Past Events

  • Philip Venables and Ted Huffman stand together in front of a building with a bold red brick wall with blue graffiti marks.

    Making Space at the Armory

    Artist Talk: Philip Venables & Ted Huffman

    December 4, 2025

    The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions creators Philip Venables and Ted Huffman are joined in conversation with comedian, musician, and writer Morgan Bassichis and original book illustrator Ned Asta.

  • Black and white photographic portrait of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

    Malkin Lecture Series

    Finding Frederick Law Olmsted in Cotton's Kingdom

    December 1, 2025

    In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a thirty-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. This journey through the so-called Cotton Kingdom would become a centerpiece of his methods and legacy as a landscape architect and influence the landscapes across America that he shaped. As a Black woman born and raised in the South and a practitioner in the profession of landscape architecture that Olmsted founded, Sara Zewde follows Olmsted’s path in search of how his journey inspired in him the radical idea that public parks could redress society’s ills at the height of slavery in America and the implications for landscape architecture today.
    Sara Zewde is the Founding Principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. She also serves as Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

  • Headshot of artist Sandra Mujinga wearing dark clothing against a solid, bright background.

    Artists Studio

    Sandra Mujinga

    November 20, 2025 - November 21, 2025

    Norwegian artist and musician Sandra Mujinga works at the intersection of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, investigating economies of visibility and disappearance. In Sunless Mouths, a new installation and durational performance created specifically for the Armory’s Veterans Room, Mujinga continues a line of inquiry developed in her video installation Amnesia? Amnesia? (2019), turning her attention to an increasingly melancholic relationship with the sun.

    Sunless Mouths explores distance and intimacy through worldbuilding rooted in selective memory. Set in the aftermath of abandonment and estrangement, two siblings confront the silence between them, unsure if what they see is real or merely the shadow cast by grief.

    Combining original electronic music, a pre-recorded radio play, live performance, and a fabricated frosted-glass environment, Mujinga investigates how we live alongside one another: how closely we know each other, and how architecture, climate, and memory shape, or obstruct, that closeness. Using shifting light, layered sound, textured glass, and bodies in motion, the work reframes how we perceive our cities and our neighbors, suggesting intimacy not as something given, but as something that must be continuously negotiated, remembered, and reimagined.

  • Historical black and white photograph of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, Manhattan.

    Malkin Lecture Series

    Politics and Memory

    November 17, 2025

    Following the Civil War, New York City built more monuments to the Union cause supported by public funds than any other city—Brooklyn Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument outside Prospect Park, the New York Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park, and more throughout today’s five boroughs. From simple standing soldiers to grand triumphal arches and temples, these monuments incited political and artistic conflict that shaped the nation’s tradition of commemorative iconography. Join author and professor Akela Reason as she illuminates the complex intersection of art, politics, and memory within these works while highlighting the ever-changing ways different constituencies have engaged with them.

    Akela Reason is a scholar of American visual and materials culture at the University of Georgia. Her latest book is titled Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York (Yale University Press, 2025).

  • Headshot of mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke looking directly at the camera against a dark background.

    Recital Series

    Sasha Cooke & Myra Huang

    November 13, 2025 - November 15, 2025

    Two-time Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke is a vocal veteran, making frequent appearances on the world’s greatest stages and festivals and with over 80 symphony orchestras worldwide. She is also a “luminous standout” (The New York Times) on the recital stage, with programs of early and modern repertoire that showcase her artistic versatility and dramatic magnetism. She comes to the Board of Officers Room for a new program titled “Of Thee I Sing,” including an artfully curated set of works by Copland, Barber, Ives, Weill, Jake Heggie, Sondheim, and more, as well as the New York premiere of an Armory-commissioned work by American composer Jasmine Barnes.

  • Artists Studio

    Guillermo E. Brown

    October 11, 2025

    Drummer, composer, and creator Guillermo E. Brown pushes music performance to new heights through musical collaborations, sound installations, and singular theatrical works. Splitting his time as a solo performer, under the moniker Pegasus Warning, and as a drummer for bands like Reggie Watts’ KAREN on the Late Late Show with James Corden and other free jazz ensembles, he demonstrates his expertise in various disciplines that combine experimental musical performance with a sense of political urgency. Brown comes to the Veterans Room with a cast of collaborators for an insightful overview of the past, present, and future of his work, including some of his Creative Capital projects and new compositions played on a new audio-visual musical instrument he is building as part of the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Arts Technology Lab.

