Past Events
Results
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Artists Studio
Dawn of Midi
February 18, 2017
Dawn of Midi may share the instrumental makeup of a traditional jazz piano trio, but the Brooklyn-based acoustic ensemble have made a name for themselves by discovering entirely new avenues of sound that are focused on rhythm and dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. They come to the Veterans Room to play a set based on their acclaimed album Dysnomia, utilizing sophisticated rhythmic structures from North and West African folk traditions to weave a sonic tapestry of trance-inducing grooves.
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Recital Series
Isabel Leonard & Ted Sperling
January 5, 2018 - January 7, 2018
Highly acclaimed for her expressive intensity, impeccable technique, and charisma, Grammy Award-winning Isabel Leonard has thrilled audiences around the globe both in the opera house and on the concert stage at the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, and at the Salzburg and Glyndebourne Festivals, amongst others. Having also become an audience favorite on the Metropolitan Opera stage, the celebrated mezzo-soprano moves to a much more intimate space—the Board of Officers Room for a program of beloved songs and lesser-known gems by Leonard Bernstein in celebration of the centenary of his birth.
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Recital Series
Nadine Sierra & Bryan Wagorn
February 16, 2018 - February 18, 2018
The youngest winner ever of both the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the Marilyn Horne Foundation Vocal Competition, Nadine Sierra is being hailed as one of the most promising new talents in opera today, with impressive recent debuts at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Paris Opera, and San Francisco Opera. She performs a wide-ranging program of art songs from Schumann and Strauss to Barber and Bernstein and works by Spanish and Brazilian composers that offers audiences the chance to get to know the seamless technique, abundant musicality, and vocal beauty of this star on the rise in one of the only spaces that could provide such a personal encounter—the Board of Officers Room.
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Interrogations of Form
Looking Back | Looking Forward
February 17, 2018
Artists, thinkers, activists, academics, and community leaders gather for a symposium of conversations, performances, and open studios exploring artistic, social, and political perspectives on the extraordinary world-changing events of 1968, the fifty years that followed, and the promise of the next fifty years. Artistic interventions and multi-disciplinary conversations across visual and performing arts, activism, literature, film, and poetry will take place in the historic period rooms—including the Board of Officers Room, Veterans Room, and second-floor Company Rooms.
Presented in Collaboration with The Aspen Institute Arts Program & ArtChangeUS
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Recital Series
Lindemann Young Artists
March 6, 2018 - March 7, 2018
With notable alumni including Stephanie Blythe, Christine Goerke, Nathan Gunn, Mariusz Kwiecien, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Dawn Upshaw, The Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists Program is considered one of the most prestigious programs for artists through training and performance opportunities on the Metropolitan Opera stage. Hear some of the next generation of opera greats from the program—mezzo soprano Emily D’Angelo, bass David Leigh, and pianists Valeria Polunina and Nate Raskin in an evening of song in the Board of Officers Room.
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Artists Studio
Alvin Curran
March 14, 2018
A founding member of the radical collective Musica Elettronica Viva, experimental composer Alvin Curran has shaken up the music composition world with his radical take on sound—tinkering with synthesizers, instruments, natural sounds, and using non-musical objects as instruments to challenge notions of form and performance in his startlingly original work. Whether they are solo performances, urban sound events, or large-scale installations, his avant-garde compositions flow organically between contemporary classical music, improv, free jazz, and all points in between, yet forge a very personal language through recombinant invention. The iconoclastic sound artist performs “The Alvin Curran Fake Book,” combining his Shofar Shoals, a work that features one of the most archaic music instruments—the ram’s horn—plugged into a computer to create sonic fireworks out of its few humble tones, with works that include his Endangered Species, Era Ora, and Unstandard Time.
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
Yerma
March 23, 2018 - April 21, 2018
Federico García Lorca’s 1934 devastating drama is radically reimagined by Australian director and dramatist Simon Stone, who transforms the achingly powerful tale of a provincial Spanish woman’s desperate desire to have a child into a parable of modern life. Having won 2017 Olivier Awards for Best Revival and Best Actress for Billie Piper when staged at the Young Vic in London, this full-blooded production is transported to the Armory for its highly anticipated North American premiere.
