The Kitchen Announces Fall 2022 Programming Featuring the Premiere of Beau Bree Rhee's SHADOW OF THE SEA & More

The Kitchen has announced Fall 2022 season programming launching the influential, experimental interdisciplinary organization beyond the walls of its Chelsea building as it undergoes renovations and moves temporarily to another location with a rich avant-garde history: Westbeth. Throughout Fall 2022 and into next year, The Kitchen teams with numerous other organizations and collectives; engages artists in residencies with a durational programming model; and presents work in Westbeth, in various unconventional locations in New York, and in virtual space. Treating place as a flexible medium and transcending the containment of given platforms, The Kitchen expands its history of deconstructing and challenging formal categories to burst open the possibilities of artistic futures. In tandem with this multi-layered season of programming, The Kitchen also announces a new partnership with Bloomberg Connects: a free arts and cultural mobile app created by Bloomberg Philanthropies built to centralize access to programs from cultural institutions around the world.

In Westbeth's West Side Loft-a space whose vast potential recalls The Kitchen's own original locations at the Mercer Arts Center and, later, the loft it occupied on the corner Wooster and Broome Streets-acclaimed pianist-vocalist-composer Samora Pinderhughes continues to explore and expand the world of his newest interdisciplinary album GRIEF. The New York Times has described the recording as a "visionary" work from "one of the most affecting singer-songwriters today, in any genre" that "turn(s) the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated." Through the portal of the album and its accompanying visuals, Pinderhughes wrestles with the meeting points of abolition, healing, and the grieving process. He unfurls the many intimate damages that our society's systems of prison, detention, and structural violence do to people, and pays tribute to the beautiful, vulnerable, complex, and deep ways that people figure out how to heal themselves and others. In a debut presentation with The Kitchen, Pinderhughes and collaborators perform selections from the album in new renditions made especially for the Westbeth space, alongside a rotating presentation of moving image works to be screened at intervals between live performances (November 2022-January 2023).

Throughout the season, The Kitchen and artists tap into the organization's extensive and dynamic archives to continue to expand and make intersections across the over-50 years of The Kitchen's creative history, community, and program. The Armory Show this year inaugurated a new program, Armory Spotlight-providing a complimentary booth to a premier New York cultural institution-with a booth for The Kitchen, which presented rarely seen selections from its archive (September 9-11). The Kitchen's 2021 Research Residents in Fall 2022 present projects based on their engagements with the archive: multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer Sharmi Basu presents Decolonizing Sound, an evening performance with an accompanying intervention into the archive foregrounding experimental musicians of color (October 27); in The Kitchen's Video Viewing Room, artist Will Lee presents All it does is turn, a new videogame for which he drew inspiration from multiple historical artists' projects at The Kitchen (November 2022); and Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage of Steph Christ Collective begin to conduct oral histories in Fall 2022, for a new open-source platform the NYC Performance Archive 1980-2005, which will be launched publicly in Spring 2023.

Exploring the potentiality of work made beyond institutional walls-activating virtual and public space-programming in Fall 2022 refracts The Kitchen into new corners of New York and the web. In a collaboration with the Simons Foundation-whose Outreach, Education and Engagement division seeks to foster connections to science-The Kitchen begins a momentous extension of The Kitchen L.A.B as a year-long residency. Running from September 2022 to September 2023, the program will host the School for Poetic Computation in residence for a year to engage with The Kitchen's archive as a resource for studying connections between computation, critical theory, new media art, and poetry. Another year-long residency, with experimental broadcasting and performance platform Montez Press Radio, explores questions of narrative in relation to place through a series of offsite productions, as both Montez Press Radio and The Kitchen are transmitted beyond the respective walls within which they're based (September 2022-2023). In collaboration with Madison Square Park Conservancy, The Kitchen presents visual artist and choreographer Beau Bree Rhee's Shadow of the Sea, a "dance poem" conceived in dialogue with Cristina Iglesias's exhibition Landscape and Memory at Madison Square Park that includes eight stanzas of vastly differing qualities (September 21, October 12, October 20).