  • Recital Series

    Jeremy Denk

    October 8, 2025 - October 9, 2025

    Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists, receiving acclaim from both audiences and critics alike for his nuanced performances on both the recital and orchestral stage. The recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk invites audiences to feel a sense of renewed discovery with his artistic interpretations of both keyboard classics and contemporary compositions. He gives a marathon performance of what is presumably the most famous and challenging collection of suites in music history—Bach’s Six Partitas—large musical canvases that follow the basic form of the Baroque dance suite and beautifully showcase virtuosic playing in every way.

  • 50 pianos encircle an audience of hundreds of concert-goers, bathed in fuchsia and blue lighting.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    11,000 Strings

    September 30, 2025 - October 7, 2025

    The modern piano is a keyboard instrument with 88 black and white keys, producing 88 distinctive notes when played by a pianist. But what happens when a composer wants to expand that sonic palette when creating new work? That exact dilemma is tackled head on by maverick composer Georg Friedrich Haas in his latest composition, which is performed at the Armory in its highly anticipated North American premiere.

    This sonically adventurous spatial work is realized as a concert installation in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where the audience is surrounded by a chamber orchestra and 50 micro-tuned pianos. Each upright piano is tuned in the smallest of increments—the amount of difference between sounds that is audible to humans—to allow all pitches to be possible. And when paired with the phenomenal musicians of the Klangforum Wien as an acoustic amplifier, this ambitious new composition creates an immersive sound world that envelops listeners in a variety of sonic environments, from chillingly tender melodic motifs to the thunderous roar of a looming weather storm. This unforgettable experience showcases Haas’s focus on the human dimension in his experimentalism while creating a new way of listening.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Caftan

    September 28, 2025

    A journalist, stylist, creative director, author, and editor-at-large of Vogue, André Leon Talley left an indelible mark on the fashion industry with a boundary-breaking career and style setting caftans, emphasizing bold, culturally diverse aesthetics and being a possibility model for Black creatives who wanted to work in the fashion and media industries. Inspired by this legendary fashionista, his iconic caftans, and his role in the world of fashion, this vibrant, multifaceted program explores fashion’s role in self-expression, freedom, and diasporic encounter.

    The day includes panel discussions with industry historians, designers, educators, and community activists that examine the role of fashion as a tool for resistance, cultural preservation, and cross-cultural dialogue. Participants include: outgoing president of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) Joyce F. Brown; award-winning author and CUNY Graduate Center Professor of History Tanisha C. Ford; Artist and Founder of The Institute of Black Imagination Dario Calmese; curator of the Met Costume Institute’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition Monica Miller, and journalist, award-winning editor, cultural curator, and Founder of Native Son Emil Wilbekin.

    In addition to an afternoon of conversation, a curated display of garments honoring André Leon Talley’s legacy will be on view.

  • Historic black and white photograph of a bustling and crowded New York City street.

    Malkin Lecture Series

    New York's Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers

    September 25, 2025

    Although the last decade of the Gilded Age is called "The Gay Nineties," the joy and festivities of this time were generally reserved for the wealthy. If you were a common working stiff—or worse, a common working "stiffette"—life was not so happy. Most New Yorkers played by the rules of the game, but others invented their own, successfully gaming the system to their advantage. Join social and architectural historian John Tauranac in this lecture as he profiles those scoundrels, scalawags, and scrappers.

    John Tauranac is the author of New York Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers: The City in the Last Decade of the Gilded Age (Lyons Press, 2025), as well as several other volumes on New York City's social and architectural history. Tauranac has been teaching New York's architectural history for over 30 years at NYU's School of Professional Studies.

  • Recital Series

    Pene Pati & Ronny Michael Greenberg

    September 24, 2025 - September 26, 2025

    The first Samoan tenor to perform on Europe’s top opera stages, Pene Pati has made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic with an exceptional versatility in repertoire that showcases his luminous timbre, a seductively natural singing style, and perfectly nuanced articulation. Expect all the vocal power, charisma, and dramatic flair this extraordinary singer brings to the opera stage when he makes his North American solo recital debut in the Board of Officers Room with a varied program of songs traversing eras and continents that beautifully showcases his caressing colors and amber high notes.