Making her New York stage debut, the extraordinary Piper delivers a fearless performance as the woman—now a blogger and journalist—driven to the unthinkable by her obsession with her own infertility while brutally documenting her trauma amidst the internet-surfing blogosphere of today. Stone—in his New York directorial debut—superbly stages this requiem for lost hope in a glass encasement that transforms from luxurious apartment to garden to wild music festival at an electrifying pace. Intersecting the audience, this highly unusual staging serves as a strikingly effective visual metaphor to imitate life under a microscope and lived online while heightening our sense of voyeurism.
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Interrogations of Form
Sunday Salon: Film
April 15, 2018
Acclaimed Australian immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth hosts an afternoon salon exploring the power of emerging interactive technologies and gestural interfaces, including virtual reality, to reveal fragile human states of grace and connect people with the natural world. View Wallworth’s Emmy-winning VR film Collisions (Commission & World Premiere, World Economic Forum, 2016) and the multi-channel HD video Still Walking Country, as well as a presentation and Q&A with the artist in the historic Veterans Room.
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Artists Studio
Matana Roberts
April 24, 2018
“Panoramic sound-quilting” is the term internationally renowned composer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts uses to describe her combination of instrumental music, singing, text, and visual imagery. Exploring themes of American history, memory, and ancestry, her very personal and improvisatory body of sound work is startling in its originality and gripping in its historic, political, and social power. She brings her creative practice as a musician merged with social consciousness to the Veterans Room for a site specific performance in her ongoing anthropological examination of music, storytelling, and the long, diverse history of her birth country.
Matana Roberts’ visual work will be on view at Fridman Gallery March 25–April 25, 2018.
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Interrogations of Form
Confrontational Comedy
May 11, 2018
Aparna Nancherla (Late Night with Seth Meyers, Master of None) headlines an evening of comedy sets and a conversation highlighting the power of humor to confront stereotypes and engage audiences around uncomfortable topics. Joining her are comedians Jordan Carlos (Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Broad City, The Colbert Report), Jena Friedman (former field producer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and writer for Late Show with David Letterman) and Jes Tom (who regularly shares stages with artists of myriad styles, mediums, and points of view). The evening is hosted by Warrington Hudlin (Founding President, Black Filmmaker Foundation, producer of House Party and Boomerang).
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
myRiad
May 22, 2018 - May 24, 2018
Musician, composer, and Mercury Prize nominated-producer Oneohtrix Point Never‘s world-building approach to creating works spans across the mediums of film, poetry, and visual art. Having just won the best Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for the film Good Time, Oneohtrix Point Never comes to the Armory with a project of unprecedented scope: a hyperstitial “concertscape” imagined from the perspective of an alien intelligence. MYRIAD is Oneohtrix Point Never’s most ambitious project to date, and builds on a practice of site-specific concertscapes presented at the Museum of Modern Art (2011), Tate Britain and MoMA PS1 (2013), and Edinburgh International Festival (2015), amongst many others.
Pulling from long-standing fascinations with film and television tropes, abstract sculpture, game ephemera, poetry, apocryphic histories, internet esoterica, and philosophies of being, MYRIAD generates a conceptual spectrum that is as much a speculation on the unthinkable future as it is an allegory for the current disquiet of a civilization out of balance with its environment. Oriented around behaviorally choreographed set pieces and lighting, the theatrical installation takes a directly formal approach to themes latent in his work by placing the audience inside the architecture of the music itself. Using the scale of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to explore disorienting relationships between space and sound, MYRIAD mutates forms of live musical performance. The world premiere of MYRIAD is presented as a four-part epochal song cycle by the Park Avenue Armory and the Red Bull Music Festival New York City.
Music performed at MYRIAD will be released as a new album—“Age Of”—on June 1, 2018 on Warp Records. The release is his most cohesive and richly composed work to date, weaving a tapestry of disparate musical histories—early music, country and folk balladry, melodic pop, computer music, and much more—that demonstrate both the complexity and range of the artist’s repertoire. With sounds that are unsettlingly familiar and uniquely his own, “Age Of” guides us through an unclassifiable new world.
