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Wendy's Subway Reading Room
BAM Next Wave Art
September 14, 2017-January 28, 2018
BAM Fisher, Sharp Lower Lobby
321 Ashland Place
Brooklyn, NY 11217
bam.org/wendyssubway
#WSxBAM
Wendy’s Subway returns to BAM for the second year with a newly envisioned Reading Room. The space, as part of Next Wave Art, is located in the BAM Fisher Sharp Lobby and houses a collection of over 300 books, including titles selected by Next Wave Festival artists for their relevance to their shows on the BAM Fisher stage and their artworks on view throughout BAM’s campus this fall. Readers will also find a small collection of titles suggested for further reading on other Next Wave Festival performances happening this season.
This year, Wendy’s Subway has also invited 25 international, independent, and artist-run libraries and organizations to recommend titles from their own collections, broadly related to the field of performance. These titles expansively reflect the specific collections of each participating library or organization, and it is our hope that their involvement fosters a platform for sharing resources, references, and forms of knowledge across many publics, within a convivial and intimate reading context.
Design: Tyler Polich
Neon Design: Hailey Loman
Special thanks to Erica Ammann, Mary Gordanier, Zoe Senise, Holly Shen, Molly Silberberg, and Sixing Xu, and all the publishers who generously donated books to the Reading Room.
Photography: Object Studies. Courtesy of BAM and Wendy's Subway. -
PARTICIPATING NEXT WAVE VISUAL ARTISTS
Corey Escoto, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Andy Meerow, Hayal Pozanti, Kim Schoen, Siebren Versteeg.
PARTICIPATING NEXT WAVE FISHER ARTISTS
Germaine Acogny, Joshua Beamish, Suzanne Bocanegra, Xavier Cha, Rachel Dickstein, Bruce Guthrie and Scott Graham, John Heginbotham and Maira Kalman, Manual Cinema, Cynthia Oliver, Thaddeus Phillips, Olivier Py, Zvi Sahar and Leslie Strongwater.
PARTICIPATING LIBRARIES AND ORGANIZATIONS
Aeromoto (Mexico City); Aleph B° (Beirut); Ashkal Alwan (Beirut); AND (London); at land’s edge (Los Angeles); Beta-Local (Puerto Rico); Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (New York); CC Catálogo Contemporáneo (Mexico City and other locations); Chimurenga Library (Cape Town); dispersed holdings (New York); Feminist Library on Wheels (F.L.O.W.) at the Women’s Center for Creative Work (Los Angeles); Free Black Women’s Library (New York); Fundación Alumnos47 (Mexico City); Interference Archive (Brooklyn); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (Los Angeles); P A L / Pilipinx American Library (Queens); Parmer (Brooklyn); Press Press (Baltimore); Provisions Library: A Project for Social Change (Fairfax and Washington D.C.); Reanimation Library (Queens); The Surplus Library on Affect and Economic Exchange (Multiple Locations); Temporary Services (Chicago); Vancouver Women’s Library (Vancouver); Ulises (Philadelphia); Yale Union (Portland) -
Public Programs
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UPCOMING
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Tuesday, December 19th, 7pm
Evening hosted by the Center for Experimental Lectures
Featuring Danielle Dean, Millie Kapp and Noah Furman
Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose works use fiction and the aesthetics of advertisement to engage and historicize the media and cultural processes that colonize the mind and body. Drawing on her multinational background—born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, and brought up in a suburb of London—her work explores technology, architecture, marketing techniques, and the media as tools of subjection and oppression. Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include Focus: Danielle Dean at the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), a phone, a shoe, a castle, in 2017 and Hexafluorosilicic in 2015 at Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). Her work has also been included in the exhibitions including She at SFMOMA Open Space (San Francisco), From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word at Centre D’Art Contemporain Genève (Geneva), In Practice: Material Deviance at Sculpture Center (New York), Experimental People at High Line Art (New York), Lagos Live at the Goethe Institut Nigeria (Lagos), and Made in L.A. 2014 at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).
Millie Kapp is a New York-based performing artist. She graduated with a Masters in Performance Studies from NYU and completed her undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kapp has presented her performance work in Oakland, Maine, Toronto, Philadelphia, Montreal, Minneapolis, Chicago and New York. She's curated and programmed performance in New York City and was previously adjunct faculty at Stony Brook University.
