Join us for the closing of Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, the first solo presentation of work in New York by Alabama raised and NYC-based artist Zeelie Brown. The closing will feature a talk by Katherine Adams with Zeelie Brown and a performance by Yatta Zoker.

RSVP via Eventbrite (Recommended)

The exhibition is accompanied by an original zine publication by the artist featuring a commissioned essay by Katherine Adams and poetry by Dre Cardinal. Framed as a conversation between Brown and figures both living and historic, the solo project will include performances by Brown and guests, a public dinner, talks, and a gallery-spanning installation of lush inter-media, tactile, and sonic works that confront the intersectional realities of climate injustice, oppression, and anti-Blackness in contemporary American society. Brown focuses on the potential for transformative and restorative justice through acts of resistance and care, as a means to “(re)form the world.” Brown refuses polite forms of permission-seeking to exist and to be visible, or as Brown writes in their artist statement, “You’ll forgive me if I want to destroy things…” 

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Katherine C.M. Adams is a curator, writer, and researcher based in New York. She is currently a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (New York). At present she is a Researcher with the New Centre for Research & Practice and a Curator for The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023. Her writing has been published in FLAT Journal (UCLA), Triple Ampersand (The New Centre for Research & Practice) and Public Parking (Manitoba), among others. As an independent curator, most recently she developed an exhibition and programs for Miriam Gallery (Brooklyn).

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called "soulscapes" to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie is currently working with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in her native rural Alabama. Queer Mother's Space is their first Manhattan solo show.

Yatta Zoker (YATTA), a Houston native, has shared the stage with musicians like Cardi B and The Sun Ra Arkestra. Their 2016 debut EP, ‘Spirit Said Yes!’ was released on NYC’s imprint PTP. In 2019, YATTA released WAHALA.The album was named one of Fact Magazine’s 25 Best Albums of 2019 and one of Pitchfork’s Best Experimental Albums of 2019. Most recently, YATTA released ‘DIAL UP’ and performed selections at the Getty alongside collaborator Moor Mother’s free-jazz ensemble, Irreversible Entanglements. Yatta has performed at MOMA PS1, MOMA, New Forms Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, and NTS x The Tate virtual festival. They are a former artist-in-residence of Pioneer Works, Elsewhere Museum, Otion Front, and Flux Factory. They are a 2022 MFA Candidate at Bard College and a teaching artist in Los Angeles, CA. 

ACCESSIBILITY AND COVID-19
EFA Project Space is located on the 2nd floor of 323 West 39th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues. The building has an ADA wheelchair accessible elevator that provides access to the gallery from the ground floor. There are all-gender single stall bathrooms and an ADA approved bathroom on the 3rd floor. The space is not scent-free, but we do request that people attending come low-scent. Admission to the building does not require an ID, but you will be asked to sign-in and out to facilitate contact tracing, as necessary. The closest MTA subway station is the Port Authority A, C, E stop which is ADA wheelchair accessible. Texts and programs are in English. Large format texts can be provided with an advance request. EFA Project Space is committed to nurturing an intergenerational environment and we encourage children & kid noise at our events. Please notify us of any accessibility needs by email to projectspace@efanyc.org, or by phone at (212) 563-5855 x 244. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, masks are required for entry.

Join us for a special artist-led walkthrough of Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, the first solo presentation of work in New York by Alabama raised and NYC-based artist Zeelie Brown. The event will feature a reading by poet Dre Cardinal.

The exhibition Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, is accompanied by an original zine publication by the artist featuring a commissioned essay by Katherine Adams and poetry by Dre Cardinal. Framed as a conversation between Brown and figures both living and historic, the solo project will include performances by Brown and guests, a public dinner, talks, and a gallery-spanning installation of lush inter-media, tactile, and sonic works that confront the intersectional realities of climate injustice, oppression, and anti-Blackness in contemporary American society. Brown focuses on the potential for transformative and restorative justice through acts of resistance and care, as a means to “(re)form the world.” Brown refuses polite forms of permission-seeking to exist and to be visible, or as Brown writes in their artist statement, “You’ll forgive me if I want to destroy things…” 

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called "soulscapes" to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie is currently working with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in her native rural Alabama. Queer Mother's Space is their first Manhattan solo show.

Dre Cardinal is a half-Korean, quarter French-Canadian, quarter German published poet who has won numerous awards, most notably the highly competitive creative thesis mentorship under her favorite poet Josh Bell while (not) studying at Harvard College. A Gemini military brat who moved around the South, she mostly grew up in San Antonio where Zeelie was her next door neighbor. Dre has also lived in Germany, South Korea and Madagascar. She is the last of a long line of first-born surviving females. Her life’s purpose is to clear heart chakras through her writing -- and bring love. She’s known Zeelie for 31 years.

ACCESSIBILITY AND COVID-19
EFA Project Space is located on the 2nd floor of 323 West 39th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues. The building has an ADA wheelchair accessible elevator that provides access to the gallery from the ground floor. There are all-gender single stall bathrooms and an ADA approved bathroom on the 3rd floor. The space is not scent-free, but we do request that people attending come low-scent. Admission to the building does not require an ID, but you will be asked to sign-in and out to facilitate contact tracing, as necessary. The closest MTA subway station is the Port Authority A, C, E stop which is ADA wheelchair accessible. Texts and programs are in English. Large format texts can be provided with an advance request. EFA Project Space is committed to nurturing an intergenerational environment and we encourage children & kid noise at our events. Please notify us of any accessibility needs by email to projectspace@efanyc.org, or by phone at (212) 563-5855 x 244. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, masks are required for entry.

Join us for the opening of Zeelie Brown: Queer Mothers’ Space, the first solo presentation of work in New York by Alabama raised and NYC-based artist Zeelie Brown. The opening will feature a reading by poet Dre Cardinal.

RSVP via Eventbrite (Recommended)

The exhibition is accompanied by an original zine publication by the artist featuring a commissioned essay by Katherine Adams and poetry by Dre Cardinal. Framed as a conversation between Brown and figures both living and historic, the solo project will include performances by Brown and guests, a public dinner, talks, and a gallery-spanning installation of lush inter-media, tactile, and sonic works that confront the intersectional realities of climate injustice, oppression, and anti-Blackness in contemporary American society. Brown focuses on the potential for transformative and restorative justice through acts of resistance and care, as a means to “(re)form the world.” Brown refuses polite forms of permission-seeking to exist and to be visible, or as Brown writes in their artist statement, “You’ll forgive me if I want to destroy things…” 

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called "soulscapes" to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie is currently working with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in her native rural Alabama. Queer Mother's Space is their first Manhattan solo show.