  • A fashionable dancer carrying a briefcase walks along a red, white, and blue dance floor in front of a crowd of spectators.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Monkey Off My Back or The Cat's Meow

    September 9, 2025 - September 20, 2025

    Acclaimed choreographer, dancer, and Guggenheim fellow Trajal Harrell has made a name for himself as one of the most important creators working today by generating captivating hybrid works rooted in art and dance history that reimagine our pasts and create spaces for different eras and philosophies to converge. By deftly interfacing the glorious pageantry and elaborate flourishes of the New York voguing scene and the guttural passion of the Japanese dance form butoh with modern and post-modern dance vocabulary, he has created a signature style that is both transcultural and futuristic with wide-ranging references and humor. The internationally admired and respected artist comes to the Armory for the North American premiere of his latest creation that lies at the intersection of dance, theater, history, fashion, and music.

    This parade of expressiveness is as an homage to art as a free space for play and imagination, featuring a large cast of dancers and actors wearing more than 60 virtuosic looks designed by Harrell. Centered on a stunning Mondrian-like colored grid spanning the length of the performance area, this dancing runway show is turned on its head with iconography that juxtaposes everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical references, pop culture, and political rhetoric. And while drawing on the Declaration of Independence as a foundation for the US and its urgent call for freedom, this vivid mosaic of a double-edged paradigm also explores the resulting inequalities to the forebearers of the land affected by those actions while celebrating the unifying power of community.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Black Theater Advance

    September 6, 2025

    Building on a multi-year initiative to catalyze growth and permanence for Black theaters across the nation, this dynamic salon tackles the issues facing us all in reimagining the future of American theater as a space for bold artistic expression and social change. Through conversations, activations, and manifestos, the event manifests the vision and voices of Black theater makers, with innovative approaches to storytelling, amplifying diverse voices, community engagement, and institutional transformation.

  • Visitors wander among a group of Diane Arbus photographs, hung and arranged on an intricate scaffolding system.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Diane Arbus: Constellation

    June 5, 2025 - August 17, 2025

    Diane Arbus is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century, best known for her stark, documentary style of capturing people outside the boundaries of ordinary society. For decades, her innovative artistry has influenced countless artists with iconic images that seem to reflect Arbus’s restless attraction to the unfamiliar in all its guises.

    These dynamic pictures are given an evocative new life at the Armory in an immersive installation that brings together all of the photographs (some still unpublished) from the set of more than 450 prints by Neil Selkirk, a photographer and student of hers and the only person authorized to make prints from her negatives. This unconventional constellation of images allows viewers to find their own path to discover what lies between the pictures, what connects them to each other, and the imperceptible architecture underlying all creations: chance, chaos, and exploration. Marking the largest and most complete showing of her works in New York to date, this unprecedented collection of Arbus’s works provides a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity.

    Co-presented with LUMA FOundation

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Lenapehoking

    May 30, 2025

    Marking the 400th anniversary of the start of construction of New Amsterdam on what is now lower Manhattan, this evocative evening of chamber music and storytelling considers the myth of Manhattan’s purchase while celebrating the enduring presence of Lenape and other Indigenous nations.

    Featuring captivating compositions by Brent Michael Davids, the program includes works such as “Touching Leaves Woman,” “The Last of James Fenimore Cooper,” and the world premiere of “Ode to Joe.” This memorable musical journey, incorporating unique Native American instruments as well as a string quartet and chorus of singers, engages audiences with Indigenous cultural expressions to envision decolonial futures through the power of music and narrative.

    Co-presented with Lenape Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes Lenape culture and arts in Lenapehoking

  • Artists Studio

    Sofia Jernberg

    May 20, 2025

    Swedish experimental singer, improviser, and composer Sofia Jernberg harnesses unconventional techniques and sounds with a focus on the human acoustic voice in durational performances that freely mix between improvisation and composed song. She has developed a broad repertoire ranging from overtone singing to guttural lutes, including childlike wailing and soft, intimate melodies that touch on themes of identity, internationality, origin, and belonging. This singular talent is joined by some additional musicians and guests for a unique performance of some of her own pre-existing and new compositions that embrace her creative practice of communion and collaboration.

  • Recital Series

    Erin Morley & Gerald Martin Moore

    April 11, 2025 - April 13, 2025

    One of today’s most sought-after lyric coloratura sopranos, Erin Morley has stepped into the international spotlight with a string of critically acclaimed appearances in the great opera houses of the world. A recipient of the Beverly Sills Award and a graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, her performances have garnered huge critical acclaim worldwide. She comes to the Armory to appear on a far more intimate stage—the Board of Officers Room—with an artfully curated program of works from her recent album Rose in Bloom, including repertoire connected to flowers, gardens, and nature from Schumann and Berg to Saint-Saëns and Rimsky-Korsakov and a song cycle by Ricky Ian Gordon.