Noah Furman is an artist and teacher living in Jersey City. He finished a master in fine arts at Hunter College in 2015. He makes work in painting, sculpture and performance. Millie Kapp and Noah Furman have collaborated on numerous pieces since 2008.
The Center for Experimental Lectures is an artist's project that provides a platform to engage with the public lecture as a form. Started by Gordon Hall and co-organized by Joseph Lubitz, the Center for Experimental Lectures commissions new lecture performances with the aim of providing an occasion for participants to develop their individual projects while exploring the possibilities of the lecture as a work in itself. The Center for Experimental Lectures additionally maintains an archive of video documentation and transcriptions, ensuring that the content created in this project circulates after the live event. Since 2011, the Center for Experimental Lectures has commissioned thirty-three new lecture performances at venues including Recess, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Interstate Projects, New York; The Shandaken Project at Storm King, New Windsor, NY; and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. http://www.experimentallectures.org/ -
PAST
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Tuesday, September 19th, 7pm
Reading Room Opening Reception and Reading hosted by Adult Contemporary
Featuring Alex Fialho with Melissa Levin, Emily Johnson, and Adam Radakovich
Alex Fialho is a Brooklyn-based curator and arts writer. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and Programs Director at Visual AIDS, where he facilitates art projects and conversations around both the history and immediacy of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Melissa Levin is currently Vice President, Artists, Estates and Foundations, Art Agency, Partners and recent former Vice President of Cultural Programs at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Together, Fialho and Levin co-manage The Michael Richards Estate and have co-curated two exhibitions of the work of Michael Richards (1963-2001) in NYC: Michael Richards: Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, on view at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art from September 8–November 17, 2017, and Michael Richards: Winged, on view in summer 2016 at LMCC's Arts Center at Governors Island, and referred to by Holland Cotter in The New York Times as "the most moving show I've seen this summer." For LMCC, Fialho and Levin's additional co-curatorial credits include the Creative Insider's Guide to Lower Manhattan; (Counter)Public Art, Intervention & Performance in Lower Manhattan from 1978-1993; and Trisha Brown: Embodied Practice and Site-Specificity.
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Originally from Alaska, she is of Yup’ik decent and is based in New York City. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within, through, and into a space and environment—relating to place via land, history, and role in community. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Johnson is the recipient of a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) and a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award. Her work is supported by Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Creative Capital, MAP Fund, a Joyce Award, the McKnight Foundation, and The Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. Johnson was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota 2013–2014 and an inaugural 2014 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency. Johnson’s written work has been published and commissioned by Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the recently published compilation, Imagined Theaters (Routledge). Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars premieres in Lenapehoking (NYC) with PS122 on Randall's Island and will tour to Chicago, San Francisco, and Narrm (Melbourne, Australia).
Adam Radakovich is an interdisciplinary artist and founding member of the House Of LaDosha. Specializing in performance, video, illustration, and fashion design, their work focuses on the obscure, notions of wicked beauty, and created and actual nostalgia. Always trying to push the boundaries of what is/was and can be, Adam is finding a space for himself.
Adult Contemporary is a mobile reading and performance series founded in 2013 by Katherine Brewer Ball and Svetlana Kitto. We ask artists, academics, performers, and writers to "read" in whatever way they see fit; to play off each other; to self-determine; to use the platform to experiment in form; to give us words, movements, sounds or textures. Adult Contemporary is a salon-style site of experimentation, genre collapse and extra-ordinary conversation. Our events are always free and open to the public. This September will mark the launch of Adult Contemporary 01, a journal of art and literature. https://www.adultcontemporarymag.com -
Tuesday, November 14th, 7pm
Evening hosted by Danspace Project
Featuring Ni'Ja Whitson, Mariana Valencia, and Yvonne Rainer
Los Angeles and New York based, award-winning interdisciplinary gender queer artist, Bessie-nominated performer, and writer, Ni’Ja Whitson (MFA) has been referred to as “majestic” and “powerful” by the New York Times and noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. Whitson engages a nexus of postmodern and African Diasporic performance practices, intersecting gender, sexuality, race, and spirit. Recent awards include residencies and fellowships with Hedgebrook, LMCC Process Space, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and the Bogliasco Study Center in Italy. They are an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside and is the founder/artistic director of The NWA Project.