Executive Director and Chief Curator Legacy Russell said, "The growth of this moment now at The Kitchen offers us an opportunity to reflect and reimagine: How can we bring new voices into the institution who extend and challenge the application of our mission? Who are the makers of what we want The Kitchen to look like in this next fifty years? As our vision and institutional presence enter into dialogue with the Dia, Madison Square Park Conservancy, the Simons Foundation, and the School for Poetic Computation-as well sites of profound artistic significance like Westbeth and The Armory Show-we are thrilled to explore all that a Kitchen without walls can be, and how it might eventually inform our future back in our transformed home."

Programming Schedule and Descriptions

The Kitchen x Madison Square Park Conservancy

Beau Bree Rhee: Shadow of the Sea

September 21 at 6P, October 12 at 6P, October 20 at 6P*

Madison Square Park Conservancy Oval Lawn

* Prior to the performance in the park, Shadow of the Sea begins with Coastal Walks at 5P simultaneously on the east and west sides of Manhattan. Visitors are invited to join the performance at 5P at either the East River Promenade and East 10th (East Side) or Pier 64 (West Side). Kitchen staff members will be present at both locations to guide visitors. The walks will last approximately 30 minutes. Visitors will need to travel from the concluding point of the walks to Madison Square Park to view the rest of the performance.

A collaboration between The Kitchen and Madison Square Park Conservancy brings live performance outside the walls of The Kitchen and into the public space of the park, creating new opportunities for dialogue and exchange among artists, publics, and landscape. Arising out of this partnership is the premiere of a new performance project by Beau Bree Rhee, Shadow of the Sea, conceived in dialogue with Cristina Iglesias's exhibition Landscape and Memory at Madison Square Park.

Rhee's work Shadow of the Sea opens with a question: The sea covers 71% of our planet: and its shadow? Composed as a "dance poem," the performance has eight stanzas, each with vastly differing qualities. An ensemble of dancers will begin the first section on the East and West sides of Manhattan, performing a migratory score-a Brutal Meditation-that traces where the sea may eventually reclaim the land within the next hundred years. The following seven stanzas-including a Blues, an X, an Insurrection, a Chorus-take place on the Oval Lawn in Madison Square Park, where Iglesias's exhibition of five bronze sculptural pools traces a historic creek. Here, Shadow of the Sea further expresses "the shadow" within contemporary life, probing the social, historical, and philosophical dimensions of this concept.

The piece is created through multi-layered research into scientific maps projecting future coastlines; historical maps of Indigenous pathways; Indigenous spiritual beliefs; recordings of land that Rhee stewards as an earth work; and poems and songs on ecology and justice, particularly the books Poésie Perdue (published in 2000) by French writer Paul Valéry and 님의 침묵 The Silence of Nim (published in 1926) by Korean writer and activist Manhae Han Yong-un. These associations coalesce in Rhee's choreographic language for engaging the body with land and atmosphere.

Beau Bree Rhee: Shadow of the Sea is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant. Production by Zack Tinkelman, Production Manager and Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor.

Beau Bree Rhee (she/they) is a visual artist and choreographer. Her work centers around body-space-ecologies and our radical dependencies with the environment and cosmos. She works primarily with performance and drawing/painting, and additionally with poems, scores, and installation. As a trilingual/tricultural artist (Korean-American-French) and synesthete, they are invested in multi-modal work and collaborations spanning cosmology, philosophy, earth sciences, and haptic forms (scent, sound).

Rhee has shown her work at institutions including Ma's House BIPOC Art Studio; KW Institute for Contemporary Art/Berlin Biennale; The Kitchen; Bard Graduate Center Gallery, NY; Kaaitheater Bruxelles; Baryshnikov Arts Center, NY; MoMA/PS1, NY; among others. Their work is in private collections and the MoMA Library and Research Collection. In 2021, she was awarded a Tishman Environment and Design Center grant to begin a long-term land art project. Rhee is a part-time associate professor at Parsons School of Design. She is based in NYC and is an amateur gardener and swimmer.

Rhee holds an MFA in Contemporary Artistic Practices from Haute école d'art et de design (HEAD) Genève / University of Art and Design Geneva, Switzerland and a BA in Art History and Dance from Barnard College, Columbia University.

