Armory News

Park Avenue Armory Will Host ‘Illinoise’ and ‘Indra’s Net’ in 2024

November 16, 2023 - "The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2024 season on Thursday, including the New York City arrival of 'Illinoise,' a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album and staged by Justin Peck, and the North American premiere of 'Indra’s Net,' an immersive installation performance inspired by a Buddhist story and created by the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk...In addition to those performances, the Armory’s upcoming season includes: the world premiere of 'Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,' from the choreographer Kyle Abraham, with digital design by Cao Yuxi and a score composed and performed live by yMusic; the North American premiere of 'R.O.S.E,' a homage to club culture by the choreographer Sharon Eyal that is directed by Gai Behar and Caius Pawson; 'Shall We Gather at the River,' a musical call to climate action that weaves together Bach cantatas and Black American spirituals. It will be staged by the director Peter Sellars and performed by the Oxford Bach Soloists and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street." - Christopher Kuo, The New York Times

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Review: A Soprano’s Recital Captures Her Brilliant Sincerity

September 12, 2023 - "The Board of Officers Room at the Armory, one of the most intimate and ideal spaces for vocal recitals." - Joshua Barone, The New York Times

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Park Avenue Armory’s Presidentship Named By Adam R. Flatto

January 11, 2023 - Park Avenue Armory announced today the naming of the institution’s presidency position of President and Executive Producer, made possible by a generous donation from Board of Directors Co-Chair Adam R. Flatto.

This major gift honors the growth and success of the Armory as a cultural institution supporting unconventional work by world class artists that cannot be mounted elsewhere in New York. It also honors the contribution of Rebecca Robertson, the founding President and Executive Producer since 2006. Flatto has been a strategic partner and champion of the organization since the early years of the institution’s founding. He joined the Board of Directors in 2007, and joined Elihu Rose as Co-Chair in 2013. Since 2019, Flatto has served as the Co-Chair of the Board with Amanda Riegel.

In recognition of this generous gift—$1-million, which will provide important support for the Armory’s general operating expenses over five years—the role of President has been renamed the Adam R. Flatto President for that period.

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10 of Alicia Keys’s favorite spots in New York City

December 5, 2022 - “The Armory is a really special place. I saw a Nick Cave exhibit there and that was really cool. It’s very interactive. The way that the exhibits are put on here is supposed to really break the norm of how shows are put on. Every time something is going on there, you’ll have an experience that’s special. The atmosphere is inviting but very artistic and beautiful. The place is pretty big. I can go here with my homegirls, my husband, my mother—there’s definitely something for everyone.” - Alicia Keys, Time Out New York

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A New York armory from the Gilded Age is a haven for the cutting edge

July 8, 2022 - “A New York armory from the Gilded Age is a haven for the cutting edge…. the Park Avenue Armory is a magnet for the arts on a grand scale...a new fortress for battalions of creative minds...[a success] in that most hard-won of missions: planting a vital new flag in New York City’s teeming landscape of the arts” - Peter Marks, The Washington Post

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‘Hamlet’ Off Broadway Review: Alex Lawther Leads a Brilliant Modern Take on the Bard

June 29, 2022 - “engaging and often revelatory...striking...a top notch ensemble...Get thee to the Armory!" - Thom Geier, The Wrap

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Best Dance of 2020

December 1, 2020 - “Newly relevant: Bill T. Jones
This choreographer, who lived through the AIDS crisis, never left the performance world, but his artistic voice is more potent than ever. After 'Deep Blue Sea,' his ambitious production for the Park Avenue Armory was canceled because of the pandemic, he told his company, 'You will be able to survive, but life will change.' He knows that firsthand. His latest ventures — 'Afterwardness,' a socially distanced work culled from archival repertory, and 'Our Labyrinth,' a video collaboration with Lee Mingwei — have demonstrated an unflinching look at the world, both as it was and as it is now.” - Gia Kourlas, The New York Times

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Running Live Dance Drills at the Armory

