Latest news with #PS122
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
PS21, a Hub for Forward-Looking Art Upstate, Names a New Director
PS21, a newly prominent center for contemporary performance in Chatham, N.Y., has a new artistic and executive director, it announced on Thursday. Vallejo Gantner has already stepped into the role. Gantner comes to the position from a long career in arts administration, including leading the similarly named but unconnected East Village theater PS122 (now Performance Space New York) from 2005 to 2017. 'I'm looking forward to maintaining a trajectory of seeking out work by the most exciting artists in the world and demonstrating what can be done outside of the usual urban artistic centers,' Vallejo said in an interview. Founded in 2006 by the local philanthropist and conservationist Judy Grunberg, PS21 presented shows in a tent on its 100-acre site until 2018, when it opened a state-of-the-art proscenium stage with roofed open-air seating. (It can also be converted to a black box theater.) The next year, just before Grunberg died, the center hired its first artistic and executive director, Elena Siyanko, who quickly established PS21 as an internationally recognized destination for new music, experimental dance, circus arts and genre-blurring performance. The current season — which starts on May 30 with the Hatched Ensemble, led by the South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza — was organized by Siyanko, who left at the end of last year to work on projects like Down to Earth, a new multidisciplinary festival in New York City. But Vallejo said he planned to introduce new programming as early as the winter. 'I want to think about what we can do when it's dark and cold and local businesses are suffering,' he said. 'We're going to turn that bug into a feature and build out programs that speak to local audiences.' In addition to taking better advantage of the center's grounds and looking more deeply into its ecology and Indigenous history, Vallejo's vision for the future of PS21 is centered on that kind of audience expansion. 'We're going to increase the quantity of work that is engaged with long-term, multigenerational local residents and communities that the venue might not have served,' he said. 'This is a moment, politically and culturally, when we need to be going outside of our comfort zones and trying to speak with people who might not necessarily think like us.' He cited Siyanko's practice of requiring all artists to engage in community workshops as a good start. The arts are under threat, he said, citing the cost of urban real estate and the changing priorities of institutional funders and the federal government, as well as what he called 'a crisis of relevance.' In facing these challenges, PS21 has some advantages, including access to a different donor base and grants earmarked for rural communities. But Vallejo also noted a difference in attitude among local donors and arts lovers. 'In the city,' he said, 'the arts are often taken for granted, but I don't think that complacency exists up here. You can make a difference in Chatham.' Siyanko agreed, though her next project is focused on New York City. The Down to Earth Festival, debuting in September, will bring performances to the stages of the City University of New York and to city parks. 'The need for the festival is really obvious,' she said in an interview. 'In the New York performing arts scene, there is a glut of expensive new real estate, from the Shed to the Perelman Arts Center, with overpaid executives and tickets so expensive that the majority of New Yorkers can't afford to go.' To counter these trends, the Down to Earth performances will be free. And by presenting on CUNY stages and in parks 'without the extravagant resources of destination ZIP codes,' she said, the festival seeks to meet new audiences in their own spaces. This is an idea that Siyanko first tried at PS21, bringing events to Crellin Park in Chatham. When Amoukanama Circus gave a free performance there in 2023, 800 attended. 'The people who came to Crellin Park simply were not the same who used to come to PS21,' she said. Siyanko and Down to Earth's co-director, Frank Hentschker, the longtime executive director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center, are relying mainly on private donors — a safer bet, Siyanko said, at a time when federal arts funding may not be reliable. (During Siyanko's tenure at PS21, she greatly expanded the donor base and grew the organization's board from a few of the founder's friends to a formidable collection of philanthropists and artists.) Along with an edition of Prelude, the Segal Center's annual experimental theater festival, the inaugural season of Down to Earth will include the tightrope walker Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga, whose performances rope in the public; acrobats from Senegal's only circus troupe; a British installation opera sung by New York's Master Voices in Green-Wood Cemetery; local flex dancers; and an Italian work that makes music from jump roping. 'New York feels more atomized than ever,' Siyanko said. 'We hope that this kind of creation in public spaces will help bring people together.'