2021 Research Residency Projects

Sharmi Basu: Decolonizing Sound

October 27, 7P

Westbeth

Video Viewing Room: Will Lee: All it does is turn

Premiering in November

The Kitchen OnScreen

Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage: NYC Performance Archive 1980-2005

Closed-Door Oral Histories to be conducted in Fall 2022

Building on the research they conducted as participants in The Kitchen's 2021 Research Residency, Sharmi Basu, Will Lee, and Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage of Steph Christ Collective present new projects drawing on their engagements with the institutional archive.

In October, Basu will organize a performance event titled Decolonizing Sound. Featuring the artist performing as Beast Nest along with invited guests, the event centers experimental musicians of color coming together in a present day intervention into the archive. The artist additionally presents a new piece of printed ephemera for takeaway that marks this program's place within a lineage of Kitchen events. By creating and distributing a new resource that counters the gaps in the archival records, Basu invites audiences to consider: Who is archived starting when? Who is left out and who is fighting to be seen? If the folks who are creating work as a means of fighting for survival are left out, what purpose does the avant-garde serve?

In November, Lee will present in The Kitchen's Video Viewing Room a new videogame that draws on his exploration of selected videos, exhibitions, and performances represented in The Kitchen's archive. The game, All it does is turn, is a short necro-drama where the player speaks to denizens of the Mulch while investigating a string of historical misadventures.

In fall 2022, Morse and Nottage will begin conducting oral histories for the NYC Performance Archive 1980-2005, a forthcoming open source platform that will house the oral histories and digitized ephemera of artists and collectives involved in performance practice during a particular period of the discipline's evolution in NYC. The archive will center the voices of LGBT individuals, women, and artists of color.

2021 Research Residency Projects are organized by Alison Burstein, Curator.

Sharmi Basu (they/them) is a multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer born and based in the unceded territories of Chochenyo Ohlone peoples, also known as Oakland, CA. They create sound and performance pieces that address vulnerability, accountability, and experiences of diaspora by creating new narratives for decolonial thinking toward individual and collective liberation. Their primary performance project, Beast Nest, shows us that the abstract and immaterial experiences of trauma can be transformed through the process of creation in art and sound. They believe that transcending the emotional landscape through active presence is the key to accessing multidimensionality and work with these ideas in their Sound and Liberation workshops, their curatorial projects, and their BIPOC improvisation group, the Mara Performance Collective. They received their MFA from Mills College and have hosted a number of workshops internationally that center on sound healing, decolonization, and conflict & accountability, as well as technical skill-shares. They have performed for SFMOMA, YBCA, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Cluster Festival, Ableton Loop, the International Symposium of Improvised Music, Soundwave SF, Human Resources LA, and many other spaces throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. They have exhibited work at Coaxial, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Counterpulse, Gray Area, and the Smithsonian.

Will Lee is an artist based in New York. He is interested in video games as a medium for exploring a zero-degree aesthetics, or the minimal conditions for experience. Games reveal how something can be perfectly intelligible, but utterly meaningless by playing with concepts, actions, and rules. In 2018-2019, he was an artist fellow at Ashkal Alwan and completed the studio program at the Whitney ISP in 2022.

Tyler Morse is a 2020 Larry J. Hackman fellow with New York State Archives, a Wendy's Subway resident with Rider Alsop (as Porosity Press x BAILFRONT), and in collaboration with Nia Nottage and Steph Christ Collective, a 2021 Research Resident with The Kitchen. She co-operates Porosity Press and BAILFRONT, a donation-based bail fundraising operation. She's interested in undermining prisons as a barrier to organizing and exchange, and the question, "How can a press be a shared resource?" She is currently an Arts Program Associate alongside collaborator Willie Kearse at the Parole Preparation Project, co-developing a series of archive-based creative workshops. She's the author of Hearing/s (No, Dear 2020), and lives and writes poems about her friends in Brooklyn.

Nia Nottage is an archives + community organizer /and// media artist. Their projects aim to transform markers of time and place in contemporary media. Their interests include community archives, porn, somatics, and the production of a world with less work and more reward. They are a 2021 Kitchen Research Resident in collaboration with Tyler Morse and Steph Christ Collective.