October 22, 2020 - “Other volunteers and I weren’t merely pretending to be audience members at a live performance. The experience was real, a feast after famine – and a taste of what going to the theater could be like in coming months.”
“The music is live and…elegiac, the dancing virtuosic and mostly abstract flecked with gestures of vulnerability, pain and anger…you confront the trauma of recent months.”
“These projects are a ‘march into the unknown,’ Ms. Robertson said. ‘We could fall off a cliff, but going forward is better than sitting with your hands in your lap and no artists working and nothing to tell your donors. When I go into that room and see artists at full tilt, it makes me cry.’”
“When [Bill T.] Jones learned what was meant by ‘socially distanced,’ he was skeptical. Yet with every day of rehearsal, he became more convinced. He quoted Stravinsky: ‘the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself.’”
“The audience…had to be shepherded out of the building, one by one, like well-behaved children in a fire drill. That’s the kind of choreography that will be most crucial if such events are to become regular again.”
“Social dancing is the antidote to social distancing.”—Christine Jones, co-collaborator on "SOCIAL! the social distance dance club" with David Byrne and Steven Hoggett
“‘That is where I am at,’ Mr. Byrne said, ‘finding a way to be engaged with the wider world and have it be joyous. This seems to be the way to do that.’” - Brian Seibert, The New York Times

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Broadway Will Be a While. These Venues Say They’re Ready Now.

October 12, 2020 - "Directors of large flexible spaces like the Park Avenue Armory are lobbying for permission to put on indoor shows for socially distanced audiences...'Artists are leaving the city, and the ecology is eroding,' [Armory president Rebecca Robertson] said. 'We can provide employment to artists and crew and support staff. We can be that glimmer of hope.'” - Michael Paulson, The New York Times

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I Love New York: Whoopi Goldberg, Bella Hadid, and Jeremy O. Harris Celebrate the City

September 14, 2020 - "There is no place like New York. The city immortalized in a million movies, books, and Instagram stories exists on its own wavelength. In attempting to describe this singular place, one inevitably returns to well-worn lines, but 2020 introduced a chilling new narrative....The Park Avenue Armory has been home to social clubs, plays, fashion shows, and tennis matches for over 140 years..." - Janelle Okwadu, Vogue

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What Socially Distanced Live Performance Might Look Like

May 14, 2020 - "The Armory’s Drill Hall is an immense place ideal for compact shows. A 55,000-square-foot expanse with a high vaulted ceiling and a long balcony, it has hosted massive productions and one- or two-person performances to phenomenal effect. In 'Goldberg', a 2015 production staged by the artist Marina Abramovic, pianist Igor Levit performed Bach’s hour-long 'Goldberg Variations' on a piano that glided glacially along a runway into the center of the audience, then completed a single revolution, while the lights gradually dimmed to almost total darkness. At the time, the project felt arch and puzzling; now it seems almost prescient...'We want to preserve the sensation of intimacy without actual proximity,' says the Armory’s president and executive producer, Rebecca Robertson." - Justin Davidson, Vulture, New York Magazine

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Park Avenue Armory Receives Nearly $2 Million in City Funds

December 21, 2018 - "The Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall floor restoration project has received an infusion from New York City. The Manhattan Borough President, the New York City Council and the city’s Cultural Affairs department announced Friday that they are providing nearly $2 million in funding for the historic building, in a joint effort to help restore its 138-year-old floors. The combined city capital funding of $1.925 million — $1 million from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office, $875,000 from the City Council and $50,000 from the Manhattan Borough President’s Office — will go toward the Armory’s $4 million floor project, which began last August. It is part of the building’s ongoing $215 million-revitalization effort and aims to replace the current floorboards, of Georgia yellow pine, with wood from various historic buildings around the country, including the Domino Sugar Factory." - Lauren Messman, The New York Times

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The Gilded Age Glows Again at the Park Avenue Armory’s Veterans Room

