Past Events

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Richard Kennedy

    April 12, 2024

    The Radical Practice of Black Curation: A Symposium, a two-day gathering held at Princeton University and Park Avenue Armory, assembles a wide-ranging group of curators and art professionals of color—including Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem), Adrienne Edwards (Whitney Museum of American Art), and Bonaventure Ndikung (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)—to engage the past, present, and future of Black curation in the contemporary art world.

    The past two decades have witnessed the success of a wide range of Black artists, whose work has been celebrated through their recognition by prestigious awards, at influential festivals, and through exhibitions and acquisitions at leading art institutions across the globe. But these successes have been enabled by a parallel development within art institutions themselves: the ascent of a visionary group of Black curators and curators of color who have supplanted the role of traditional curatorial gatekeepers and expanded the capacity of arts institutions to recognize the work of an increasingly diverse group of artists.

    As a capstone of this event, multidisciplinary artist Richard Kennedy presents a musical encapsulation of the African diaspora in the Armory’s historic rooms. Titled Guttural (Conducted Contact), this new work opens a portal of participatory gathering as truth emerges through song, dance, and a series of wordless conversations.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Antagonisms: A Gathering

    June 1, 2024

    How do we process conflicts and friction amongst close allies? And in discussion and debate, are antagonism and disagreement crucial to creating revolutionary transformation? These questions serve as the starting point for this gathering of artists, performers, scholars, and theorists in an evocative examination of the poetics of disagreement.

    Led by playwright and poet Claudia Rankine, this symposium is punctuated with performances, panels, investigations of group dynamics, as well as imagined conversations between revolutionary thinkers. Participants include renowned postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, acclaimed cultural historian Saidiya V. Hartman, and choreographer Shamel Pitts | TRIBE.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Day For Night

    September 8, 2024

    While many see clubbing as a murky night out in a sweaty nightclub, an abandoned warehouse, or at an open-air rave with no connection to more wholesome things that happen during the day, club culture has long been an important incubator of cultural movements and continues to provide spaces for connection, creativity, and personal expression.

    This afternoon salon brings together scholars, writers, artists, and nightlife makers to enlighten nightlife as an art form, and discover the ways social and performative dance have intertwined in recent years. Participants include indomitable force in the worlds of drag, music, fashion, and nightlife Kevin Aviance (he/him); drag icon, artist-scholar, DJ, and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University madison moore (he/they); scholar-practitioner of dance performance Ariel Osterweis (she/they) whose teaching practice includes the exploration of clubbing; and artist, performer, and event planner at The Spectrum BK Gage Spex (they/he/she); with others to be confirmed.

    Presented in conjunction with R.O.S.E., the Armory’s new commission by Sharon Eyal, Gai Behar, Caius Pawson of Young, and DJ Ben UFO that sits at the intersection of arts and nightlife.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Canto De Todes / Song for All

    October 19, 2024

    Singer and performance artist Dorian Wood (she/they) exhibits a 12-hour composition and installation inspired by a lyric written by the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra. Divided into three movements, this durational work features two hour-long chamber pieces separated by a 10-hour pre-recorded, multi-channel composition mixing a genre-defying canon of folk, pop, and experimental music of Central and Latin America. Redeveloped and re-envisioned in harmony with the Armory’s historic period rooms and specifically honoring the craftspeople that constructed the building at its inception, this Armory commission spotlights timely issues of migration and emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change.

    The performance will be accompanied by: a film program about Audre Lorde curated by Michael Gillespie; a multi-channel work featuring the contributions of 10 filmmakers, writers, and orators from throughout the Americas including Génesis Mancheren Ab’äj, Óscar Moisés Díaz, Kenia Guillen, Leslie Arely Martinez, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, and Frisly Soberanis, curated by the film and literary collective Tierra Narrative; and a series of panels in collaboration with the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

    Performers for the chamber pieces include cellists Ethan Philbrick and Adrián Gonzalez Cortes and guitarist Alexander Noice, among others. Participants in panels to be announced.

    Canto de Todes / Song for All is a keynote performance of ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, an in-person conference from October 17–19 by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present.