Dre Cardinal is a half-Korean, quarter French-Canadian, quarter German published poet who has won numerous awards, most notably the highly competitive creative thesis mentorship under her favorite poet Josh Bell while (not) studying at Harvard College. A Gemini military brat who moved around the South, she mostly grew up in San Antonio where Zeelie was her next door neighbor. Dre has also lived in Germany, South Korea and Madagascar. She is the last of a long line of first-born surviving females. Her life’s purpose is to clear heart chakras through her writing -- and bring love. She’s known Zeelie for 31 years.

Time: Saturday, May 14, 2022, 1-2:30 PM

In Person at EFA Project Space (323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, NYC 10018)

RSVP RECOMMENDED (via Eventbrite)

What became of the White Seeds planted in Black Soil?

In “Atlantic Correspondence,” Tanika I. Williams reconstructs her genealogical journey from Ireland, to Jamaica, to New York from the 1800s to present day. The cartographic performance plots Williams' ancestry with soil, immigration documents and vital records, to visualize ancestry through plant migrations.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph with Anne Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tanika I. Williams is a Brooklyn-based video and performance artist exploring mothering, ecology and spirituality. https://www.tanikawilliams.net/

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

Time: Saturday, May 7, 4-5 PM

In Person at EFA Project Space (323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, NYC 10018)

RSVP Recommended

on the boat, let's face it i'm held. in its waves, its vagueness, in its water. i see only water. water doesn't answer. no land ahead. just water. /eileen myles, the importance of being iceland

...and under them the earth
sank with its grosser portions; and the water,
lowest of all, held up, held in, the land. /ovid, metamorphoses, book one, lines 30-2

the water is opaque. it is comforting to imagine that you are in it. you won't be visible any longer… relief from the unending demands of simple sight. /roni horn, saying water

water receives you, affirms you, shows you who you are, and all the neat, imperceptible qualities that are water tease you with their ambiguity, tease you and extend you out into the world. /roni horn, saying water

May 7, dispersed holdings will perform meditations on water with words and sound, in conjunction with Sal Randolph’s installation, Slowing Time.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS
Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University, where he was founding director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. A collection of his poems, A New English Grammar, is forthcoming from Dispersed Holdings.

dispersed holdings is an artist-run platform for publishing and experimental listening practices founded in 2015 by Sal Randolph and David Richardson. For two years (2016–18), dispersed was sited in the former Bowery apartment of the artist Eva Hesse. Since leaving that space, dispersed holdings has published three books: Speed of Resin (2019), a meditation on impermanence and an homage to Hesse; Reading Room (2020), a document of the "Ambient Reading Spectacular" residency series and an exploration of the practice of reading; and Reading Now (2021), a follow-up to Reading Room that considers reading practices amid lockdown. On occasion, dispersed holdings is also a band.

Sal Randolph is an artist working between language and action. Her current work addresses the intersection of attention, time, feeling, capital, and crisis through performance, experimental publishing, and the creation of social spaces. She is co-founder of dispersed holdings, originally a listening and publication space in New York sited in the former apartment of sculptor Eva Hesse, continuing now as a publishing project and, from time to time, a band. She is a member of the research consortium ESTAR(SER) and is currently a teaching fellow at Bennington College. She is also a Zen practitioner and senior student of Roshi Enkyo O’Hara at the Village Zendo.

David Richardson writes fiction and essays. Since 2015, he has co-directed the publishing project dispersed holdings, with whom he edited Reading Room (2020) and Speed of Resin (co-published with Cooperative Editions, 2019), and co-edited Reading Now (2021). He holds an MFA in fiction from UMass Poets & Writers, and he teaches in the Bard Language and Thinking Program, the Bard Prison Initiative, and the UMass Writing Program.

Emma Wippermann is a poet based in New York. Her closet drama Joan of Arkansas is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse later this year. She has an MFA from Brown University and has published work in jubilat, Omniverse, Second Factory, No, Dear, Oversound, Temporary Art Review, and elsewhere.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

How I Went Jank…

Join us on Zoom this month for artists Kamari Carter and Lamar Robillard, in conversation with Anaïs Duplan, Dellyssa Edinboro, and John Engelbrecht, co-presented by the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. Carter and Robillard will discuss their work, contemporary practices, and experience as part of the Jank Museum project at EFA Project Space in December 2021.

RSVP for the Zoom link via Eventbrite

Image: Lamar Robillard, Tennis Painting IV: Game, Set, Melancholy (Naomi Vs Serena), 2021, Linen canvas, enamel house paint, acrylic, Plastisol ink, 56 9/16” x 44 5/16”

Bios:

Kamari Carter (b. 1992) is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and has been featured in a range of major publications including ArtNet, Precog Magazine, LevelGround and WhiteWall. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and the Bettering American Poetry anthology. Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2020. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He now works as Program Manager at Recess and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Poetry at Columbia University.

Dellyssa Edinboro is the Education Coordinator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS). She enjoys learning about the educative role of community-engaged creative work and teaching, studying, and reading about activism and agency in educational spaces.

John Engelbrecht is an artist, arts organizer, educator, and Executive Director of Public Space One (PS1). Since joining PS1 in 2009, he has steadily built the beloved regional arts institution operating locally as Iowa City’s arts hub through securing national recognition (in grants, awards, and accolades in the contemporary arts field), thanks to its innovative programming (residencies, performances, exhibitions, and public projects) and wide-ranging artist network. Under his tenure, the organization has grown from its DIY/DIT roots to owning, occupying, and programming three buildings in downtown Iowa City and operating major projects including the Iowa City Press Co-op, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, and the Media Arts Co-op.

Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Lamar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Port Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN and Art Helix Gallery.

RSVP for the Zoom link via Eventbrite

Time: Thursday, April 21, 6-7 PM

NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR A POSTPONEMENT DATE.

Join us for an evening performance by Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble artist Del Hardin Hoyle and sound artist/composer Matt Evans.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS

Matt Evans is a composer and percussionist producing acoustic and electronic music, collaborative performances, and concept-driven recording projects through an eco-fictional lens. Taking cues from interwoven organic species, entangled online networks, and intersectional thinking, Evans uses drum-driven hypnotic soundscapes and embodied improvisatory performance to question the unknowable and absurd relationships between the human experience, capital-driven consumerism, and ecological systems. These projects imagine new ways to care for ecosystems and communities while engaging in art-making that applies research, ritual, and abstraction.

