell will make his Armory debut with the North American premiere of Monkey Off My Back or The Cat's Meow, a hybrid work that channels dance, theater, and history through a fashion spectacle featuring a large cast of dancers and actors wearing more than 60 Harrell-designed looks. Staged on a Mondrian-esque colored grid spanning the length of the Drill Hall—and echoing the Armory's own history of hosting fashion shows—Monkey Off My Back juxtaposes everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical and pop culture references, including political rhetoric drawing on the Declaration of Independence and its urgent calls for freedom, resulting in a parade of expressiveness that celebrates the imaginative and unifying power of art.

Maverick composer Georg Friedrich Haas will present the North American premiere of 11,000 Strings, a continuation of the spatial music masterpieces that the Armory has presented within its massive 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall, including 2024's Inside Light and 2022's Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), among others. For 11,000 Strings, audiences will be surrounded by a ring of 50 micro-tuned pianos played simultaneously and amplified by soloist ensemble Klangforum Wien to create cascading sonic landscapes ranging from tenderly melodic to a thunderous roar. Pushing the sonic palette of a piano beyond traditional tonality by introducing all possible pitches, Haas's experimentalism seeks to explore new ways that humans can perceive sound, creating a wholly unexpected listening experience.

The 2025 season concludes with The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, a stage adaptation of Larry Mitchell and Neil Asta's 1977 cult manifesto which offers a radically reimagined history of the world told through fables and myths with a queer, anti-assimilationist lens. Composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman have taken Mitchell's original text and transformed it into a cabaret-like spectacle, drawing on theater, song, and dance traditions from Baroque to Broadway. The eclectic cast of performers eschews norms of gender and genre, continually swapping roles while weaving deeply personal stories of community and survival. Equally satirical and vulnerable, The Faggots and Their Friends is a kaleidoscopic celebration of queerness and a political manifesto that puts marginalized voices center-stage.

Throughout the year, the Armory will present intimate performances, lectures, artist talks, and educational programs in its exquisite period rooms. The Board of Officers Room offers a home for classical and contemporary concerts through the Armory's Recital Series with performances by award-winning baritone Konstantin Krimmel in his North American recital debut with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, soprano and Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Program graduate Erin Morley with pianist Gerald Martin Moore, Samoan tenor Pene Pati with pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg in his North American solo recital debut, pianist and MacArthur ‘Genius' Fellow Jeremy Denk, mezzo-soprano and two-time Grammy Award winner Sasha Cooke with pianist Myra Huang, and two-time Grammy Award winning ensemble, the Attacca Quartet.

The Veterans Room will continue to host the Artists Studio, curated by MacArthur Genius, Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Jason Moran. The 2025 Artists Studio offers imaginative performances from today's most creative voices who defy categorization and freely explore artistic forms. Programs will feature curator and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Swedish experimental vocalist Sofia Jernberg with special guests, solo performer and drummer Guillermo E. Brown, and Norwegian artist and musician Sandra Mujinga.

The Armory will also present Making Space at the Armory, its public programming series of talks, salons, symposia, performances, and other programming that sparks conversation on contemporary issues with today's leading artists, activists, cultural leaders, scholars, and audiences. For its fourth season, Armory Curator of Public Programming and Guggenheim fellow Tavia Nyong'o will host the series focusing on the connections between art and civic life in our current moment. In addition to a two-day symposium that explores the legacy of multidisciplinary artist and activist Yoko Ono, programming includes a night of chamber music composed by Brent Michael Davids that chronicles the 400th anniversary of the origins of New Amsterdam and the enduring presence of the Lenape and additional Indigenous peoples; a panel discussion celebrating the legacy of Vogue editor and creative icon Andre Leon Talley led by thought leaders in the fashion industry that explores fashion's role in self-expression, cultural preservation, and resistance; a collective conversation with Black theater makers that manifests the influence and importance of Black theaters across the country; and additional dialogues with artists Anne Imhof, Trajal Harrell, Georg Friedrich Haas, Philip Venables, and Ted Huffman.

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