  • Artists Studio

    Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

    March 22, 2025

    Adventurous artist, curator, and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe creates hypnotic sound worlds that blur the boundaries between live performance and installation. His signature style builds upon the call-and-response tradition in African American music that can be traced from sacred hymnals to the secular work songs that inform the 20th-century continuum of the blues, jazz, and soul. This veteran sound artist comes to the Veterans Room for the premiere of his new work, “The Unbearable Comedy of a Caterwaul in 4 Parts” for modular synth, voice, and bowed and struck objects. This builds on his electronic and vocal performance practice in the realm of spontaneous music, blending analog synthesizers with organic vocal expression to create auditory passageways with trancelike suspensions.

  • A group of performers enters the performance space, which includes a countdown clock on a Jumbo-Tron and Cadillac Escalades.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    DOOM: House of Hope

    March 3, 2025 - March 12, 2025

    Anne Imhof has emerged over the past decade as one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of her generation. While working prolifically across painting, drawing, video, music, and sculpture, she is best known as a world builder and scene setter creating large-scale endurance performances or tableaux vivants that unite these various media in singular compositions. After galvanizing the German pavilion with her exhibition and performance Faust, for which she was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the visual and performance artist has gone on to create exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and Palais de Tokyo in Paris that received acclaim from critics and viewers alike while landing her at the top of Art Review‘s “Power 100” list. The radical art world superstar takes hold of the entirety of the Armory for her largest performative work to date.

    Utilizing the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, this all-encompassing work fuses space, performers, sound, and scenography in response to our present in which anxiety and hope find a fragile balance between apathy, activism, and resistance. This sequential durational performance takes audiences on a journey to ultimately find a sense of community through our own shared experiences and features a cast of nearly 60 performers including actors, skaters, and dancers—including members from the Flexn and Line Dance communities—who create an experience that blurs the lines between observer and participant.. The culminating happening serves as a seismographic meter of our times, while projecting into our own possible futures to find a new form of hope.

  • Recital Series

    Konstantin Krimmel & Ammiel Bushakevitz

    February 22, 2025 - February 24, 2025

    Capturing several competition prizes early in his career, baritone Konstantin Krimmel has graced some of the finest concert and operatic stages in Europe with a richness of nuance schooled in lieder singing and a naturalistic interpretive approach. Krimmel makes his North American recital debut with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz in a program of lieder inspired by their recent album Mythos – Schubert and Loewe (Alpha, 2024), which showcases the similarities and differences between these composers, both born in the same year in Germany but who lived such different musical and personal lives. This program includes works by Schubert and Loewe highlighted on the album, as well as a song cycle by Vaughan Williams.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    A Dream You Dream Together

    February 15, 2025 - February 16, 2025

    Explore the multidisciplinary career of trailblazing artist Yoko Ono and her enduring legacy of arts activism for peace and creativity in this two-day symposium, presented in tandem with Wish Tree. This convening assembles a host of scholars, artists, writers, and activists for a series of panels and performances that explore and highlight Ono’s message and highlight Ono’s influence and impact on the art world and the world at-large.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Yoko Ono Tribute Concerts

    February 15, 2025 - February 16, 2025

    In concurrence with Yoko Ono's Wish Tree and A Dream You Dream Together – A Symposium Celebrating Yoko Ono, Making Space at the Armory presents two intimate tribute concerts in one of the Armory historic period rooms inspired by Ono’s works and legacy.

    Matmos: Fresh Squeezed Grapefruit
    Saturday, February 15, 2025 at 8:00pm

    Experimental electronic music duo Matmos come to the Armory’s Veterans Room for a performance responding to Yoko Ono’s pathbreaking book of instructions Grapefruit (1964), first self-published in Tokyo in 1964. Using this foundational anthology of poetic and conceptual instructions, often with performative prompts, Matmos activates a selection of the objects and actions described in Ono’s text pieces, including: chewing gum, whispers, stones, masks, maps, smells, mirrors, water, sticks, alarms, flutes, pencils, tape, egg timers, gauze, and tuna fish sandwiches. Playing these objects, sampling and manipulating their sounds, Matmos enact Ono’s instructions and constructing new forms in real time out of these everyday materials in a performance titled “Fresh Squeezed Grapefruit.”

    Double Bill: Alicia Hall Moran & Carl Hancock Rux
    Sunday, February 16, 2025 at 8:00pm

    The weekend continues with a double bill performance by vocalist and performer Alicia Hall Moran and visionary multidisciplinary artist, poet, playwright, and musician Carl Hancock Rux in the Veterans Room. A solo by Moran engages Ono’s 1981 song “Walking on Thin Ice,” while Rux is joined by DJ Spooky and Indian classical multi-instrumentalist Kamal Sabri in a meditative piece with three movements evoking Ono’s spoken word.