Mariana Valencia is a choreographer who has held residencies at Chez Bushwick, NYLA, ISSUE Project Room, and BAX. Her work has received support from the FCA Emergency Grant, CPR Andrew W Mellon AIR Program, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and the Jerome Travel and Study Grant. Collaborations include projects with Kim Brandt, robbinschilds, MPA, Elizabeth Orr, AK Burns, Kate Brandt, Jules Gimbrone, No Total, Crit Group, and Critical Correspondence. www.marianavalencia.work
Yvonne Rainer, co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, is a choreographer and filmmaker. Her dances and films have been shown worldwide. A memoir – Feelings Are Facts: a Life – was published by MIT Press in 2006. A selection of her poetry was published in 2011 by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited.
Danspace Project presents new work in dance, supports a diverse range of choreographers in developing their work, encourages experimentation, and connects artists to audiences.
For 40+ years, Danspace Project has supported a vital community of contemporary dance artists in an environment unlike any other in the United States. Located in the historic St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Danspace shares its facility with the Church, The Poetry Project, and New York Theatre Ballet. Danspace Project’s Commissioning Initiative has commissioned over 520 new works since its inception in 1994.
Danspace Project’s Choreographic Center Without Walls (CW²) provides context for audiences and increased support for artists. Public programs (including Danspace Presents, Platforms, Food for Thought, DraftWork), Commissioning Initiative, residencies, guest artist curators, and contextualizing activities and materials are core components of CW² offering a responsive framework for artists’ works. Since 2010, Danspace Project has produced eleven Platforms, published eleven print catalogues and five e-books, launched the Conversations Without Walls discussion series, and explored models for public discourse and residencies. danspaceproject.org. -
Tuesday, November 28th, 7pm
Twisting Tongues: Bilingual Poetry
Evening hosted by the Asian American Writers' Workshop
Featuring Steven Alvarez, Jen Hyde, and Sahar Muradi
Writing in Dari, Spanish, Nahuatl, Chinese, and English, the poets of Twisting Tongues see translation as a way to interrogate the relationship between English and histories of migration and diaspora. Come see poets Jen Hyde, Steven Alvarez, and Sahar Muradi read their innovative multilingual poetry that embraces errant, in-between, generative translation.
Steven Alvarez is the author of The Codex Mojaodicus, winner of the 2016 Fence Modern Poets Prize. The Codex Mojaodicus is a work of “Neo-Baroque Xianco experimentalism” written in English, Spanish, and Nahautl that moves through the colonization of the Americas to twenty-first century borderlands. He has also authored the novels in verse The Pocho Codex (2011) and The Xicano Genome (2013), both published by Editorial Paroxismo, and the chapbooks, Tonalamatl, El Segundo’s Dream Notes (2017, Letter Press), Un/documented, Kentucky (2016, winner of the Rusty Toque Chapbook Prize), and Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus (2014, winner of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Poetry Prize). Born and raised in southern Arizona, he currently lives in New York where he is the Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University.
Jen Hyde’s debut collection Hua Shi Hua (华画诗) Drawings & Poems from China (Ahsahta Press, 2017) uses the image of the yellow crane to interpose English translations of classical Chinese poetry with her experience of the contemporary Shanghai skyline. She writes, “When I finished the performance, I realized that perhaps I am not so much an illiterate writer, but one who is unable to understand both my first language and the language of my heritage, and that this is an identity that requires lifelong mining.” Kimiko Hahn hailed the collection, “[A] lyrical quest for heritage, for language, and for poetry itself.” Jen lives in Brooklyn, where she is Heart Valve Ambassador for The American Heart Association, the Assistant Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, and a collaborative chapbook publisher for No Dear/Small Anchor. Read her poems in AAWW’s The Margins.
Afghan American poet Sahar Muradi’s first chapbook, [G A T E S] (Black Lawrence Press) examines intimacy, time, and the unknown. Rajiv Mohabir says that “Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father’s illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited.” Sahar is a writer, performer, and educator born in Afghanistan and raised in the U.S. She is the co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) and co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association. Check out Sahar’s lyrical conversation with Zohra Saed in Open City.
