PRESENT TENSE Residency to Bring Trisha Brown Dance Company to Catskill Art Space
An exhibition of Elizabeth Murray's works on paper will accompany the residency in the River Gallery.
Catskill Art Space (CAS), in collaboration with the Elizabeth Murray Estate, Trisha Brown Dance Company, and Works & Process, will present a special residency devoted to PRESENT TENSE (2003), the landmark collaboration between choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Elizabeth Murray. This Works & Process residency at Catskill Art Space will take place October 6-10, culminating in a free public sharing on Saturday, October 10 at 4PM at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY.
The residency will offer audiences an intimate opportunity to witness the Trisha Brown Dance Company at work as the dancers rehearse and reconstruct PRESENT TENSE, a work that brings together Brown's radically fluid choreography, Murray's exuberant visual language, and music by John Cage. Public rehearsals will be open at Catskill Art Space on October 9 and 10, providing an inside view into the process of preserving and activating Brown's choreography.
First presented in 2003, PRESENT TENSE is one of Brown's late collaborations with Murray, a longtime friend and fellow pioneering artist. The work combines Brown's abstract movement vocabulary with an unusual interest in emotional narrative. Its dancers move between intricate, earthbound phrase work and adventurous aerial partnering, creating the impression of bodies riding, tumbling, and suspending themselves across space. As dancers multiply and regroup, Brown's choreography produces unexpected relationships between individual bodies, space, and gravity. The result is at once precise and unruly, playful and deeply physical.
The visual world of PRESENT TENSE was created by Elizabeth Murray, whose bold, animated forms transformed the performance environment into an extension of the choreography. Murray also designed the original costumes, later reimagined by Elizabeth Cannon. The work is set to selections from John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton. PRESENT TENSE premiered at the Festival International de Danse de Cannes in December 2003.
Elizabeth Murray, PRESENT TENSE
Works on Paper
Coinciding with the residency, Catskill Art Space will present a selection of Elizabeth Murray's works on paper that served as studies for the backdrop she created for PRESENT TENSE. The exhibition will be on view in the second-floor River Gallery, October 3 through December 27, 2026, offering audiences a rare opportunity to encounter Murray's visual thinking alongside the choreography it helped shape.
The presentation illuminates the collaborative nature of PRESENT TENSE: Murray's drawings and studies reveal the development of the forms that ultimately occupied the stage, while the live rehearsal and performance allow those forms to be understood in relation to Brown's constantly shifting bodies and spatial structures. Together, the exhibition and residency offer a multidimensional portrait of two artists whose practices were grounded in movement, experimentation, scale, and an instinctive refusal of conventional boundaries between disciplines.
Under the guidance and stewardship of Works & Process, the presentation is conceived in the spirit of institutional collaboration, bringing together dance, visual art, and archival practice in a shared exploration of a historic artistic partnership. Following its presentation at Catskill Art Space, the project will travel to Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York, where the Murray works on paper will be on view February 2-March 14, 2027.
About Trisha Brown Dance Company
Founded in 1970, Trisha Brown Dance Company is dedicated to the creation, performance, and preservation of the work of its founding artistic director and choreographer, Trisha Brown. Brown's groundbreaking approach to movement transformed contemporary dance, and her collaborations with leading visual artists-including Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Terry Winters, and Elizabeth Murray-expanded the possibilities of choreography across disciplines.
About Elizabeth Murray
Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) was one of the most influential American artists of her generation. Known for her exuberant paintings and drawings, Murray challenged the boundaries of the traditional picture plane through animated forms, unusual shapes, and a visual language that drew equally from abstraction, cartooning, and everyday experience.
About Works & Process
Works & Process champions performing artists and their creative processes from studio to stage, producing fully funded residencies and presenting programs that bring audiences behind the scenes through artist discussions and performance highlights. Having supported over 100 residencies for over 1,000 artists, annually Works & Process produces more than 25 residencies through a growing network of partners across the Northeast, helping artists develop and share new work locally, nationally, and internationally. In New York City, beyond the presenting at Guggenheim New York, Works & Process partners with organizations including 92NY and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and presents free outdoor dance programs with Manhattan West. www.worksandprocess.org
Long-term Installations
Following a major renovation and expansion, Catskill Art Space reopened in October 2022 with a long-term presentation of James Turrell's Avaar (1982) in a custom-built gallery on the building's second floor. A room-sized installation, Avaar is an important example of the artist's early, wall-based 'aperture' works, which function by creating two areas within a room. There is a 'viewing space,' where one stands to see and experience the work, and a 'sensing space,' which is an ambiguously defined area of diffused light. Avaar is one of the rare examples of Turrell's aperture works to make use of white lighting only; no colors will be present in the installation. This work is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, which has granted CAS a special long-term loan to exhibit the work. The presentation at CAS marks the first time the work has been shown since the 1970s, giving audiences from the Catskills and beyond the rare opportunity to experience a major Turrell work that has not been seen in nearly five decades.
On the second floor's central landing, Sol LeWitt's vibrant Wall Drawing #992 unfolds in three sections, each consisting of 10,000 straight lines drawn in color marker, to create a mesmerizing arrangement of primary colors. On the fourth wall, presenting LeWitt's Wall Drawing #991, straight, arced, and organic lines will encompass the wall in black marker and pencil. The conceptual, minimalist artist conceived guidelines for his two-dimensional works to be drawn directly on the wall. Much like Turrell's Avaar, the LeWitt works were realized for CAS's space; in this instance, they are generously loaned by the artist's estate. This work was overseen by a draftsperson, who determines the length and placement of the lines, and executed by five artists local to the area over nearly two weeks.
The newly realized performance space on CAS's second floor hosts British sculptor Francis Cape's A Gathering of Utopian Benches-an installation of meticulous copies of benches built and used by communal societies. Cape's installations have always argued that design and craft express belief. Utopian Benches, which has toured extensively throughout the US, was built from poplar grown near Cape's studio in Narrowsburg, NY. To be considered both as contemporary sculpture as well as furniture that visitors can actively use, the benches reference the societies who first used them, inviting visitors to utilize them for exchange, discourse, and community. The installation, which is meant to be used by visitors both for contemplation and may be used for performance seating, overlooks an expansive wall of windows onto the Willowemoc Creek.
Ellen Brooks activates an intimate gallery space, framed by a partially open staircase, with Hang (2022), an installation suspending over 30 feet of scrolls of film negatives from the ceiling. The artist hangs transparencies and negatives in all formats and from clips attached to the ceiling, mimicking the practice of film photography. Hanging negatives reference the surrounding natural landscaping, evoking a cascading waterfall with coils of film collecting on the ground floor gallery.
About Catskill Art Space
Catskill Art Space (CAS) explores contemporary art practices of emerging and established artists. Through exhibitions, performances, classes, lectures, and screenings, CAS fosters creative community in the Catskills. Established as Catskill Art Society in 1971, CAS reopened in October 2022 as Catskill Art Space following a major renovation and expansion of its multi-arts center, located in the picturesque hamlet of Livingston Manor in the Western Catskills. CAS presents a rotating slate of exhibitions, performances and other events featuring national and regional talents, alongside long-term installations of works by James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Francis Cape, and Ellen Brooks. Learn more at catskillartspace.org.