+ They are currently accepting advice and donations for the launch of 'come forever' a co-op arts/community center in brooklyn, ny.

steph christ is a fag communist collective of artists, archivists, and activists, as well as a small press - find us at http://stephs.net

June Canedo de Souza: Every Memory Belongs to a Myth

Premiering in October

Online Video Viewing Room

Through the presentation of found family videos alongside recent performances, Rio de Janeiro and New York based-artist June Canedo de Souza's in-progress body of work "follows a multi-response objective: one that explores absence as a condition of memory, another which aims to address the disjunction between personal experience and familial history." Through performances and installations, she expands upon what shadowed truths, specifically those concerning the women in her family, are able to be depicted haptically. This non-verbal visual language connects the archive to a larger conversation about labor, migration, and the natural world.

June Canedo de Souza works with photography, performance, film, painting, and sculpture. Her practice engages in a conceptual exploration of memory as it relates to migration and is anchored by her lived experience. From multimedia installations to durational performances, her work mainly borrows from the domestic culture and the cultural memory of the women in her family. She is interested in asking questions about the ways in which migration affects the mental health of people who migrate, the interrelations between objects, space, and time, and how objects themselves migrate.

June Canedo de Souza: Every Memory Belongs to a Myth is organized by Lumi Tan, Senior Curator.

The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x School for Poetic Computation

September 2022 - September 2023

Various Sites

Through support from the Simons Foundation, The Kitchen will fund a 12-month cycle (fall 2022-summer 2023) of its L.A.B. Research Residency that pays homage to The Kitchen's new media roots by exploring the histories of art, science, and technology represented in the institution's archive. Spanning The Kitchen's "without walls" period during the transformative moment of the institution's renovation of its 19th Street building, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x School for Poetic Computation will bring together groundbreaking artists and thinkers, rising in the field, to build, dialogue, and exchange together. This program is motivated by a recognition that the future of art is one that embeds itself in the world and requires "lab critical thinking" to test with care the critical theories that will help art, science, and technology grow and succeed. For the initial year of this program, The Kitchen has invited a collective to be in residence: NYC-based School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), an organization that supports interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory. SFPC's programs facilitate unlearning and learning, and challenge the capitalistic, heteronormative, and patriarchal canon of social and computer sciences.

School for Poetic Computation is an experimental school in New York that was founded in 2013. SFPC supports interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory. It is a place for unlearning and learning. SFPC's programs challenge the capitalistic, heteronormative and patriarchal canon of social and computer sciences. SFPC attracts self-motivated creative thinkers and radical teachers. All participants are treated as collaborators, and the school formally encourages the power of learners to determine their experience & education. The unique culture of the institution is one based on communal care and solidarity across social differences. The pedagogical space framed in intimacy ideally allows for participants who are LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, and/or Disabled to feel empowered that their ideas are important, necessary and central. Learn more about SFPC at: http://sfpc.study.

The Kitchen L.A.B. Residency x Simons Foundation, in partnership with School for Poetic Computation Co-Directors Zainab Aliyu, Todd Anderson, American Artist, Neta Bomani, Melanie Hoff, Galen Macdonald, and Celine Wong Katzman, is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator and Alison Burstein, Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, and Daniella Brito, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation Fellow.

The Kitchen x Montez Press Radio

September 2022 - September 2023

Various Sites

Montez Press Radio will think beyond not only the walls of The Kitchen, but the walls of Montez Press Radio's home base of 46 Canal Street, to explore the disparate relationship between the face-to-face nature of live performance and the diffuse nature of online distribution. Does broadcasting as a medium for recorded and live audio projects have the ability to convey the here and now beyond the here and now? Throughout its year-long residency and in partnership with commissioned artists, Montez Press Radio will consider the importance of the geographical, architectural, and social settings of narrative storytelling and ask how locale can be integrated into the recording and dissemination of a sonic event. During the residency, MPR will also engage directly The Kitchen Archive as a site of inspiration and source material.

Montez Press Radio is an experimental broadcasting and performance platform. Founded in 2018 with the goal of fostering greater experimentation and conversation between artists, writers, and thinkers through the medium of radio, the platform invites different corners of the art world to interact with each other in person and on air-a place where media finally meets flesh. Montez Press Radio is drawn to art that exists in the unexpected, the authenticity of sharing without a script, the sounds of ideas in the making, conversation that forgets there's an audience. All in-studio broadcasts are free and open to the public. Montez Press Radio's archive is an ongoing auditory document of Montez Press Radio's existence. It is not designed to reflect the ingenuity of post-production, but rather serves as a catalog of rough cuts containing all the small glitches, false starts, and awkward silences that are intrinsic to the process of live recording and running an event space. Montez Press Radio is as much a radio broadcast as it is a reflection of particular moments in time.