Established in 1991, AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans. -
Workshops
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PAST
Friday, September 15th, 2-4pm
Black Feminist Praxis
Led by Olaronke (Founder, The Free Black Women's Library)
Capacity: 20 participants
Register here.
All are welcome to this interactive workshop led by Olaronke that offers an opportunity to examine rituals, actions, and sacred practices rooted in Black feminist thought. We will look at the history and ongoing themes of this movement, and examine it as a spiritual belief system that is rooted in fairness, compassion, and truth. Black feminism is not just a political or social movement, it offers a deep, complex, and inclusive framework that can be used to shape our goals and ideas around personal growth, social justice, art-making, and community building. It confronts patriarchy, violence, capitalism, anti-Blackness, and so much more.
In this session we will write and reflect on the teachings and lives of radical Black feminist authors, organizers, and activists like Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, June Jordan, bell hooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler. Please bring an open mind, a journal/notebook and your favorite pen or pencil.
Olaronke is a Brooklyn-born Nigerian installation artist, cultural worker, Black Feminist/Womanist scholar, social coordinator, mama, yoga teacher and world traveling with. She is also an award winning set decorator and scenic artist for Film and TV, yoga teacher. In 2015 she started The Free Black Women’s Library, a mobile library that features a collection of 800 books written by Black women as well as performances, film screenings, writing workshops and critical conversations. -
Saturday, October 28th, 2-4pm
Finding the Fleshy Idea
Led by Alexandra Watson (Executive Editor, Apogee)
Capacity: 15 participants
Register here.
In a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose, author Richard Rodriguez talks about essay writing as an attempt to find the "fleshy idea," the one that will drive the piece and give it coherence. Apogee's Executive Editor will lead a workshop on revision as an attempt to locate and develop the fleshy idea in a piece--the key concept that readers can sink their teeth into; the "aboutness" of the piece. We will apply these revision strategies to prose (fiction and nonfiction) produced in the workshop itself, first generating raw material based on a series of prompts, then practicing (with the help of fellow participants) locating the fruitful concept, then building description and narrative around that concept.
Apogee is a journal of literature and art that engages with identity politics, including but not limited to: race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and intersectional identities. We are a biannual print publication featuring fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. Our goals are twofold: to publish fresh work that interrogates the status quo, and to provide a platform for underrepresented voices, prioritizing artists and writers of color.
Alexandra Watson is a writer, editor, and teacher from New York. She teaches writing at Barnard College and at the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Redivider, PANK, The James Franco Review, Apogee, and The Huffington Post. She’s a graduate of Brown University and Columbia’s School of the Arts. -
Saturday, November 18, 4-6pm
Sense/Memory
Led by Stephanie Hayes and Emily Reilly (Founders, HORSE)
Capacity: 15 participants.
Register here.
Multidisciplinary performance makers, Stephanie Hayes and Emily Reilly, co-founders of HORSE, will lead a workshop that explores methods for generating text through movement and sense memory. Their practice is grounded in a concept they describe as "inheriting," a laboratory structure they have spent years developing through an ongoing series of workshops with artists from all fields.
You do not need to be an experienced mover to participate but please wear clothing you feel comfortable moving in.
HORSE founded by Swedish performer and writer Stephanie Hayes and British dramaturg and performer Emily Reilly, seeks theatrical ways of letting our inner noise leak out; a theater of fragments that drolly illuminates life’s absurdities by relating the grand and monumental to the tiny and banal. Invested in memory, discomfort, and confusion, HORSE works are deeply collaborative, merging dance, theater and visual art in an attempt to create formally rigorous explorations of the paradoxes of life. -
Saturday, December 9th, 2-4pm
Workshop led by Kerry Downey, Nikita Gale, Melanie Hoff, and Dorothy R. Howard
Organized by Amanda Parmer (PARMER)
Capacity: 20 participants
Register here.