Evans’ classical compositions tend toward the ambient and the poetic, where simple structural logics are impeded on by indeterminate and incidental forms. Textural string and wind writing combine with ephemeral and otherworldly percussion and keyboard sounds in the production of effervescent clouds of subtle shifting harmony and rhythm. Experiments with expanded intonation and euclidian rhythms give these compositions an uncanny, hyperreal feeling that extends an overarching dreamy sentiment. These works often take optical phenomenon and theoretical physics as a point of departure — as calculated depictions of phenomenological anomalies. 

Del Hardin Hoyle was born in Rotherham, UK. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City. A recent graduate from the Interior Design MFA at Parsons the New School for Design, New York. Del’s work establishes itself across a wide range of forms - from sculpture, furniture and interior design, sound, music, installation, curating, film and graphic design to name a few. Del started the monthly radio show A Year On Earth with musician and sound designer Sam Bellingham in 2018. He co-founded the artist collective (it’s all) Tropical in England in 2014 curating ambitious large scale group exhibitions all over the UK. He has exhibited widely across the UK, Northern Europe and New York City.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

A conversation with writer and researcher Heather Davis and Sprout artists Anna Rose Hopkins and Marina Zurkow about the legacies of plastic, oceans, and kin, and infinity, as part of our series of programs around the installation Languish at the End of the Ocean (2022) by Hopkins and Zurkow, presented in Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble. This immersive installation can be experienced at EFA Project Space through May 14. Fashioned as a self-service spa, the installation features the artists’ guided meditation Soupy Salty Sonic: A Liquid Wanting which invites the audience to voyage through undersea depths as their body morphs to become part of the ocean.

Please RSVP on Eventbrite for the Zoom link.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS

Heather Davis is a writer, researcher and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is also a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Anna Rose Hopkins is a performing artist and chef by trade who plays at the intersection of food, theater and narrative. Her work considers food systems, the Anthropocene, affective labor and hierarchies of service. Her collaborative works have been supported by Swissnex SF, Getty PST:LA/LA the Barbara Seiler Gallery. Film/TV works of note include Dark Night (dir. Tim Sutton), Amos World (dir. Cécile B. Evans), and Gregory Go Boom (dir. Janicza Bravo). Anna Rose is co-founder of Farm2People, bolstering the farm to food bank supply chain; chef and co-owner at Hank and Bean; writer/actor with IAMA Theatre Company. 

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes with humor and affection. Her work has been featured at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Storm King Art Center, New York; the 7th Moscow Biennale; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

The event will feature live transcription. Video of the talk will be posted with captions after the event. Please contact projectspace@efanyc.org if you have specific access needs or requests.

A conversation between artist and researcher Ellie Irons and Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble artist Gaye Chan, on weediness. Presented as part of Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble, curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam, and Marina Zurkow.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Gaye Chan

Gaye Chan is a conceptual artist who moves between solo and collaborative activities that take place on the web, in publications, streets as well as galleries. Her recent work often ruminates on how cartography and photography simultaneously offer and occlude information. Past exhibition venues include Art in General (New York City), Articule (Montreal), Artspeak (Vancouver), Asia Society (New York City), Gallery 4A (Sydney), Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), and YYZ Artist Outlet (Toronto).

Chan’s collaborative projects include being a part of Eating in Public and Downwind Productions. Eating in Public is an anti-capitalism project nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people’s homes, plant free food gardens on private and public land, set up free stores, all without permission. Downwind examines the impact of colonialism, capitalism, and tourism. Through agitprop commodities and web media, DownWind takes up Waikiki as an actual specific site/sight and a metaphor for countless other places where self-sustaining peoples have been dislocated for profit.

Gaye Chan was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States in 1969. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and is a professor of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Chan’s work has been supported by Art Matters and the Creative Capital Foundation.

Ellie Irons

Ellie Irons is an artist and educator living and working on Mohican land in current-day Troy, New York, USA. From foraged watercolor paintings to un-lawning experiments, her work combines socially engaged art, ecology fieldwork, and embodied learning. She is a co-founder of the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency, collaborations investigating relationships between humans and spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds). Her solo and collaborative work has been part of recent exhibitions on contemporary environmental art, including The Department of Human and Natural Services at NURTUREArt, Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator at Wave Hill, and Unsettled Nature at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Her work has been covered by publications ranging from Art in America to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Irons received a BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. In December 2021, She completed a PhD in arts practice at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, focusing on artistic practice for cultivating plant-human solidarity and ecosocial justice in an age of extraction and climate chaos. She is currently an environmental educator at Radix Ecological Sustainability Center and an artist in residence at Basilica Hudson.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

An in-person reading at EFA Project Space by Ron Broglio, with prints by Marina Zurkow.

Animals of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Join us for a reading and book launch of Animal Revolution by Ron Broglio and accompanying pop-up exhibition of the curious book illustrations by Marina Zurkow. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, we report to you these creative nonfiction incidents accumulate to reveal how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. Books and archival limited edition prints will be available for sale at the reading. The book is also available for sale here.

A selection of 18”x24 digital prints on Hahnemühle German Etching 310, Edition of 25, are for sale for $300. Each print will be accompanied by a copy of the book.

Proceeds from print sales go to Liberty Wildlife, a Phoenix area wildlife rehabilitation program including work with the critically endangered California Condor

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and other collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and willful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS

Ron Broglio writes books and essays on nonhuman phenomenology and animal studies. He has curated and produced a number of art exhibitions on contemporary environmental art. Broglio is director of the desert humanities initiative at Arizona State University and Associate Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. He is author of Animal Revolution and Surface Encounters: thinking with animals and art among other books and edited collections including the recently published The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. He co-edits the Desert Humanities book series for Texas Tech University Press. Broglio was collaborator and co-curator of Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories in which artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson examine the cultural life of endangered species in the Grand Canyon. He has performed as Field Marshal of the Animal Revolution and created a number of animal art interventions including Teat Tweet and Santio’s Gift. Currently, he is working on desert phenomenology experiments with the arts, designers, and science collaborators in an art book series Strata (first issues on saguaro, rocks, and lines & borders). As Director of Desert Humanities, he is engaged in a number of long-term thinking-making experiments in the deserts of the American Southwest.

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes with humor and affection. Her work has been featured at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Storm King Art Center, New York; the 7th Moscow Biennale; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

Please join us at EFA Project Space on Saturday, March 12, 2022 for the opening reception of Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble, curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam, and Marina Zurkow, with exhibition design by Universal Solvent Studios.

The exhibition features installations by Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, and Sal Randolph, and during its run performances, talks, and interventions by Ron Broglio, Heather Davis, Matt Evans, Ellie Irons, Anne Randolph, David Richardson, Tanika I. Williams, Brett Gui Xin, and others.