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The Let Go
June 7, 2018 - July 1, 2018
Interdisciplinary artist Nick Cave creates a dance-based town hall—part installation, part performance—to which the community of New York is invited to “let go” and speak their minds through movement, work out frustrations, and celebrate independence as well as community. The reimagined Wade Thompson Drill Hall allows for social gatherings and is activated by “chase,” a multi-colored, 100-foot-long mylar sculpture that glides across the dance floor.
Up Right Performances
On weekday evenings Cave will orchestrate a cast of dancers in his signature Up Right performances, a call to arms where the soundsuits are engaged in a transformative journey to face the forces that stand in the way of selfhood. Practitioners and initiates perform new site-situated choreography by Cave and dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper that celebrates self-determination in a grand procession around “chase,” accompanied by the melodic voices of baritone Jorell Williams and Vy Higginsen’s Sing Harlem Choir with additional musicians.Installation Hours
During weekends, visitors and community organizations such as yoga practitioners, hula-hoopers, church choirs, and school groups from across all boroughs are invited to express themselves through movement within the installation to music curated by some of New York’s leading DJs played as a soundtrack or mixed live. Participants will be engaged by dancers leading games of Twister, Soul Train lines, a special line dance called “The Let Go” created for the installation, soundsuit invasions, and other dance-based encounters. Also on display in the Armory’s historic rooms are a collection of Cave’s soundsuits, wearable sculptures that create a second skin to conceal race, gender, and class to force the viewer to observe without judgment. Weekend DJs include Ana Matronic (June 9), Johnny Dynell (June 10), Joe Claussell (June 16), JD Samson (June 17), Noise Cans (June 23), Sabine Blaizin (June 24), Sammy Jo (June 30), and Tedd Patterson (July 1). -
Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The Let Go: Freedom Ball
June 14, 2018
Party-goers are invited to don their most outrageous outfit in this high octane evening of fashion, dance, and house music by the legendary Marshall Jefferson and hosted by celebrity night life glitterati. A “dress to express” ball-style competition hosted by a panel of leading tastemakers takes place at 11:00pm with multiple categories and the chance to win a cash prize of up to $10,000.
Dress to Express Ball-Style Competition
Speak your passion through fashion and dress up to let go in “chase,” Cave’s monumental kinetic sculpture within The Let Go. The competition begins at 11:00pm and winners will split a $20,000 purse prize ($5,000 for the top look in each category, plus a $5,000 bonus prize for the top look overall). Contestants must arrive by 10:00pm to enter the competition.
Categories
- State of the World: Express your views through your body politic
- Unlike Anything Else: Celebrate your beautiful difference and gorgeous self
- Dare-Flair: Push your limits—werk the floor
Hosted by Matthew Placek
APPARATUS, House of Yes, Ladyfag,
Papi Juice, Saada of Everyday People
Opening Ceremony, TELFAR, and VISIONAIRESpecial Guest Judges
Nick Cave, Mickalene Thomas, Racquel Chevremont, Mickey Boardman, and Adam van Eeckhout
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The Let Go: An Evening of Artistic Responses
June 26, 2018
Songwriter and musician Nona Hendryx, vocalist and artist Helga Davis, dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper, and FLEXN dance pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray and his company of dance activists the D.R.E.A.M. Ring will respond to the installation in an evening of site-specific performative responses curated by Nick Cave.
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The Damned
July 17, 2018 - July 28, 2018
Tony Award-winning director Ivo van Hove unleashes his visionary creativity at the Armory with the prestigious Comédie-Française, which for more than three centuries has boldly faced the perils of the stage, for the North American premiere of his adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s desperately dark drama The Damned. The historic walls of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall form the backdrop for this remarkable production, which employs cameramen prowling amongst the actors to catch close ups of key moments that are projected on massive screens amongst the minimalist set to create scenography that borders on installation art.
Using the screenplay rather than Visconti’s film as a starting point, van Hove traces the disintegration of the wealthy Essenbeck family and their steel dynasty during the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933 in Germany, reflecting the ideological debauchery of a society ready to make the most venomous alliances for the benefit of its sole economic interests. This sharply drawn familial chronicle combines intrigue and ambition with betrayal and murder in the insidious struggle for power, and the corruption of relationships echoes the cruelty and brutality of the political context—themes that have the makings of a great modern tragedy.