  • Visitors wander among a grove of 92 Wish Trees in the expansive Drill Hall.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Wish Tree

    February 14, 2025 - February 17, 2025

    Yoko Ono is a groundbreaking and influential artist and activist, with a multidisciplinary career spanning conceptual art, film, and performance. A trailblazer of early conceptual and participatory work, a celebrated musician, and a formidable campaigner for world peace, her practice centers on ideas over objects, often expressed in poetic, humorous, profound, and radical ways.

    Her powerful, participatory practice is realized at the Armory with the largest installation of her ongoing work Wish Tree in North America to date. Within the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, a grove of 92 trees will be installed in honor of the influential artist’s 92nd birthday. Visitors are invited to contribute by tying personal wishes to the trees, creating a large scale, yet intimate activation of her social practice work.

    The installation also intersects with our Making Space series of public programs with a two-day symposium of conversations, panels, and activations that trace Ono’s radical approach to art, language, and participation while amplifying her legacy of peace activism, female empowerment, and challenging the boundaries of artist and audience.

  • Jamie xx performing in the Drill Hall against a backdrop of dramatic blue lighting.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    In Waves

    January 9, 2025 - January 12, 2025

    A forward-thinking beatmaker and producer, Jamie xx has helped to shape the sound of the late 2000s and beyond with his Mercury Music Prize-winning group the xx, with their artful blend of indie pop, R&B, and dance sounds. A lauded solo artist and sought-after remixer in his own right, he has worked with everyone in popular music today producing songs for the likes of Adele, Radiohead, Alicia Keys, and Drake. His signature mix of the kinetic and the atmospheric are equally innovative and evocative, while showing a reverence for dance music’s power to move bodies and hearts.

    Jamie returns to the Armory following his unforgettable residency with the xx in 2014 after 25 sell-out performances to kick off the North American tour supporting his long-awaited new release In Waves, his first solo album in 10 years. Reflecting the life- and world-changing events of the past decade—waves everyone has experienced both together and alone—the album replicates the emotional crescendos and thrilling volatility of an almost mystical night out, encapsulating fun, joy, and introspection all at once in a way that can best be experienced on the dance floor.

    Co-Presented with Bowery Presents

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Nineteen Reservoirs

    December 18, 2024

    As New York City incorporated, welcomed new inhabitants, and cemented itself as a center of American industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it faced an existential problem: how to sustain its ever-increasing need for water. The solution: a network of reservoirs and aqueducts built across more than one million acres in upstate New York from 1907 to 1967. This feat of engineering allowed New York City to blossom into the metropolis we know today, but also demolished, submerged, and profoundly altered twenty-six villages across the Hudson Valley and their ecosystem. Join Guggenheim fellowship recipient Lucy Sante as she examines the triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences of these decisions on New York City’s divided public—urban and rural, rich and poor, human and animal.

    Lucy Sante‘s book Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City was published by The Experiment in 2022, and recently released in paperback in February 2024. Awards include a Cullman fellowship, Whiting Writer’s Award, Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Infinity Award in Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Grammy for album notes.

  • Recital Series

    Barbara Hannigan & Bertrand Chamayou

    December 12, 2024

    Soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is no stranger to captivating Armory audiences and critics alike, making her US recital debut in 2017 with a residency looking at the legacy of the Second Viennese School and the works of trailblazer Erik Satie, and returning in 2019 with artfully curated programs including the New York premiere of John Zorn’s Jumalattaret and Schoenberg’s String Quartet No.2 performed with the Emerson String Quartet. The Canadian musician makes her highly anticipated return to the Recital Series at the Armory with another dazzling program including an encore performance of Zorn’s captivating song cycle that beautifully spotlights her unparalleled dramatic sensibility, virtuosity, and artistry that has rarely been seen before on the contemporary music landscape.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful

    December 3, 2024 - December 14, 2024

    MacArthur Fellow Kyle Abraham is one of the most sought after choreographers and dancers of our time, creating a unique and expressive style of dance that explores issues of identity, history, and geography. In addition to performing and developing new works for his company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, the bold creator has been commissioned by a variety of dance companies including New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Royal Ballet, and The National Ballet of Cuba. He has also choreographed for many of the leading dancers of our time, including Misty Copeland, Calvin Royal III, and Wendy Whelan. He unleashes his signature style—a unique blend of modern dance techniques ranging from ballet to hip hop—in the world premiere of a new evening-length work.