The gallery will be open from 12 pm, with a durational performance of Acts of Service by Anna Rose Hopkins from 12 - 5 pm, an ongoing plant swap by Eating in Public/Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma, and a sound performance/activation by Del Hardin Hoyle beginning at 7 pm. Bring a plant to swap!

RSVP Encouraged, not required. Masks and proof of vaccination required for entry to EFA Center.

The opening will coincide with the reception for Dread In The Eyes, curated by Deric Carner, on EFA’s 3rd Floor, featuring work by EFA Member Artists Samira Abbassy, Allen T. Ball, Michael Eade, Sally Egbert, Jason File, Katya Grokhovsky, Edgar Jerins, Kosuke Kawahara, Greg Kwiatek, Dana Levy, Cheryl Molnar, Nazanin Noroozi, and Whitney Oldenburg.

About the exhibition

Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and willful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Sprout invites your participation to inhabit ways of being that are soft, wild, caressing and off-kilter. We ask if and how we can prepare in the now—think with the emergent boldness of the sprout, with the casual yet crucial pivot of the hinge, with the sensual nonchalance of the nap—both as siesta and as the luxurious pile of a rug—and approach the world with a wobble—uncertain, intoxicated, unsteady and open. 

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

ACCESS INFO

EFA Project Space is located on the second floor of 323 West 39th Street. It is accessible via an elevator (whose door width is 32” and car width is 65”) or two flights of stairs. At the building’s ground-level front desk, you will be asked to sign in with your name but not to provide ID. 

The exhibition is free. Chairs with backs are available to guests upon request by speaking to a gallery attendant. There are two non-gender-segregated bathrooms on the building’s third floor, accessible via the elevators, outside the Project Space. The bathrooms are cleaned twice daily. One bathroom is wide and long enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the other cannot. Neither bathroom has grab bars. Though we cannot guarantee a scent-free space, we ask that all guests, who are able, to attend the exhibition fragrance-free, out of consideration for guests with chemical sensitivities. Fragrance-free soap is available in the restrooms on the third floor.

For the health and safety of our staff and the general public, attendance at events requires advanced RSVP. All attendees must show proof of vaccination. Masks are obligatory for entry.

Presentation Slide Deck Here

Join us for a live zoom Q&A Session with EFA Project Space Program Director Dylan Gauthier and Program Manager Judy Giera, and friends.

About this event

Thinking of applying to Project Space's Open Call for Curatorial and Artist Project Proposals? Join us for this casual, hour-long public Q&A session on Zoom. Come with your questions, queries, and quandaries...

Can't make the event? We'll post a recording on our website and Instagram later in the week.

The call (full details here)

How far can the idiom of the contemporary art exhibition be stretched before it begins to lose its commonly-understood meaning? Where are the bounds of site located that allow us to inscribe what it is to curate, to make shows, to invite a public, to further the work of artists and curators, or to share a work in public? 

This open call invites curatorial proposals, publication ideas, artist project proposals, one-off gatherings or series, and other forms that respond to and pose questions about the limits and boundaries of contemporary exhibition-making.

Once the exclusive product of the gallery, museum, project space, kunsthalle, the exhibition has found its way into the world in a surprising number of novel forms. This has taken place both before the pandemic, and accelerated during – as in the shift to outdoor venues out of the necessity to socially distance, or the increase of virtual platforms for NFTs, as crypto-currency backed artworks and other “online only” exhibition spaces found new markets and new audiences. With this changed landscape as the background, we are increasingly interested in rethinking the Project Space form and propose this open call as an opportunity for artists and curators to address this question in public and alongside the organization.

We envision multi-layered, multidisciplinary, multi-generational, multi- or meta-verse formulations on what it means to practice in the alchemical form of exhibition-making today. Art historical and/or future looking and speculative proposals are welcomed. We have moved so far beyond the white box motif, while the form has not been abandoned, it does allow us to think through ways that please other formulations that both are and are not aligned with additional exhibition making practices. 

The call for proposals will program Project Space's gallery and website through 2023 and into 2024, and guide the creation of a symposium that draws on Project Space's 15-year history of pushing the boundaries of curatorial practices, blurring the edges between artist project, activism, community building, and this other thing called putting on an art exhibition, and of process-based exhibitions.

A publication featuring essays and responses by past Project Space curators and exhibiting artists will be released alongside the symposium.

Art & Magic: Artists and the Occult
A Zoom Workshop

Tuesday, February 8 - 6:00 - 7:30 PM via Zoom

In conjunction with Cosmic Geometries, please join Hilma's Ghost on Tuesday, February 8th, 6:00-7:30PM EST for a free virtual program with four artists who have divinatory practices that are deeply entwined with their studio practice. Melissa Brown will talk about her use of Tarot to adapt complex visual mythologies in her paintings; Isa Carillo will discuss how she uses numerology to construct portraits; Maria Molteni will focus on her use of altars and astrology; and Laurel Sparks will illuminate on her use of sigils to make abstract paintings. Hilma’s Ghost will also expound with a brief talk on the history of art and magic. 

This session is free and open to all. 

If you would like to buy one of our decks, EFA Project Space has a limited supply of ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT decks in New York that you can pick up in person. First purchase the decks on our Hilma’s Ghost website here and use the code “EFA.” Then, please contact Judy Giera at judy@efanyc.org to pick up the deck once you have paid on our site. 

Hilma's Ghost's ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT deck holds itself in conversation with the Rider-Waite-Smith, which is not only the most popular deck in worldly distribution today but was illustrated by a womxn, Pamela Colman Smith. More than a century later, Brooklyn-based artists, Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray apply an abstract lens to the cards’ rich symbolism to access their semiotic potential and surface divinatory meanings. The artists worked together for more than 300 hours to construct the 78 original drawings for their tarot deck, an amalgamation of their unique and distinct visual languages. The original drawings are on Fabriano Murillo paper with a combination of gouache, ink, and colored pencils, their size directly proportional to the Tarot card dimensions. Both artists hold extensive knowledge regarding western and non-western abstraction, with Tegeder pulling from Bauhausian and Minimalist traditions, and Ray from spiritual and esoteric forms from South Asia, as well as the patterning and craft traditions of Asian textiles. Within these drawings lies a rich sensibility for color, shape, and compositional elements, expressing hybrid traditions of abstraction that is intrinsically experimental and daring. The project in its entirety was presented by Carrie Secrist Gallery at The Armory Show in September 2021 and was included in this as one of the exhibitions to see in a review for The New York Times by Will Heinrich.

Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder  and Sharmistha Ray  in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history’s blindspots, especially for women artists considered too ‘mystical’ for the conservative art world. 