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Artists Studio
Charlemagne Palestine
September 14, 2018
A pioneer of experimental music, Charlemagne Palestine creates intense, resonant music centered on layered overtones, electronic drones, and dense hypnotic rhythms created by percussive repetition to playfully defy the conventions and contexts most associated with modernist composition. He also explores the world of experimental sound through performance and immersive installation, incorporating bears and other plush toys viewed as representations of the soul that are either hand-made by the artist or found—into truly unique performance environments that are often shamanistic and overtly spiritual in nature. The multifaceted artist creates an immersive, site-specific installation in the Veterans Room that invites audiences into his colorful, fantastical world.
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Recital Series
The Crossing
September 19, 2018 - September 20, 2018
Having “made a name for itself in recent years as a champion of new music” (The New York Times), The Crossing comes to the Armory to perform an ambulatory concert that utilizes the corridors and historic rooms to create a unique kind of seamless music with fluidity of movement from room to room. The program includes world and New York premieres by David Lang, Louis Andriessen, and a new work by Ted Hearne, co-commissioned by the Armory. The new music champions are dedicated to expanding the contemporary choral music experience through commissions, collaborations, community, and performances that are characterized by a distinctive unity of sound and spirit.
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Interrogations of Form
Sunday Salon: Literature
September 23, 2018
Armory Artist-in-Residence and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins hosts fellow playwrights and collaborators in an intimate afternoon of conversation, readings and performances featuring both rising talents and luminaries, all of whom are actively exploring and testing the boundaries of the literary art form.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Walt Whitman, the Civil War, and New York's Seventh Regiment
September 25, 2018
America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman, whose bicentennial birthday arrives in 2019, was the quintessential 19th-century New Yorker. Our understanding of his work is enriched through knowing the people, politics, arts, science, and philosophy of his times as described in Professor David Reynolds’s award-winning Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Whitman had many connections to the New York’s Seventh Regiment and witnessed many of the militia’s impressive parades and marches, from the 1824 greeting of the Marquis de Lafayette to the military escort of President Lincoln’s coffin through the city forty-one years later. Such pageantry enlivened Whitman’s poetry and prose. He hobnobbed with figures associated with the Seventh Regiment, including artist Thomas Nast, poet Fitz-James O’Brien, and author Theodore Winthrop. The heroism of New York’s soldiers in the Civil War inspired him and contributed to his view of the war as the central event in American history.
David S. Reynolds is the Distinguished Professor of American literature and U.S. History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include John Brown, Abolitionist (winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Prize), Beneath the American Renaissance (winner of the Christian Gauss Award), Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America, A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, and Lincoln’s Selected Writings: A Norton Critical Edition. Professor Reynolds is a regular book reviewer for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal.
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The Six Brandenburg Concertos
October 1, 2018 - October 7, 2018
Few musical works are as beloved as the six Brandenburg concertos by J.S. Bach. Virtuosic, audacious, and overflowing with richly imaginative music, these six works display a lighter side of the composer’s imperishable genius and still sound as fresh and exciting today as they must have when audiences first heard them nearly 300 years ago. Taking this iconic masterpiece as a ready-made score, famed Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker explores the movement, dance, and transcendental dimension found in this celebrated music in a new, evening length work.
Making its North American premiere, this new dance piece embodies Bach’s polyphonic mastery by setting 16 dancers originating from different generations of her company Rosas in direct dialogue with musicians from the baroque ensemble B’Rock, who perform the concertos live under the baton of Amandine Beyer in their North American debut. This production continues a rich lineage of exploring Bach’s enduring legacy at the Armory, including St. Matthew Passion (Peter Sellars, Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle in 2014) and the Goldberg Variations (Igor Levit and Marina Abramović in 2015). And in the hands of one of the most prominent artists in contemporary dance today, these performances are sure to make audiences think about and feel this classic composition in an entirely new way.
