Ruth Negga, Lili Taylor & Paul Lazar to Join Suzanne Bocanegra Artist Lectures at NYU Skirball

NYU Skirball will present four Artist Lectures by conceptual artist Suzanne Bocanegra throughout the 2023-24 season, featuring actors Lili Taylor, Paul Lazar and Ruth Negga, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, Paul Lazar and Geoff Sobelle, and produced by Jecca Barry. The series will begin on October 30 with Farmhouse/Whorehouse, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor; followed by When A Priest Marries a Witch, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Paul Lazar on November 27; Bodycast, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Ruth Negga on January 29; and Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor on April 8.
 
Suzanne Bocanegra is a visual artist who uses theater and theater craft to interrogate the history and practice of visual art. Part performance, part memoir, and part essay, her Artist Lectures are both intensely personal and exhaustively researched, exploring not only how and why she became an artist, but also more general meditations on art-making, on history, our various cultural moments and our shifting ideals of human beauty.
 
Farmhouse/Whorehouse, starring Lili Taylor and directed by Lee Sunday Evans; When a Priest Marries a Witch, starring Paul Lazar and co-directed by Bocanegra and Lazar; and Bodycast, starring Ruth Negga and directed by Paul Lazar all call upon memories of Bocanegra’s Texas childhood. Through text, video, music, and costume, the stories examine her upbringing and life as an artist, in stories spanning a scandal involving a priest, an artist and a witch, her teenage years spent in a plaster body cast, and growing up on her grandparents’ farm, across the road from the ‘Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’
 
Honor, starring Lili Taylor and directed by Geoff Sobelle, is based on a 16th century tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled Honor, which depicts 69 historical and allegorical figures who offer personal stories as moral lessons in honor and in dishonor.  Bocanegra’s very close reading of the tapestry leads her to such diverse topics as Carole King’s Tapestry album, tableau vivant, the founding of the Girl Scouts of America, Anni Albers, and the history of theater.
 
Suzanne Bocanegra (Author) uses theater and theater craft to interrogate the history and practice of visual art, employing large-scale video, performance and installation, as well as collage, sculpture and painting. She is the recipient of the 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards. In 2019, a major show of Bocanegra's work titled Poorly Watched Girls was presented at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Also in 2019, her solo show Wardrobe Test was the inaugural exhibition at Artcake, an exhibition space in Brooklyn. Bocanegra’s most recent performance Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has traveled to LAMoCA, ICABoston and the Walker Art Center.
 
Previous performances have been commissioned and/or presented by the Museum of Modern Art, The Next Wave Festival, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Hammer Museum, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, among others. Bocanegra’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), among others. https://suzannebocanegra.com

Lili Taylor

(Performer) has been working on stage and screen for thirty years.  She has appeared in dozens of films including Mystic Pizza, Say Anything…, Dogfight, Short Cuts, Household Saints, Factotum, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, Ransom, and The Haunting. In television she has starred in Six Feet Under, Almost Human, Outer Range and American Crime, for which she earned an Emmy nomination. Taylor has appeared on stage in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including Three Sisters (Roundabout), Mourning Becomes Electra (Acorn Theater), and The Library (Public Theater).
 

Paul Lazar

(Performer / Director) is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Walker Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Classic Stage Company and Japan Society. Paul’s one person performance, Cage Shuffle, premiered at the American Realness Festival in 2017 and continues to tour the U.S. and Europe. He has acted in over 40 feature films, including Snowpiercer, The Host, Mickey Blue Eyes, Silence of the Lambs, Beloved, Lorenzo’s Oil and Philadelphia. Stage credits include Macbeth on Broadway, and off Broadway in Tamburlaine at Theatre For A New Audience, Young Jean Lee’s Lear, The Three Sisters at Classic Stage Company, Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians at Soho Rep, Irene Fornes’ Mud at the Signature Theater and Mabou Mines, and Mac Wellman’s 1965 UU at the Chocolate Factory Theatre. Paul has performed with The Wooster Group, acting in Brace Up!, Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape and North Atlantic. He is the winner of two Bessie Awards, among others.
 

Ruth Negga

(Performer) was nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for her starring role in the film Loving and starred in the film Passing. Her television credits include AMC’s Preacher. Her upcoming projects include David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ limited series, Presumed Innocent, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal, and Dan Levy’s film Good Grief. In 2022, Ruth made her Broadway debut in Macbeth as Lady Macbeth, earning a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. Ruth was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and was raised between there, Limerick, Ireland, and London, England.
 

Lee Sunday Evans

(Director)  is a two-time Obie Award-winning Director + Choreographer and the Artistic Director of Waterwell. She most recently directed the acclaimed production of Heather Christian’s Oratorio For Living Things and was just announced as the director of a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time. She is developing a TV project for A24. Notable credits include Dance Nation by Clare Barron, the live production of The Courtroom, Detroit Red by Will Power, Sunday by Jack Thorne, In The Green by Grace McLean, Miller, Mississippi by Boo Killebrew, and Home by Geoff Sobelle.
 
Jecca Barry (Producer) is an opera, theatre, film, and music producer, as well as a nonprofit arts leader. From 2012-2022, she served as Executive Director of the acclaimed production company Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and was a Co-Director of New York’s annual PROTOTYPE Festival from 2017-2022. Jecca has overseen the commissioning, development, production and touring of over 30 new theatre, music-theatre, and opera works, and has toured those works to over 40 national and 15 international venues.
 

NYU SKIRBALL
 

NYU Skirball is located in the heart of Greenwich Village, historically a center of resistance, dissent and free thinking. NYU Skirball’s programing reflects this history and embraces today’s renegade artists and companies, presenting works that aim to engage, provoke and inspire audiences. NYU Skirball is NYC’s home for cutting-edge performance, artistic research, and discourse, holding close to James Baldwin’s dictum that “artists are here to disturb the peace.” The 800-seat theater provides a home for internationally renowned artists, innovators, and thinkers and presents ground-breaking events ranging from re-inventions of the classics to cutting-edge premieres, in genres ranging from dance, theater and performance arts to comedy, music and film.
 

TICKETS
 

Tickets are $35. Farmhouse/ Whorehouse will play Monday, October 30 at 7:30 pm; When A Priest Marries a Witch will play Monday, November 27 at 7:30 pm.  Tickets are on sale now.
 
Bodycast will play Monday, January 29 at 7:30 pm; Honor will play Monday, April 8 at 7:30 pm. Tickets will go on sale in November.
 
Tickets can be purchased online, by visiting the box office in person, Tuesday – Saturday from 12 pm – 6 pm, or by calling 212.998.4941. NYU Skirball is located at 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square, New York, New York 10012. www.nyuskirball.org.