​Named after af Klint, Hilma’s Ghost believes that western heteropatriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation. Following a year of lockdowns and social distancing, Hilma’s Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible. Since its inception, Hilma’s Ghost has run online workshops that have been attended by over 700 people, from all over the world. The Instagram archive also documents the stories of womxn artists. To learn more about Hilma's Ghost, check out our website or follow us on Instagram. We regularly post about our programs and profile living womxn artists working with aspects of the occult and/or spirituality.  

This program is being held in conjunction with Cosmic Geometries, a group exhibition curated by Hilma’s Ghost, at EFA Project Space until February 26, 2022. This program is made possible with the kind support of Carrie Secrist Gallery. To view the curatorial walkthrough and meet some of the artists, link to our first program from January 13, here. View our second program, Going Beyond Basics: Tarot for Artists and Creatives, here. 

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Melissa Brown (she/her) is fascinated by patterns and drawing from sources high and low including lottery tickets, painted fingernails, landscape painting, and ukiyo-e prints. She explores form and perception in her lushly layered prints, paintings, and mixed-media works. Her training as a printmaker, working primarily with woodcuts (which she describes as “the most archaic form of printmaking”), informs her interest in repetition and its meaning. Brown is particularly focused on the repetitive patterns found in natural and urban environments. Skillfully combining abstraction and representation, she produces landscape scenes touched with surrealism, full of floating rocks, undulating waves, radiant skies, and trees covered with bark composed of expressive faces. Solo projects and exhibitions include Big Medium for PrintAustin, Austin, Texas, Essex Flowers, New York, New York, Roberto Paradise, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Kansas Gallery, New York, and Canada, New York. Group exhibitions include Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, The Hole, New York, Musee International Des Arts Modestes, France, Novella Gallery, New York, Mass Gallery, Austin Texas, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, among others. https://www.melissabrown.tv

Isa Carillo (she/her, b.1982, Guadalajara) has been defined by a research of hidden and enigmatic aspects of the collective unconscious and a connection to a critical and empirical vision of pseudoscience applied to individuals. Her interest in hidden or invisible phenomena began to develop at the start of her career by combining themes referring to the subconscious present in everyday life. Through the collection of elements such as personal files, photographs and graphic material among others, the artist stores images and information that she later uses as catalysts to develop her projects. In this way, the point of departure becomes the place of union between memory and form thus proposing a bridge towards the invisible. She has exhibited individually and collectively in institutions such as Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Museo Taller Clemente Orozco, Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Centro Cultural de Arte Moderno in Guadalajara, Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, Mexico City and Museo de Pintores in Oaxaca, Mexico. http://isacarrillo.com/

Maria Molteni (They/She, b.1983, Nashville) is a queer transdisciplinary artist, educator, mystic and Siren. They are the grandchild of Tennessee square dancers, stunt motorcyclists, quilters, beekeepers and opera singers of various European backgrounds. Their practice has grown from formal studies in Painting, Printmaking and Dance to incorporate research, social engagement and play-based collaboration with the living and dead. Molteni pictures themself as an Atlantian Phys Ed coach for visionary communities like Shakers, Bauhaus or Black Mountain College. Molteni is an active member of the Golden Dome school as well as Lake Pleasant, the oldest Spiritualist community in the US (contemporary of Lily Dale). Check out Maria’s work at @strega_maria / www.mariamolteni.com or travel to the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA to see Unseen Hours: Space Clearing for Spirit Work, on view through March 13, 2021.

Laurel Sparks (she/her) uses tactile geometry to create alchemical paintings that propose an encoded world view, paying tribute to occult histories of abstraction, counter-culture legacies and ancient mystery traditions. Sigil magic systems are applied to encrypt esoteric glyphs, magic squares, or text, while woven patterns produce dazzle camouflage. As secrets hiding in plain sight, the compositions are not meant to be decoded, but experienced as talismanic resonances. Exhibitions include Rubedo at Kate Werble Gallery (New York City), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and Berman Museum at Ursinus College; Fire Island artist-in-residence (2013) and fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop at Elizabeth Foundation (New York City, 2014). https://laurelsparks.com.

VISITOR INFO

View Cosmic Geometries Wed–Sat 12 pm-6 pm, no appointment necessary, mask and proof of full vaccination required for entry. For more information and accessibility notes please visit: https://www.projectspace-efanyc.org/about.

EFA Project Space, launched in September 2008 as a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary arts venue founded on the belief that art is directly connected to the individuals who produce it, the communities that arise because of it, and to everyday life; and that by providing an arena for exploring these connections, we empower artists to forge new partnerships and encourage the expansion of ideas.

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts is a 501(c)(3) public charity, dedicated to providing artists across all disciplines with space, tools and a cooperative forum for the development of individual practice. We are a catalyst for cultural growth, stimulating new interactions between artists, creative communities, and the public.

Please join Hilma's Ghost on Wednesday, January 26th from 3:00-4:30 EST for a free workshop with Sarah Potter, a professional and renowned Tarot reader, who will guide us through the basics of the ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT deck. Learn how to use the cards intuitively, expressively, and creatively to create your own spreads and read Tarot.

RSVP for a Zoom Link Here

Geared towards creatives and artists, this workshop will look at non-traditional ways of using Tarot cards. We will talk through using the deck to navigate challenging questions in your creative practice, as a tool for choosing opportunities, and general ways of deepening your intuition with your creative practice with the use of the cards.

This session is free and open to all. If you have your own Tarot deck, please bring it to this virtual session. If you would like to buy one of our decks, EFA Project Space has a limited supply of ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT decks in New York that you can purchase in person. Please contact Judy Giera at judy@efanyc.org to reserve your deck and pay and pick up the deck in person. For shipping outside of New York, purchase the decks on the Hilma’s Ghost website here.

ABOUT

Hilma's Ghost's ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT deck holds itself in conversation with the Rider-Waite-Smith, which is not only the most popular deck in worldly distribution today but was illustrated by a womxn, Pamela Colman Smith. More than a century later, Brooklyn-based artists, Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray apply an abstract lens to the cards’ rich symbolism to access their semiotic potential and surface divinatory meanings. The artists worked together for more than 300 hours to construct the 78 original drawings for their tarot deck, an amalgamation of their unique and distinct visual languages. The original drawings are on Fabriano Murillo paper with a combination of gouache, ink, and colored pencils, their size directly proportional to the Tarot card dimensions. Both artists hold extensive knowledge regarding western and non-western abstraction, with Tegeder pulling from Bauhausian and Minimalist traditions, and Ray from spiritual and esoteric forms from South Asia, as well as the patterning and craft traditions of Asian textiles. Within these drawings lies a rich sensibility for color, shape, and compositional elements, expressing hybrid traditions of abstraction that is intrinsically experimental and daring. The project in its entirety was presented by Carrie Secrist Gallery at The Armory Show in September 2021 and was included in this as one of the exhibitions to see in a review for The New York Times by Will Heinrich.