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Artists Studio
Juliana Huxtable
October 10, 2018
Juliana Huxtable straddles the worlds of art, fashion, and night life, exploring the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and sexuality through a fluid mix of media including self-portraiture, text-based prints, club music and parties, poetry, and social media. Throughout her practice, Huxtable combines and reinvents cultural histories, questioning the presentation and perception of identity in artworks that often reference her own body and history as she examines socio-political issues. The art icon and powerhouse DJ creates a new work combining video, sound, spoken word, and performance in her ongoing exploration of what it is to be human and the resistance to the caging of people within fixed selves, private bodies, and prescribed identities.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Sargent's Women
October 11, 2018
John Singer Sargent’s high-society portraits defined the Gilded Age. Stanford White helped launch the artist’s career in America, spreading the word among his firm’s rich clients that a portrait by Sargent would be the perfect decoration for their massive mansions. Extremely prolific, Sargent insisted that his portraits were not psychological studies that he merely painted what he saw. Yet with some of his young women he seemed to have an uncanny ability to divine their internal landscapes. New York Times best-selling author Donna Lucey will speak about four of those women, whose lives she chronicles in her book Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas. These women all inhabited a rarefied world of large fortunes and strict conventions, yet managed to do something unexpected, something shocking, to upend society’s rules. Basing her research on original letters and diaries, Lucey uncovers lives out of an Edith Wharton novel. What emerges are stories of forbidden love, family conflict, ambition, desire, and triumph.
Donna M. Lucey is the author of Sargent’s Women, The New York Times best-selling Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, the award-winning Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, as well as other books, articles, and a feature-length screenplay. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants and was a 2017 writer-in-residence at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. Ms. Lucey also serves as media editor at Virginia Humanities in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Unexpected President
November 5, 2018
Chester Arthur, our nation’s 21st president, went from a promising start as a young lawyer in Manhattan to being known as a crooked crony of the New York Republican political machine. As Quartermaster General for the New York State Militia during the Civil War and as a socially ambitious businessman, he interacted with the members of the Seventh Regiment repeatedly throughout his career. With the assassination of President Garfield, Arthur found himself in the Executive Mansion in September 1881 (which he would later hire the same artists who worked at our Armory to redecorate). He was truly a Gilded Age president for the nation but little is known about him today due to his distrust of the press and his destruction of his private papers before his death. Author Scott Greenberger will introduce us to this New York president and describe how from the moment Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave, going up against the very forces that had controlled him for decades. He surprised everyone—and gained many enemies—when he swept house and took on corruption, civil rights for African Americans, and the issues of land for Native Americans.
Scott S. Greenberger is the executive editor of Stateline, a nonprofit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he guides a team of veteran journalists who report on state politics and policy in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Before joining Pew, Greenberger was a staff writer at The Boston Globe, where he covered education, served as City Hall bureau chief, and was the primary policy reporter in the Globe‘s State House bureau. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and GQ. He is the co-author, with former Sen. Tom Daschle, of The New York Times best-seller Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.
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Recital Series
Severin von Eckardstein
November 13, 2018 - November 14, 2018
Few other pieces showcase Schumann’s creative expression and unrestricted imagination than his fantasy works, written both early and late in his career. Making his New York recital debut, pianist Severin von Eckardstein captures the subtle variety of this dreamy music in two distinct programs that showcase his superb technique and emotional depth. He opens his residency exploring the connection between Schumann and Russian composer Nikolai Medtner through their exploration of fantastical elements, and then turns to darker myths in a program that pairs the composer’s works with those of Wagner and Liszt.
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The First United Lenape Nations Pow Wow & Standing Ground Symposium
November 18, 2018
Join us for the first large-scale Lenape Pow Wow on Manhattan Island, transpiring on land that once belonged to the Lenape and marking the first congregation of dispersed Lenape elders in the area since their forced migrations in the early 1700s. The Pow Wow has been a traditional gathering by Native Americans for centuries as a way to congregate, celebrate, and share cultural traditions and heritage. Presented in partnership with members of the Lenape community, this event provides an opportunity for members of the Lenape to gather, while also inviting the New York City community to learn about the Lenape’s historical and cultural ties to New York in a fun and interactive day of presentations.