How do we, as desiring machines, desire to be machines? We are using this discursive workshop to examine the question of reproductive labor in a digital age. We aren’t talking about reproduction in the sense of procreation but rather how we reproduce and recharge our cultural, affective and material needs. More simply put, how do we reproduce one another and ourselves differently as we spend increasing amounts of time in dialog with and through digital interfaces? How are the erotic feedback loops that direct us and co-construct our desires moving from interpersonal responses to exchanges between people and objects.
In this, how are technological languages changing our corporeal reactions to words and images through increased uses of digital text (emojis, etc)? Maybe these communicative forms expand our capacity for recognition and possibly they narrow our ability to produce difference. In both cases the intimacy we experience with machines has shifted. This shift moves from the co-construction of bodies and inanimate material to machines responding to our desire for intimacy with a predetermined set of answers masquerading as free choice.
Kerry Downey, Nikita Gale, Melanie Hoff and Dorothy R. Howard each bring a distinct perspective and praxis that relates to these questions. In conversation with the group attending we’ll stake out four clear yet interrelated positions that together oppose an oversimplifying answer to how machines are forming us. The workshop aims to re-invigorate the stakes of this question to imagine how our digital interfaces offer new forms of recognition that excite, rather than flatten culture and they may or may not have the capacity to help us resist objectification. Participants in the workshop will engage in a collective project to document the event as a webzine.Kerry Downey (b.1979, Ft. Lauderdale) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City. Downey recently had a solo show at CAVE in Detroit and a two-person shows at Knockdown Center and 20|20 Gallery in New York City. They have also exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Hessel Museum at Bard College, and Taylor Macklin in Zurich. In 2015, Downey was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Artist-in-residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SHIFT at the EFA Project Space, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, and the Vermont Studio Center. Downey participated in the Queer/Art/Mentorship program in 2013. They are currently in residence at Triangle Arts Association in Brooklyn. Downey holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College.
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She has a BA in Anthropology from Yale University and completed an MFA in New Genres from UCLA in 2016. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally in London and Paris. Gale's work has been featured and reviewed in various publications including Artforum, Art Papers, Art21 Magazine, and The New York Times. In 2016, she was awarded UCLA's Toby Devan Lewis Award, and in 2017, she was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Her work is currently on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem's latest group exhibition Fictions through January 7th, 2018.
Melanie Hoff is an artist and researcher who uses computation to play with systems that organize society as they scale from interpersonal exchange to state governance. Her work investigates social conventions, political rhetoric, and the ways in which economies of behavior reveal distributions of power. She believes in engaging technological objects as cultural artifacts and installation that moves away from art contexts and towards the processes of everyday life. Hoff has worked as a machinist, artist, and is presently an adjunct professor of interaction design at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Dorothy R. Howard (b. 1991, Yakima, WA) is a writer, and current PhD student at UC San Diego, where she is part of the Feminist Labor Lab. She holds a BA in History from Reed College. Her primary fields of inquiry include: knowledge production, digital labor, human-computer interaction, feminist epistemologies, syndicalism, and archival theory. Dorothy has participated in talks, panels, and workshops Rutgers University, Columbia University, UCLA School of Design Media Arts, The Piet Zwart Institute, Wikimania London, Wikimania Mexico, Theorizing the Web, and the Northwest Film Forum. Dorothy is the founding editor of the Arachne webzine [arachne.cc] in collaboration with André Ferracci.The central question the Arachne webzine takes up is the relationship of mythology to the internet, using the myth of the spider as a starting point.
Parmer is a curatorial platform for exhibiting, programming and writing based in New York that focuses on queer and feminist strategies and post-colonial analysis. The program has been hosted by Sunview Luncheonette, Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2015 and at a private residence in Bedford Stuyvesant in 2014. Participants and collaborators include: Park McArthur, Nikita Gale, Tom Ackers and Melanie Gilligan, Malin Arnell and Pablo Zuleta Zahr, Jessica Segall, Jeanine Oleson, Chelsea Knight, Amy Balkin, Marisa Williamson, João Enxuto and Erica Love, Silvia Federici, Premilla Nadasen, Aliza Shvartz, Arlen Austin, Dorothy Howard, Sara Eliassen, Meredyth Sparks, Thomas Love, Cassandra Guan, Liz Linden and Jen Kennedy amongst others.
Documentation published in collaboration with Arachne. http://arachne.cc/
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