Sarah Potter is a Tarot reader and professional witch based in NYC. Her writing about the occult is regularly featured in Cosmopolitan, Astrology.com, Bust Magazine, and other popular outlets. Her first book, The Cosmo Tarot: The Ultimate Deck and Guidebook, debuted in 2021.

Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history’s blindspots, especially for women artists considered too ‘mystical’ for the conservative art world.

​Named after af Klint, Hilma’s Ghost believes that western heteropatriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation. Following a year of lockdowns and social distancing, Hilma’s Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible. Since its inception, Hilma’s Ghost has run online workshops that have been attended by over 700 people, from all over the world. The Instagram archive also documents the stories of womxn artists. To learn more about Hilma's Ghost, check out our website or follow us on Instagram. We regularly post about our programs and profile living womxn artists working with aspects of the occult and/or spirituality.

This program is made possible with the kind support of Carrie Secrist Gallery.

Please join us on Thursday January 13, 2022, 3-4:30 pm for a Virtual Exhibition Opening Reception of Cosmic Geometries, organized by Hilma’s Ghost.'

Join the curators, artists, and EFA staff for a virtual reception and curatorial walkthrough celebrating the opening of Cosmic Geometries. RSVP.

RSVP Required for Zoom link (provided via Eventbrite)

About the Exhibition

EFA Project Space is thrilled to present Cosmic Geometries, organized by Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist collective project by Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder, and featuring a diverse, intergenerational group of artists, with work by: Natessa Amin, Yevgeniya Baras, Lisa Beck, Biren De, Grace DeGennaro, Evie Falci, Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll, Rico Gatson, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Xylor Jane, Valerie Jaudon, Laleh Khorramian, Julia Kunin, Marilyn Lerner, Anne Lindberg, Mahirwan Mamtani, Carrie Moyer, Stephen Mueller, Sky Pape, Dorothea Rockburne, A.V. Ryan, Laurel Sparks, Barbara Takenaga, Jackie Tileston and Johanna Unzueta. 

Cosmic Geometries is a group exhibition of intergenerational and intersectional artists that examines the spiritual and aesthetic functions of abstract painting and geometry in art. The artists deploy a range of painterly devices to create cosmic and transcendental visions that combine esoteric world traditions with the language of Modernism. Their motifs are inspired by sources as divergent as Islamic architecture, Buddhist mandalas, Hindu yantras, medieval Christian stained-glass windows, and quantum mechanics, rendering formal devices that range from tessellations, optical illusions, to elaborate ornamentation techniques. These artists primarily work with the language of painting, but also draw from languages and materials adapted from sculpture, installation, craft, textiles, and ceramics. Within these works lies a rich sensibility for color, shape, and compositional elements, which reveal the daring sensibilities that artists are bringing to the historically overlooked arena of the spiritual in art. These artists' practices build upon palimpsest legacies of alternative power structures that are constantly being erased.

Join us on Friday, December 17 from 6-8 PM for a closing reception for Jank Museum artists-in-residence Kamari Carter and Lamar Robillard.

RSVP to the In-Person Event at EFA Project Space (via Eventbrite) here.

About Jank Museum

Jank Museum, organized by artist, poet and curator Anaïs Duplan and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), and co-presented by EFA Project Space investigates the idea of “jank,” speculating around objects made with limited resources to meet an immediate survival need. Taking cues from Adrian Piper in her essay, “The Joy of Marginality,” Jank Museum invites artists who make work from the margins to center their own survival, persistence, and futurity. Jank Museum is a two-week residency in EFA Project Space's 2500 square foot gallery for two artists of color, each tasked with creating one piece of “jank” every day for 10 days. Artists were selected through a competitive open call, and are provided with resources and an honorarium as well as studio visits with EFA staff and affiliated curators and 24/7 access to Project Space over the duration of the residency period.

About the Artists

Kamari Carter is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.  

Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Lamar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Port Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN and Art Helix Gallery.

About the Center for Afrofuturist Studies

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) is an artist residency and programming initiative that reimagines the futures of marginalized people by creating dynamic workspaces for artists of color. Dynamic means interactive, supportive, community-engaged, rigorous, and inclusive. The CAS rethinks and challenges what an arts practice that revolves around Black futurity looks like—through long-term engagement and financial, logistical, and programmatic support. Since 2016, we have hosted residencies for 18 Black artists, writers, dancers, filmmakers, and scholars, and worked with many more to collaboratively produce exhibitions, workshops, and other programming. The CAS also maintains a growing public reading room and archive at its home base at Public Space One in Iowa City.

Join EFA Project Space Program Director Dylan Gauthier and guests for a webinar around various ways that residency programs can nurture and support the “whole artist” by addressing and broadening our approach to access, equity, inclusion, diversity, sustainability and care, inside and outside of the studio.

REGISTER for the ZOOM WEBINAR HERE

Structures of Support for the Whole Artist, 5:00pm
Eve Biddle, Jamie Blosser and Howardena Pindell, moderated by Dylan Gauthier
How can residencies support intersectional artists’ identities, needs, and expectations, beyond their professional practices? From parent artists to artists of color to disabled artists and more, how can residencies be more accessible to the “whole artist”? This panel will be a conversation between artists and residencies.

This panel is presented as part of the 2021 Rethinking Residencies Symposium co-hosted by Rethinking Residencies and the Vera List Center for Art & Politics.

Join us on Saturday, December 4 from 4-6 PM for an Open House with Jank Museum artists-in-residence Kamari Carter and Lamar Robillard.

About Jank Museum

Jank Museum, organized by artist, poet and curator Anaïs Duplan and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), and co-presented by EFA Project Space investigates the idea of “jank,” speculating around objects made with limited resources to meet an immediate survival need. Taking cues from Adrian Piper in her essay, “The Joy of Marginality,” Jank Museum invites artists who make work from the margins to center their own survival, persistence, and futurity. Jank Museum is a two-week residency in EFA Project Space's 2500 square foot gallery for two artists of color, each tasked with creating one piece of “jank” every day for 10 days. Artists were selected through a competitive open call, and are provided with resources and an honorarium as well as studio visits with EFA staff and affiliated curators and 24/7 access to Project Space over the duration of the residency period.

About the Artists

Kamari Carter is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.  

Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. Lamar’s practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity and spirituality as it relates to identity, Black material culture and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience. Inspired by various forms of literature, media, representation and history, he aims to insert his theory of second class citizenship into the canon through a lifelong exploration of the Unfavoured American experience while simultaneously providing authentic representation for Blackness with the absence of the Black body politic. Lamar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Port Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN and Art Helix Gallery.