The Pow Wow features a dance competition for hundreds of dancers of all ages, competing in traditional Native American dress and regalia, with musical accompaniment by drumming and singing groups Red Blanket, Young Blood, and Silver Cloud. In addition, there will be featured performances by Kalpulli Huehuetlahtolli Aztec/Mexica Dance, Inuit Throat Singer Tanya Tagaq, and Taino Dancers from the Kasibahagua Taino Cultural Society showcasing the varied traditions of their respective cultures, as well as opportunities to purchase authentic Native jewelry, crafts, clothing, and food from numerous vendors and artisans.
The Standing Ground Symposium will provide an opportunity to meet Lenape elders as well as hear the perspectives of academics and community leaders regarding key issues facing the Native American community, including internationally renowned activists for indigenous people Winona LaDuke and Roberto Mukaro Borrero, and author Steve Newcomb. The Symposium also includes performances and activities for the whole family including Native flute players and theater groups exploring mythic traditions and stories that the community has passed down through generations, screenings of films that explore the complexities of Native life and made by Native filmmakers, and a display of bespoke creations by Native fashion designers.
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Malkin Lecture Series
“Ever Since the Town Went Dry”
November 26, 2018
In the 1910s, at the height of the Progressive Era, a national movement to prohibit the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol swept the United States. Prohibition, its supporters promised, would end the abuse of alcohol, curb the corrupt influence of the distilling and brewing industries, and usher in a new era of prosperity and “clean living.” But in American cities like New York, with large immigrant populations and deeply entrenched saloon cultures, the call for Prohibition was met with skepticism and resentment. Urban opposition to the dry movement was strong, and the “wet” sentiment in cities remained a substantial obstacle to the passage of a constitutional amendment banning alcohol. The United States’ entry into World War 1 in 1917, however, changed everything. Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on wartime patriotism, the dry movement used the war to paint its opponents as traitors who would support the German war effort, squander national resources, and undermine the war effort for the sake of a drink. For a time, it worked. The dry movement used World War I to push successfully for the passage of Prohibition. Once enacted, however, chaos ensued. As WWI ended and the 1920s arrived, New Yorkers entered the dry era determined to defy “the noble experiment.”
Michael A. Lerner is the principal of Bard High School Early College, a partnership between Bard College and the New York City Department of Education. He is the author of Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (2007) and served as a consultant on the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition (2011). He lectures frequently on Prohibition and New York City history. He holds a Ph.D. in History from New York University and a B.A. in History from Columbia University.
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Wade Thompson Drill Hall
The Head & the Load
December 4, 2018 - December 15, 2018
William Kentridge is a remarkably versatile artist whose evocative vision combines the political with the poetic through artistic media as diverse as printmaking, drawing, painting, sculpting, and filmmaking. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism, his highly personal work is often imbued with lyrical undertones in his critical examination of aspects of his native South African society and the aftermath of apartheid.
The renowned artist synthesizes elements of his practice to conjure his grandest and most ambitious production to date, commissioned by the Armory. Kentridge works alongside long-time collaborator, Philip Miller—one of South Africa’s leading composers—whose powerful and evocative compositions offer a perfect complement to Kentridge’s feverishly imaginative work.
A play on the Ghanaian proverb, “the head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” the large-scale work expressively speaks to the nearly two million African porters and carriers used by the British, French, and Germans who bore the brunt of the casualties during the First World War in Africa and the historical significance of this story as yet left largely untold. This processional musical journey—as much an installation as a performance piece—melds performances by orchestra collective The Knights, and an international ensemble cast of singers, dancers, and performers accompanied by a chorus of mechanized gramophones alongside multiple film projections and shadow play to create a landscape of immense proportion and imagination that utilizes the vast sweep of the Wade Thompson Drill to upend standard notions of scale.
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Recital Series
Thomas Oliemans & Malcom Martineau
December 17, 2018 - December 19, 2018
Hailed as “one of the most renowned Dutch singers” (Volkskrant), Thomas Oliemans has been taking the opera world by storm with his dynamic vocal color and communicative singing style at major opera houses and festivals throughout Europe, including Dutch National Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro Real, and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Festival. He brings his burnished baritone across the Atlantic to make his U.S. recital debut in an artfully curated program of lieder and arts songs from the late Romantic period.