March 7, 2016 - "The Veterans Room at the Park Avenue Armory — completed in 1881 by the then-brand-new dream team of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler and Samuel Colman — may be as close as any room in New York City comes to such beyond-words fantasia. Depending on which inch you’re looking at, it’s Islamic, Chinese, Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, Persian or an indefinable mélange of them all, on which no expense was spared. It’s never been a secret (the year it opened, this newspaper declared it “undoubtedly the most magnificent apartment of the kind in this country”), but for decades its glories have been concealed beneath bad repairs, inadequate lighting, brown paint and a patina of Gilded Age cigar smoke." - Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

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Thompson Family Foundation to Give Park Avenue Armory $65 Million

July 9, 2015 - "The New York City cultural landscape is mapped by the surnames of great patronage: Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Frick, Cooper Hewitt and, more recently, Geffen, Koch and Bloomberg. Now the name of another donor seems likely to enter the lexicon: Wade Thompson. Mr. Thompson, who died in 2009, made his money by reviving the Airstream brand of shiny aluminum trailers, and in the 1990s, he began devoting a sizable amount of his fortune to reviving the grand but crumbling Park Avenue Armory, at 66th Street, which has transformed itself into a hangar-size stage for art, music and performance. The Thompson Family Foundation, which Mr. Thompson began in the late 1980s, has decided to add to the largess and is giving the armory $65 million, which will be used to create an endowment for arts programming and educational initiatives." - Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

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Pierre Audi Is Named Next Artistic Director of Park Avenue Armory

June 2, 2015 - "Pierre Audi is a serious multitasker. He has led the Dutch National Opera since 1988 while also serving as artistic director of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam from 2004 until 2014. Somehow he found time to work as a critically acclaimed director, after founding London’s avant-garde Almeida Theater. Now he’s taken on yet another major position: artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, a young institution with an ambitious reach." - Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times

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Park Avenue Armory to Restore Tiffany-Designed Veterans Room

April 9, 2015 - "The blue-blooded Park Avenue Armory has announced the next stage of its modernization. The architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron will restore the building’s opulent Veterans Room, which has one of the few surviving interiors designed by Louis C. Tiffany and Company, the firm identified with the American Aesthetic Movement, led by Louis Comfort Tiffany, working with Samuel Colman, Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler and Stanford White. The work, which began in January, is part of a $200 million renovation of the landmark, and it follows the 2013 restoration of its Board of Officers Room." - Graham Bowley, The New York Times

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The xx Named One of the Top 10 Concerts of 2014

December 29, 2014 - "The fraught interiority of the xx’s music found an almost perfect expression in this stark but dynamic staging that suggested a meditation on distance and scale (and scarcity, at least where tickets were concerned). In an age of ballooning pop spectacle, here was an act of spectacular compression, one that served both to illuminate the songs and to interrogate their premise." - Jon Caramanica, The New York Times

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Alex Poots to Be Culture Shed’s Artistic Director

November 24, 2014 - "Over the last few years, Culture Shed, the visual- and performing-arts institution planned for the Far West Side of Manhattan, has been nurtured by prominent designers (Elizabeth Diller and David Rockwell); substantial city support ($75 million); and influential advocates (former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his deputy, Daniel L. Doctoroff). Hanging over the project was always a question: Who is going to run it? Now there is an answer: Alex Poots has been named artistic director and chief executive." - Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times

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2015 Season Announcement

November 19, 2014 - "The premiere of a new installation and performance by Laurie Anderson, a multimedia installation by Philippe Parreno, and GOLDBERG, a collaboration between the performance artist Marina Abramovic and the pianist Igor Levit, are among the major attractions in the Park Avenue Armory’s 2015 season." - Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

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Paul McCarthy’s WS Named Best Art Exhibition 2013

December 19, 2013 - "Blood, excrement, alcohol and M & Ms flew through the air as Mr. McCarthy took down targets ranging from Walt Disney (“WS” stands for Snow White backward), himself (the ranch house was a replica of his childhood home) and America’s lust for bigness and waste." - Holland Cotter, The New York Times

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