About the Center for Afrofuturist Studies

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) is an artist residency and programming initiative that reimagines the futures of marginalized people by creating dynamic workspaces for artists of color. Dynamic means interactive, supportive, community-engaged, rigorous, and inclusive. The CAS rethinks and challenges what an arts practice that revolves around Black futurity looks like—through long-term engagement and financial, logistical, and programmatic support. Since 2016, we have hosted residencies for 18 Black artists, writers, dancers, filmmakers, and scholars, and worked with many more to collaboratively produce exhibitions, workshops, and other programming. The CAS also maintains a growing public reading room and archive at its home base at Public Space One in Iowa City.

Digital World Building _An Act of Resistance
November 19th,
5 - 7 PM EST via ZOOM

RSVP Required

Digital World Building: _An act of resistance will explore the process to reconstruct digital and 3D design into tools for community and world building URL and AFK (away from keyboard). As a group we will discuss the dichotomy of navigating social media, despite its relentless surveillance, as sites for community organizing and how this influences our abilities to reimagine, speculate and manifest alternative futures, meanwhile existing in the present. Our discussion will preface a brief introduction and collaborative work session using Blender, a free open-source 3D software.

This workshop is suitable for participants 13+ years or older. Beginner to immediate level computer and social media skills are suggested. Please download Blender at blender.org before joining the workshop. To personalize your designs during the group work session, Adobe Illustrator or a substitute software and/or website to create .svg files is highly recommended.

Suggested Focus Materials

_text**
‘I Say Tear It All Down’: Curator Legacy Russell on How ‘Glitch Feminism’ Can Be a Tool to Radically Reimagine the World
The Ambient Well by Hawa Arsala

_artist talks**
Encrypted Enclosures//Glitching Visibility: Zach Blas in Conversation with Legacy Russell
Danielle Brathwaite Shirley, kamra and Myles E Johnson \\\[Artist Talk\\\] at black beyond _origins

About the Moderator:
JAZSALYN’s (she/her/hers) work begins where fiction and reality collide. As an anti-disciplinary artist, she combines new media and community organizing practice to reimagine black futures.

As a participating Artist and Director of black beyond, a radical space for artists and activists to define alternate realities for blackness, JAZSALYN collaborates with black and non-black co-liberators to decolonize and re-indigenize social and creative practice. Through black beyond, she curates a series of workshops, artist talks, exhibitions, performances, as well as a monthly segment titled alternate realities on Dublab Radio.

Her work has been featured in CULTURED Magazine, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Huffington Post. Exhibitions and panels such as the Wheaton Biennial, Abolition Planning and Afrofuturism at Pratt Institute, black beyond _origins on New Art City and Textiles as a Second Skin at MoogFest.

JAZSALYN is a current member of the Extended Realities cohort at NEW INC in The New Museum. As well as a faculty member in the Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design, where she teaches a studio course on speculative design and techno origins. *Her preferred name is unicase and omits last name for decolonial purposes.

Support black beyond's efforts to amplify the work of underrepresented artists in their upcoming exhibition _assembly, alchemy, ascension at the Kellen Gallery in New York, NY, for Spring 2022. *All donations are tax deductible via New York Foundation for the Arts.

VISIT
black beyond _origins, an XR experience reimagining black femme futures.

FOLLOW
blackbeyond.xyz
Instagram @jazsalyn @blackbeyond_
Twitter @blackbeyond_

This program was made in congruence with Dark Data, curated by Gee Wesley with curatorial fellows Bianca Dominguez and Mae Miller, featuring American Artist, Hannah Black, Stephanie Dinkins, E. Jane, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sondra Perry which was held from September 11 - October 30, 2021 at EFA Project Space.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Dark Data presents the work of six artists who explore pervasive forms of data collection, mass-surveillance, and hypervisibility visited upon Black life through technologies of predictive policing, data-mining, algorithmic violence, and artificial intelligence. The project situates these emergent data technologies within a broader lineage of anti-Black surveillance and quantification. Dark Data highlights a host of artistic and social tactics exercised by Black practitioners to actively respond to these conditions through experimental archival strategies, inventive modes of technological encryption, and gestures of digital worldmaking.

Presented with PWRPLNT

POWRPLNT is a space where the digital arts community engages the next generation of creators. It functions as gallery space, internet lounge and an environment where people from all backgrounds may learn the skills necessary to express themselves creatively in today’s networks. We aim to make the digital world accessible, personal and more human. For more information visit: https://www.powrplnt.org/

Join us for a virtual panel discussion and walk-thru of EFA Project Space’s current exhibition Dark Data as part of “2021 Black Fine Arts Month: The Global Experience” a kick-off celebration for Black artists, performers, curators, and collectors from around the world. The panel discussion will feature Gee Wesley (Curator), Bianca Dominguez and Mae Miller (Curatorial Fellows), HC Huynh (Director, EFA Special Projects) and Dylan Gauthier (Director, EFA Project Space) and will include a virtual walk-through of the exhibition.

For more information on the entire day’s events and to RSVP, visit here.

Founded by Pigment International's Patricia Andrews Kennan in Chicago, IL, Black Fine Arts Month held every October, is a global celebration of the Black Fine Art aesthetic, an annual recognition of artists, innovators, collectors, curators, and those vested in the Black Art tradition, and an opportunity to commemorate and elevate these contributions through art programming.

Join us for the opening of Dark Data, curated by Gee Wesley, with curatorial fellows Bianca Dominguez and Mae Miller. Work by American Artist, Hannah Black, Stephanie Dinkins, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sondra Perry, and E. Jane.

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 11, 2021, 4-8 pm (mask & proof of vaccination required for entry)

Join us for a closing reception, performances, and a catalog release for BOY BOX, curated by Angela Conant, wIth work by: Jared Buckhiester, CAConrad, Deborah Czeresko, Karen Yvonne Hall, BB Kenda, Rose Nestler, Sarada Rauch, Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz, Vincent Tiley, Christopher Udemezue, Angela Washko.

Performance by Karen Yvonne Hall as "Daren" and reading by Christopher Udemezue at 7 pm.

Fundraiser to support disaster relief in Haiti organized by ragganyc.com.

RSVP and Masks Required.

Christopher Udemezue reading:

“I need to know that you will be here where he can’t find us when I knock my key” 

2021 

Christopher Udemezue

Karen Yvonne Hall Performance of two operatic pieces:

"Soy Carlos"

2020

The Artist, Karen Yvonne Hall, heard this musical piece coming out of the drain while washing dishes. Due to their auditory processing disorder, in combination with their early childhood musical upbringing, they sometimes hear everyday sounds distorted as music. For example, they could interpret the sound of a passing garbage truck as a marching band. This phenomenon happens for Karen especially when they hear the sound of running water.