    Featuring a large ensemble of dancers with whom he has collaborated from across the country, plus Abraham himself, this Armory commission includes an innovative visual design created by Cao Yuxi (JAMES) and an Armory-commissioned score composed and performed live by the critically acclaimed new music ensemble yMusic to explore the growing sensitivities of life and transition, and nature and humanity, in our chaotic world. The underlying choreography employs layers of counterpoint to find intimacy and evoke ideas of empathy and constant change, fueling an evocative new dance work that migrates through the fragility of time and an ever-changing ecology.

  • Artists Studio

    Maori Karmael Holmes

    November 18, 2024 - November 19, 2024

    Multi-hyphenate Maori Karmael Holmes is a creative force working to uplift the fullness of Black, Brown, and Indigenous expression. As founder of the BlackStar Film Festival and Chief Executive & Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects, she has organized film programs at Anthology Film Archives, MOCA, and Whitney Museum. She has directed and produced film projects that have been screened internationally, as well as music videos for a wide range of musical voices, and hosts the culture podcast Many Lumens. All of these artistic happenings have led to her inclusion in Essence Magazine‘s Woke 100 List and named one of the Kennedy Center’s #Next50.

    The filmmaker, writer, and curator hosts a talented mix of artists with whom she has worked throughout her career in two unique evenings of screenings, performances, and talkbacks presented in the style of a variety show. With DJ lil’dave spinning beats throughout each night, Holmes is joined by special guests including GRAMMY-nominated singer, writer, and actress Wayna; MacArthur Fellow, founder of Scribe Video Center, and documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah; Guggenheim Fellow, bass player, composer, and music producer Anthony Tidd; filmmaker and artist Rashid Zakat; and hip-hop artist and a motivational speaker Mike Africa, Jr.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Bookshop

    November 13, 2024

    Scholar of American and urban history Evan Friss guides audiences through a chronicle of the bookshop in New York and across the country, illuminating how these vital institutions have shaped American life. Drawing on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers, Friss offers an engaging look at this institution over time, from Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore to local gems like The Strand and Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, national conglomerates like Barnes & Noble, the rise of e-tailers like Amazon Books, and more. Friss shares stories of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries.

    Evan Friss is a Professor of History at James Madison University. Publications include The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore; The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s; and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City.

  • 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.

  • Recital Series

    Karim Sulayman & Sean Shibe

    October 8, 2024 - October 10, 2024

    Garnering international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman is consistently praised for his sensitive and intelligent musicianship, riveting stage presence, and beautiful voice while regularly performing on the world’s greatest stages. The Grammy Award winner has also earned acclaim for his inventive programming, which is on full display in a varied program of works examining the relationship of East and West performed with guitarist Sean Shibe. Featuring wide ranging works from Monteverdi, Britten, and Purcell to Takemitsu, Layale Chaker, and traditional Sephardic songs, this intimate recital inspects the artists own ethnic identities through songs that at once were seen to exotify but through playful juxtaposition subvert that narrative into one of celebration.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Fifth Avenue

    September 24, 2024

    Once called America’s “Street of Dreams,” Fifth Avenue has gone through a myriad of architectural and societal transformations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Join Mosette Broderick on a journey through the avenue’s history, from its appearances on the Commissioners’ map of 1807 and the proposed grid plan of 1811, to chronicling how the speculative brownstone rowhouses that lined the avenue above Washington Square gave way to grand mansions designed by European-influenced architects and decorators as the center of the city marched northward. By the end of the 19th century, Fifth Avenue was synonymous with a lavish fashionable life catering to the wealthy. And then, as quickly as it was built, it was destroyed; the New York house was replaced by more modern architecture as the evolving city shifted again.

    Mosette Broderick, Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, New York University, is also the Director of the London MA Program in Historical and Sustainable Architecture.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Indra's Net

    September 23, 2024 - October 1, 2024

    One of the most unique and influential artists of our time, Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director, choreographer, filmmaker, and creator who has devoted her life to exploring the potential of the human voice. A pioneer of extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary art, she weaves together new modes of perception to expand the boundaries of music, performance, and installation. This living legend returns to the Armory with her latest creation, an immersive work that is part performance, part installation, inspired by Indra’s Net, a parable that illustrates life’s interconnectedness.