The Guardian
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The female gaze interested me more': the radical vision of Dona Ann McAdams
For photographer Dona Ann McAdams, the personal is political. She's captured her community's history from the gay liberation movement and the performance art scene of the 1980s and 90s to the many intellectual and artistic individuals she met throughout the decades. Black Box brings together these striking historical images, taken between 1974 and 2024, with personal reflections that read like prose poems. Black Box: A Photographic Memoir is published by Saint Lucy Books. All quotes by McAdams Over the decades McAdams has brought photography into small, underserved communities, everywhere from the South Bronx to southern Appalachia, empowering people in adult homes, shelters, mountain towns and horse tracks to take and make their own photographs Since 1975 McAdams has used a Leica M2 to witness and shape the world around her. She once called herself a 'collage artist who works with time and light' and her dedication to analogue photography is matched by her commitment to community 'Every year for Pride we met in front of [the studio space] PS122 and wandered up Fifth Avenue. We had no particular destination, just the chance to celebrate who we were and what we believed in. But that year there was a profound shift in the parade. It seemed that corporate America had decided to cash in on all things gay and everyone was part of some commodified group. We all noticed it. The labels. At one point Lori said: 'Why can't we all just be generic queers?' She grabbed a paper flyer from her pocket and drew the sign. It happened that quickly: Generic Queer' 'Men looked at us. And when they looked at us we were supposed to look away or down. Those were the rules. Pretend they weren't looking, lower your eyes, let their gaze run over you. Don't look back. But I couldn't help myself, I always looked back. Straight in their eye until they did or said something stupid like: 'What are you looking at?' or 'Who the fuck do you think you are?' Often they just looked away. People would say: 'Don't do that!' or 'You clean up nice,' or 'You should wear dresses more often'' 'I wanted to be invisible, free to move around, unseen. Free to do the looking. As long as I can remember, I was fascinated by how women presented themselves in public. The dresses and makeup and all the women stuff I didn't understand – how people looked at them and they looked away. Everyone knew about the male gaze, but the female gaze interested me more. Women looked at women all the time. And not just a certain kind of woman, but all kinds of women. Every one of them. I photograph women because I love them and happen to be one' 'I drove across the country with Yvonne and Lesley to photograph nuclear power plants. I had an idea, and learned to juggle for a photograph I wanted to make in front of a nuke. It would have something to do with human error and balance, juggling our genes. We'd planned our outfits in advance. I gave the prepared camera to Yvonne's father, and cued him. The light was perfect that winter afternoon. Coastal Florida light. Yvonne's on the left. Lesley's on the right. I'm the one in the middle' 'You'd see him all the time in the early 1990s at Planned Parenthood or pro-choice rallies, with a pocket full of pink foetuses – plastic, thumb-sized – handing them out to whoever would take them, though no-one did. I knew his name but didn't want to ever say it. He surfaced again with gusto during the Trump years, with his MAGA hats and creepy theatrics, which finally landed him in hot water. On 18 December 2022, the Vatican finally defrocked him for 'persistent disobedience' and 'blasphemy.' I can finally say his name now. I choose not to' 'Somehow this image got on Facebook as a meme, cropped to better feature the two little stars in the Plaza Real [now Plaza Mayor] in Madrid, skirts blowing up like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. I always thought it was cheesy, but others did not. It's my most recognised photograph, not because of me, but because of its life in an alternate universe. Sometimes people send it to me in its various forms and say: 'You should sue!' Sue who? I really don't mind its popularity. I kind of like it. If only they would just give me a photo credit' In the afterword to Black Box, Joanna Howard writes: 'McAdams is famous for her uncanny ability to be at the right place at the right time to document resistance, protest and empowered agency across four or five decades of American culture' 'People were dying of Aids and Bush was doing nothing about it. I needed perspective, height, to look down on the protest coffins. I shimmied up a lamp-post, the way we did in high school gym with the rope. A man in the crowd holding a makeshift coffin looked up at me and said: 'Be careful'. I later learned the man was Assotto Saint, The Haitian-born performer, editor, poet and Aids activist. I wanted to send him a print of the photo, but I found out that he died of Aids in 1994. He was 36 years old' Poet and writer Eileen Myles says: 'I feel wonder, sadness, delight, awe, tenderness, envy, to name a few of the ways I am meeting up with Dona Ann McAdams' astonishingly rich and utopian army of small moments alongside her elegant and swift kind of poem-notes that muse alongside these photographs. Speaking of eyes, I can't over-state my gratitude for Dona Ann McAdams. She's really got a pair.' An accompanying exhibition will open at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York on 17 April 2025