The Kitchen x Montez Press Radio is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

Samora Pinderhughes: GRIEF

November 2022 - January 2023

Westbeth

Acclaimed pianist-vocalist-composer Samora Pinderhughes uses music, visual arts, film, language, and creative process as abolitionist action. On the heels of his world premiere of The Healing Project, a multi-pronged work that springs from interviews the artist conducted with people of color in 15 states surrounding experiences of incarceration and structural violence across the United States, Pinderhughes further expands his work of creating communal space for grieving and healing. One element of The Healing Project is his latest album, GRIEF. At Westbeth, Pinderhughes and collaborators will perform newly reimagined selections from the album, creating bold new performances that meld songcraft, ritual, and conversation alongside a rotating presentation of moving image works to be screened at intervals between live performances. The films serve as companion pieces to the GRIEF album, and present Pinderhughes' work with his collective RSCK (alongside Christian Padron, Kassim Norris, and Ray Neutron) as well as the results of long-standing collaborations with filmmakers Christian Padron, Josh Begley, Vashni Korin, and Daniel Pfeffer.

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest, and emotionally rich lyrics combined with high-level musicianship. In his music, he examines sociopolitical issues and fights for change, working in the tradition of the Black surrealists who bend word, sound, and image toward the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product.

As an artist, Pinderhughes' goal is that people will LIVE DIFFERENTLY after experiencing what he makes-that it will affect how they think, how they act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationships to their country and their world.

Pinderhughes has collaborated with artists spanning genres and scenes, including Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Anna Deavere Smith, Emily King, Christian Scott, Sara Bareilles, Simone Leigh, Titus Kaphar, Daveed Diggs, and Lalah Hathaway. He is featured as a composer, lyricist, vocalist, and pianist on the albums August Greene and Let Love with Common, Robert Glasper, and Karriem Riggins. He also has composed music for film and television including Whose Streets?, MO, The Tale, and Burning Sands.

Samora Pinderhughes: GRIEF is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

The Kitchen x Dia Art Foundation

Ongoing

Various sites

Dia Art Foundation and The Kitchen are thrilled to announce a new, cross-institutional collaboration to further the path-breaking energy that has defined both institutions over the past 50 years.

As responsive, artist-centered organizations, Dia and The Kitchen will collaborate across media and genres to blur boundaries, propose collective exhibition and performance models, and cultivate experiences that unfold through multiple temporalities and platforms, both embodied and virtual. Artists will have the opportunity to draw upon both institutions' deep histories of experimentation, engaging with the ephemeral practices cultivated and indexed by The Kitchen and its archive, while being in dialogue with questions of duration and permanence posed by Dia's sites, collection, and program.

With Dia's recent revitalization of its West 22nd Street location - Dia Chelsea - and The Kitchen about to embark on its own renovation, this collaboration invites these two risk-taking organizations to build upon decades of dialogue, reinvest in their relationship to the Chelsea neighborhood, and propose daring work that will expand engagement with artists, publics, and each other.

Dia Art Foundation is committed to advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists. Dia fulfills its mission by commissioning single artist projects, organizing exhibitions, realizing site-specific installations, and collecting in-depth the work of a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Kitchen on Bloomberg Connects

The Kitchen joins Bloomberg Connects as one of its first performance-rooted institutions. Its presence on the free arts and cultural mobile app created by Bloomberg Philanthropies will complement and enhance in-person visits as well as inspire new ways for worldwide audiences to engage off-site. The newly launched digital guide builds on the organization's wider goals of increased access for artists and audiences alike, strengthening The Kitchen as an experimental meeting space for people everywhere. As the season unfolds both in-person at varied locations and continuously online, The Kitchen's digital guide on Bloomberg Connects acts as a center-a space with access to all aspects of the program. Whether through archival selections and artist interviews; new artworks; performance and exhibition overviews; or event guides; The Kitchen's presence on Bloomberg Connects provides new forms of engagement with artists, for audiences both in the room and participating from afar.