    In the ancient Buddhist/Hindu legend, an enlightened king, Indra, stretches a large net across the universe with an infinitely faceted jewel placed at each intersection. Each jewel is unique yet reflects all the others, illuminating the interdependence of all living things. Following an initial concert performance of the work at Mills College in 2021 and a world premiere at the Holland Festival in 2023, this monumental creation receives a full production in its highly anticipated North American premiere. Monk, together with members of her extraordinary Vocal Ensemble, a sixteen-piece chamber orchestra, and an additional eight-member chorus, offers an interplay of music, movement, and architecture to embody celestial, earthly, and human realms through sound, video, and performance. The resulting production serves as a beacon to affirm life and a sense of connection to each other and all living things.

  • Artists Studio

    EJ Hill

    September 20, 2024 - September 21, 2024

    Through a practice that includes writing, music, painting, and sculpture, EJ Hill tells untold stories and provides visibility for those who have been historically ignored, focusing on everyday experiences that intermingle public struggle, endurance, trauma, joy, and resilience. His work interrogates how society’s deeply held prejudices and inequalities continue to position Black, brown, and queer bodies as targets of violence. The performance artist comes to the Veterans Room with a team of his primary collaborators to create an evening of song, storytelling, and sonic exploration. Collectively, they weave together their individual influences and practices to offer musical constellations which sprawl the space between disaster and desire.

    With [jef]Frey Michael Austin, Carson Childs, and Quincie Mychelle Lewis

  • Recital Series

    Leah Hawkins & Kevin Miller

    September 13, 2024 - September 15, 2024

    Having first dazzled Armory audiences with her participation in the Lindemann Young Artist recital in 2019, soprano Leah Hawkins has gone on to perform career-defining roles on some of the world’s leading opera stages including the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Dutch National Opera, and Opéra National de Paris. She returns to the Armory recital stage to showcase her global journey with a collection of folk songs and proverbs from various cultural and religious traditions, from American and Yiddish to Jamaican, Swahili, and others. The program features works by composers and arrangers including Jasmine Barnes, Jorell Williams, Lili Boulanger, Francis Poulenc, and Peter Ashbourne.

  • 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.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    R.O.S.E.

    September 5, 2024 - September 12, 2024

    Award-winning choreographer Sharon Eyal is known around the world for her intoxicating and boundary-blurring choreography. Along with her creative partner Gai Behar, an imaginative innovator of the underground club scene, the pair create captivating performances bristling with dark hedonism, futuristic androgyny, hypnotic repetition, and remarkable muscular control. They are joined by Caius Pawson of London-based multi-arts organization Young for the North American premiere of a new work that celebrates the freedom, energy, and intimacy that run through the best of club culture and modern dance.

    Iconic DJ Ben UFO provides the soundtrack for this scintillating synthesis of contemporary dance, electronic music, and nightlife, playing for both the dancers during performances and the audience’s own movement throughout. Dissolving boundaries between stage, dancer, and spectator to subvert conventional notions of experiencing dance, this Armory commission serves as an open invitation to watch, to dance, to come together on the dance floor—whether you are a club kid who wants their first taste of Eyal’s visceral choreography or a dance fan wanting to experience the artistry of dancers up close in a setting like no other.

  • Dramatic theatrical lighting illuminates a past performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Inside Light" in the Drill Hall.

    Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Inside Light

    June 5, 2024 - June 15, 2024

    Few hold as much of an esteemed role in the evolution of contemporary composition and studio technique than Karlheinz Stockhausen. One of the most experimental and progressive composers of the 20th century, his innovations forever changed approaches to utilizing electronics in art music and the ways in which we listen. This classical renegade’s influence can still be felt today, inspiring everyone from Björk to Aphex Twin, Miles Davis to Animal Collective, and more.

    His magnum opus Licht—a seven opera cycle each representing a day of the week—is an epic 29-hour work for vocal, instrumental, and electronic forces that is rarely performed given its length and the different configurations of musicians and spaces needed.

    Several electronic compositions from this opus, performed by one of his original collaborators Kathinka Pasveer, are presented as two parts on separate evenings or in a full marathon with transformative lighting and video projections to fully immerse the audience in the all-encompassing sound and surroundings. The vastness of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is the perfect setting to fully realize these works as Stockhausen so boldly envisioned in their highly-anticipated North American premieres.

  • 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.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Shall We Gather at the River

    May 21, 2024

    For more than 400 years, the Black American spiritual tradition has moved over, across, and through the waters—waters of life force, passage, cleansing, resistance, and renewal—depicted in such songs and verses as “Wade in the Water,” “Deep River,” “Crossing Jordan,” and “By the Waters of Babylon.”

