Parity Productions Announces Launch Of Paddle8 Online Auction

Theatre production company Parity Productions, a producer of new work that ensures they fill at least 50% of the creative positions (playwrights, directors, and designers) on their productions with women and/or trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) artists, has launched an auction on Paddle8 and their annual Silent Auction Buy Now Prices on The Parity Store.

Bidding for the Parity Productions Online Auction on Paddle8 launches today and closes on October 28th. Parity's auction will feature works by Tim Goodchild, Paul McDonough, Paul Moran, Joseph Alexander (J.A.) Pescenke, Edwina Sandys, Sylvia Sleigh, and Malcah Zeldis.

Paddle8 is an online auction house, bringing the collecting tradition into the 21st century by combining taste and trust with efficiency. Paddle8 offers works by renowned artists and designers in dozens of auctions each month.

Parity has also announced its Silent Auction Buy Now items, available through December 31st on The Parity Store. Apparel, jewelry, experiences, and art are all included in the collection. 50% of all proceeds go towards our 2020 production of Mirrors by Azure D. Osborne-Lee, premiering February 2020 at Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop.

Parity Productions is a formidable producer of new work that ensures that they fill at least 50% of the creative positions (playwrights, directors, and designers) on their productions with women and/or TGNC artists. In addition to producing their own work, they actively promote other theatre companies that follow their 50% hiring standard. Artistically, they develop and produce compelling new plays that give voice to individuals who rebel against their marginalized place in society. Parity Productions is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit theatre company formed in 2016 by international award-winning director Ludovica Villar-Hauser with its roots in two other previous not-for-profits founded by Villar-Hauser: VH Theatrical Development Foundation and Works by Women.

Tim Goodchild is a three-time Laurence Olivier Award winner who has designed for stage, television, and film. He has designed over 75 productions for London's West End theatre, and over 80 productions internationally. In 1988, he made theatre history by designing the first Anglo-Soviet production of a ballet: Swan Lake (Moscow Classical Ballet, London, the United States, Japan, and Moscow). He also designed the ballet A Simple Man for BBC2, which won the 1987 BAFTA Award. Also for BBC2, he designed the musical The Look of Love, directed by Dame Gillian Lynne, and was costume designer for the film The Little Prince. He has designed productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the New Shakespeare Company, Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, English National Opera, Sydney Opera House, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and Théatre du Chátelet in Paris, amongst others.

Paul McDonough has worked as a freelance photographer, paste-up mechanical artist, and adjunct professor of photography at Pratt Institute, Yale University, Cooper Union, Marymount College, Parsons School of Design, and Fordham University. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work is in a number of public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the DeCordova Museum, and the Joseph Seagrams Collection. He has received extensive press coverage, including several write-ups in The New Yorker, (one by Pulitzer prize winner Hilton Als), as well as reviews in The Wall Street Journal, photo-eye, and Hyperallergic. He and his wife live in Park Slope, Brooklyn. A monograph on his work was published in 2010 by Umbrage Editions, "Paul McDonough, New York Photographs 1968-78," with an essay by Susan Kismaric.

Paul Moran is an artist and teacher living and working in New York. His work in the mediums of painting and photography have been exhibited nationally and internationally. He is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Music at BMCC/City University of New York.

J. A. Pecsenke was a native of Hungary who lived in New York. His work combines the vital forces of both cultures--danger, sharp wit, and eclecticism. Pecsenke's art celebrates his longtime experience as an actor and set designer. His work includes etchings of Commedia del Arte, Opera lithographs, and paintings inspired by the works of Shakespeare. It is in the private collections of Jeremy Irons, Joanne Woodward, and Joan Fontaine, as well as in the public collections of the Metropolitan Opera, The Joffrey Ballet, The Folger Library, the New York Philharmonic, and Yale University.

Edwina Sandys is the second of Duncan and Diana Sandys' three children and a granddaughter of the statesman Sir Winston Churchill. One of her works, titled "Breakthrough," is located at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, USA. This work features eight sections of the Berlin Wall. Westminster College was the site of Sir Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946. The college is now the site of the Winston Churchill Memorial Museum, housed in the basement of a relocated London church designed and rebuilt by Christopher Wren. Ms. Sandys also worked with the Missouri University of Science and Technology, located in Rolla, Missouri, USA, to use a new way to make deep cuts in granite to create the Millennium Arch sculpture which stands across the campus from their Stonehenge monument. The Arch is a single trilithon with a vague silhouette of a man and a woman on each of its supporting megaliths several meters from the arch. In 1997 she was awarded with the United Nations Society of Writers & Artists Award for Excellence. The United Nations has installed five monumental sculptures by Edwina Sandys at their centers around the world.

Sylvia Sleigh was a Realist-feminist painter who emigrated to America in 1961. She was born in Llandudno, Wales in 1916, studying in Sussex, England at the Brighton School of Art. In the 1940s, at art school, she received the harsh advice, "You have no talent. You're just here to waste time until you get married." She ultimately received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1985. Sleigh also was awarded the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Professorship at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, where she taught. Sleigh has also taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She was married to art critic and Guggenheim Museum (New York) curator Lawrence Alloway. Sylvia Sleigh has had one-person exhibitions at Northwestern University; Bennington College, Vermont; Ohio State University, Columbus; University of Rhode Island, Kingston; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Fordham University, Bronx, New York; G.W. Einstein Company, New York City; New School for School Research; and a show in 1990 that traveled to Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; and Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

Malcah Zeldis felt that she just "wasn't talented enough" to paint as a young girl (Julia Weissman, "Malcah Zeldis: A Jewish Folk Artist in the American Tradition," The National Jewish Monthly, September 1975). When she was eighteen, she moved to Israel to live on a kibbutz and painted a few small images during her free time. A well-known Israeli artist, Aaron Giladi, praised her work and encouraged her to paint larger canvases. She was so overwhelmed by this, however, that she stopped painting altogether (Willa S. Rosenberg, "Malcah, Her Life," The Clarion, Summer 1988). In 1958, Zeldis returned to the United States and settled in Brooklyn. Her confidence in her art grew and she began to create bigger, bolder paintings based on childhood memories, historical figures, and family events.