Membership

Studio Visit with Rachel Libeskind

June 13, 2017

Rachel Libeskind is a New York-based artist. She has shown her work in exhibitions in Paris, London, Milan, Rome, Miami and New York, among other cities internationally. She is a multi-disciplinary artist, often merging installation and performance with her studio practice. Her work deals with issues of identity, the transmutations of past histories and the collection and curation of images and found and conjured objects.

Mitra Khorasheh is a Canadian curator, writer and educator based in New York. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions at galleries, institutions, art fairs, not-for-profits, as well as large-scale public art exhibitions (The Water Tank Project) in the United States and internationally. Her curatorial work has mainly focused on site-specific and performative practices, with an emphasis on the body in performance, painting and other time based media. Her most recent curatorial endeavor was a site-specific installation and performance by artists ULAY and JAŠA, marking ULAY’s first New York performance in 30 years.>

Studio Visit with Ryan and Trevor Oakes

May 18, 2017

Ryan and Trevor Oakes (New York, NY) are twin brothers who have been engaged in a conversation about the nuances of vision since they were children. They explored their mutual fascination with vision throughout grade school and during college at Cooper Union’s School of Art in New York City. Since graduating in 2004, they’ve continued their dialogue with their jointly built artworks addressing human vision, light, perception, and the experience of space and depth. oakesoakes.com

With curator and Watermill Byrd Anastasiya Siro, we will spend an evening with the Oakes, learning about their practice and recent work. The evening will be composed of three parts: a short portrait sitting for one Byrd, a screening of Emmy Award winning filmmaker Robert Jason’s 17 minute short documenting the brother’s drawing of The Palazzo Strozzi in Florence​, and a mash-up of the twins’ two recent exhibitions at MASS MoCA and Stony Brook’s Simons Center, which have just recently returned to their studio and will be re-installed throughout their studio space.

Sponsored by Morris Kitchen and VDKA 6100.

Private Tour of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair with Bansie Vasvani

May 5, 2017

With biannual editions in London and New York, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair is the leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Drawing reference to the fifty-four countries that constitute the African continent, 1:54 is a sustainable and dynamic platform that is engaged in contemporary dialogue and exchange.

The 2017 New York edition will welcome 19 galleries hailing from Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, France, Ghana, Italy, Kenya, Morocco, the UK, the US and South Africa, collectively exhibiting the work of more than 60 contemporary artists of emerging and established profile. 1:54 aims to welcome a global mix of galleries that are dedicated to pioneering and supporting African art and artists from across the world.

Bansie Vasvani is a curator and art critic with a focus on Asian and other non-Western art practices. She investigates contemporary art that mines issues of cultural identity, politics, immigration, and the commingling of varied cultural influences. Bansie travels frequently to biennales all over the world to observe new art and write critically. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, ArtAsiaPacific, New York Observer, Art Review Asia, Artnet news, Art21 Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Daily Serving, Aesthetica Magazine, and Modern Art Asia amongst many other publications.

Studio Visit with Nir Hod

April 25, 2017

Sexual confusion, mistaken identity, decadence, and lost innocence are among the themes Nir Hod confronts in his work, motifs that animated his earlier production of poetry, music, sculpture, and photographs and imbue his recent “Genius” (2008-2011) paintings. A stylistic mash-up of Old Master portraiture and lowbrow pomp, Hod’s “Genius” paintings portray children, each holding a cigarette and a pose of affected seriousness. In these portraits Hod deliberately confuses the visual cues associated with childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, high art and kitsch.

April 25, 2017

Curated by Meredith Monk: Jim Jarmusch & Phil Kline

April 5, 2017.

Composer Phil Kline, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner, pianist Kathleen Supové, and percussionist David Cossin perform past, present, and future work, including music from Kline’s upcoming album and two theater works-in-progress, “I Am Joan Crawford” and “Tesla.” The program will feature Horner singing two songs and an aria from a work-in-progress, Supové performing a solo piano piece, Kline and Cossin playing a section from a work-in-progress, and Kline and Jarmusch performing feedback improvisation over a composed bed played on 24 boomboxes, framed by projections of footage of NYC shot by Thomas Edison.

About the Series: Curated by Meredith Monk features performers selected by Monk who are following his or her own path, asking questions, finding places that fall between the cracks of genres or categories.

Studio Visit with Sarah Meyohas

February 24, 2017.

In her work across media, Sarah Meyohas (French-American, born 1991) uses networks of information, power, value, and communication. Most spaces are shaped by the flow of desire through matrices of thought; this is the site of her work.

Her 2015 cryptocurrency Bitchcoin and recent Stock Performance at 303 Gallery in New York have been featured inThe New York Times, Time Magazine, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Artspace, and The Atlantic, and she has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. She recently been selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Meyohas holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School, and in 2015 received an M.F.A. from Yale University. Her home in New York is her eponymously named gallery.

Viewpoints @ 29th Street

February 28, 2017

The Watermill Center kicks off its 2017 Viewpoints @ 29^th Street conversation series with German-born filmmaker, producer and screenwriter Katharina Otto-Bernstein, moderated by Annette Insdorf, author and Professor of Film at Columbia University. Otto-Bernstein will discuss her acclaimed HBO documentary  Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures  as well as Absolute Wilson – her intimate documentary on The Watermill Center ‘s founder and Artistic Director Robert Wilson.

Everything Alright @ New York Live Arts

Presented at New York Live Arts. February 3, 2017 @ 6:00pm

Created by director and designer Carlos Soto, Everything, Alright follows the dissolution of a group faced with the intrusion of a visitor. The piece concerns itself with those mechanisms that define community by identifying the other. Informed by the threatening foreignness of post-war science fiction, the piece approaches a poetics of the moving body and its opposition to language; broaching the unspeakable: absence, solitude, the monstrous, anger, horror and pleasure. Viewed from shifting angles, once-affectionate gestures become aggressive; simultaneously reconstructing a traumatic event and staging a fantasy.