"You Are A Holy Earth Surface Walker"

2020

This work is a direct response to a prompt in Peggy Robles-Alvarado's class titled "Respite, Write, and Release™ for Women in Creative Rebellion." In one session, Peggy introduced the work of Pat McCabe, who is an indigonus person from the Dine tribe of the Navajo nation. Twenty percent of the lyrics to this musical composition was inspired directly from words that Pat McCabe's tribe leader passed down to his people. The rest was inspired by Karen's near death experiences. 

For the purposes of this exhibition, masculinity is defined as a constructed and perceived set of traits as evaluated by a cis-dominated, colonized Western culture, in which masculinity is imposed from external perspectives, and translated into individual performances across the gender spectrum. BOY BOX optimistically proposes broader access to the joys and benefits of fluid, detachable masculine traits. The exhibition is not an astigmatic celebration of maleness, but rather a deconstruction of masculinity’s history of power, and a rejection of its stigma, one that has fueled racism and the marginalization of people who do not conform to binary constructions of gender. Addressing the hypocrisy of a masculine archetype that, in Western culture, is reserved for white cis-male people, this exhibition aims to complicate and bend masculinity across intersections of identity. To those ends, BOY BOX aims to carefully bring the fragility and preciousness of masculinity down to earth, catching it as it falls from its cultural pedestal. On view are artworks that address masculinity’s myriad iterations, frustrating ideas of  gender, the male sex, and toxicity.

The United States’ surge of mass killings in recent years evinces the damage wrought by the Western tradition of violence as a masculine craft. Where research into the causes of mass violence is inadequate, an observable commonality is that most perpetrators are male-identifying. Meanwhile, modern sensibilities replace and flip archaic gender roles. Heterosexual romance, for example, is the old-fashioned process of quieting hyper-masculine impulse in order to sweeten and garner interest from a prospective sexual partner. This cloak to accessorize the performance of masculinity is a forefather of what we now call consent.

Working to move outside its conventional constraints, this exhibition offers a group of artists’ observations and performances of masculinity. Their work shows that we each have not only a unique relationship with the masculine, but a right to its power, swagger and strength.

Join us for the opening of BOY BOX, curated by Angela Conant, wIth work by: Jared Buckhiester, CAConrad, Deborah Czeresko, Karen Hall, BB Kenda, Rose Nestler, Sarada Rauch, Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz, Vincent Tiley, Christopher Udemezue, Angela Washko.

4-8 pm - Opening

5 pm - Curatorial Walkthrough

7 pm - Drag castrato performance by Daren

RSVP and Masks Required.

For the purposes of this exhibition, masculinity is defined as a constructed and perceived set of traits as evaluated by a cis-dominated, colonized Western culture, in which masculinity is imposed from external perspectives, and translated into individual performances across the gender spectrum. BOY BOX optimistically proposes broader access to the joys and benefits of fluid, detachable masculine traits. The exhibition is not an astigmatic celebration of maleness, but rather a deconstruction of masculinity’s history of power, and a rejection of its stigma, one that has fueled racism and the marginalization of people who do not conform to binary constructions of gender. Addressing the hypocrisy of a masculine archetype that, in Western culture, is reserved for white cis-male people, this exhibition aims to complicate and bend masculinity across intersections of identity. To those ends, BOY BOX aims to carefully bring the fragility and preciousness of masculinity down to earth, catching it as it falls from its cultural pedestal. On view are artworks that address masculinity’s myriad iterations, frustrating ideas of  gender, the male sex, and toxicity.

The United States’ surge of mass killings in recent years evinces the damage wrought by the Western tradition of violence as a masculine craft. Where research into the causes of mass violence is inadequate, an observable commonality is that most perpetrators are male-identifying. Meanwhile, modern sensibilities replace and flip archaic gender roles. Heterosexual romance, for example, is the old-fashioned process of quieting hyper-masculine impulse in order to sweeten and garner interest from a prospective sexual partner. This cloak to accessorize the performance of masculinity is a forefather of what we now call consent.

Working to move outside its conventional constraints, this exhibition offers a group of artists’ observations and performances of masculinity. Their work shows that we each have not only a unique relationship with the masculine, but a right to its power, swagger and strength.

Join EFA Project Space, the 2020/2021 SHIFT Residents, and exhibition curator danilo machado for a closing reception and catalog release for the cohort’s end of residency exhibition, We turn.

RSVP and Masks Required:

To turn is to change position, to gain or lose a vantage point, to enter a new circumstance. In this exhibition, the artists of the 2020-2021 EFA SHIFT Residency consider many kinds of turns and many kinds of “we.” Through a range of material and forms—including video, collage, ceramic, photography, installation, and painting—the work presented conjures the “we” of specific communities and collective efforts, many made tenuous under pandemic circumstances. Indeed, an underlying “we” is the residency itself and the circumstances in which these artists and art workers inhabited studios and homes, and built relationships with each other. 

These artists negotiate the role of the individual, the archive, and of documentation through tactics of tactility, narrative, and abstraction. In doing so, they conjure larger histories of labor, colonialism, and environment, and consider alternatives to representation, binaries, and disclosure. The presentation of this exhibition is in part a consideration of the consequences of materiality, objectness, and touch after a year of the forced virtual. As pandemic, protest, and loss continue, what do we turn towards or away from? Who do we turn to for care? Where do we turn for community? While not all of the work in this exhibition is a direct address to the current context, the broader questions posed by it remain urgent. 

Curated by danilo machado.

Please join us in person at EFA Project Space to celebrate Wants & Needs!

This will be a limited capacity, timed-entry closing event for Wants & Needs. Masks required. Please see our Access Information for COVID protocols.

Reservations Required.

Wednesday, April 28 @ 7:30 PM EST – Re/orientation Roundtables Week 4: Sedimentation: Closing walkthrough, chat, and invitation for ongoing public engagement. Event will feature live captioning and ASL translation by Billy Sanders.

Register via Zoom.

Presented as part of [Move Semantics]: Rules of Unfolding, facilitated by Elæ Moss & Jeff Kasper.

The Move Semantics Lab presents a series of weekly events in conjunction with the on site exhibition at EFA Project Space. Co-hosted by the curators, these virtual events provide a guided “tour” through [MS]:RU’s central themes, in conversation with featured artists and their projects. Additional artist-led workshops and programs along these themes will be offered weekly. All events have live captioning.