    The power of water and its spiritual dimensions equally resonates in the beautiful, sacred texts of Bach’s cantatas. Infused with poetry, Bach’s music sounds and speaks to every drop of water, in drought and in full flood, moving and alive.

    These two musical sources flow together in an act of awakening, mobilization, and restorative beauty in the face of climate change. The Oxford Bach Soloists under the music direction of Tom Hammond-Davies and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street are joined by countertenor Reginald Mobley, tenor Nick Pritchard, and sheng player Wu Tong to perform a selection of Bach cantatas intermingled with spirituals in a staging by the celebrated director Peter Sellars. This musical call to action illuminates the undeniable truth that water is life, and that music is a universal language that can unite and inspire.

    Co-Commissioned with the Asia Society as part of COAL + ICE: Inspiring Climate Action Through Art and Ideas, on view February 13–August 11, 2024.

  • Recital Series

    Matthew Polenzani & Ken Noda

    May 20, 2024 - May 22, 2024

    American Matthew Polenzani is one of the most gifted and distinguished lyric tenors of his generation. His elegant musicianship, innate sense of style, and dramatic commitment find him at the largest and most prestigious operatic, concert, and recital venues in the world. He comes to the Armory with a program of lieder and art songs that offer audiences the chance to get to know the beauty of his sound, the musicality of his legato, the suppleness of his phrasing, and the clarity of his diction in one of the only spaces that could provide such a personal encounter—the Board of Officers Room.

  • Artists Studio

    Moor Mother & Irreversible Entanglements (IE)

    May 18, 2024

    Camae Ayewa, better known by her stage name Moor Mother, is an American poet, musician, and activist who focuses on the recovery and preservation of communal memories and histories that are often missing from mainstream narratives as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes. Having spent years organizing and performing in Philadelphia’s underground music community, she has gone on to tour nationally and internationally to develop a career spent in close proximity to what could nominally be described as jazz, rap, and experimental music.

    She comes to the Veterans Room with two distinct programs that spotlight her work as a solo artist and her collaborations with other musicians who share her drive to dig up the untold. Following a solo set of fringe and avant-garde sonic landscapes rooted in industrial, electronic, noise, punk, and hip hop, she is joined by Irreversible Entanglements (IE), a free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality that plays deeply improvised, rhythm music full of love and social commitment.

  • 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.

  • Artists Studio

    Jasper Marsalis / Slauson Malone 1

    March 27, 2024 - March 28, 2024

    Jasper Marsalis is an artist and musician who explores the intersections of popular music and avant-garde performance by working across painting, sculpture, sound, and text. The son of jazz impresario Wynton Marsalis, the multifaceted artist has made a name for himself in his own right with releases under his own name and the moniker Slauson Malone 1 that are deeply ambitious, eccentrically engaging, and play with myriad genres and styles. He comes to the Armory to perform a set inspired by the Veterans Room, layering dissonant sounds on top of one another to create a dense and dizzying suite of sonic collages that invite close listening.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Illinoise

    March 2, 2024 - March 24, 2024

    With inclusion on several reviewer’s “best of the decade” lists when it was released including those of Paste, NPR, and Rolling Stone, Sufjan Stevens’ acclaimed 2005 concept album Illinois enjoys cult status for its lush orchestrations and wildly inventive portrayal of the state’s people, landscapes, and history, complete with UFOs, zombies, and predatory wasps. This musically ambitious work, which weaves together cinematic orchestral anthems, jazz riffs, and other musical influences to explore wide-ranging narratives about blossoming queerness and self-exploration is expanded upon through a mix of live music and impressionistic choreography to revisit the beloved album’s themes of self-discovery.

    Dancer, choreographer, and director Justin Peck has assembled an impressive body of creative projects, starting out as a soloist with New York City Ballet and moving on to create work for that company and prestigious companies from around the world, as well as on Broadway with Carousel and Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film West Side Story. The Tony Award-winner embraces Stevens’ album in an ecstatic pageant of storytelling, theater, dance, and live music with a cast of virtuosic performers, singers, and musicians with a narrative crafted with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole). Featuring new arrangements of the entire album by composer and pianist Timo Andres for a live band and three voices, ranging in style from DIY folk and indie rock to marching band and ambient electronics, this bold, new music-theater production leads audiences on a mighty journey through the American heartland, from campfire storytelling to the edges of the cosmos.

  • Recital Series

    Jeanine De Bique & Warren Jones

    February 12, 2024 - February 14, 2024

    Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique has gained international recognition for her dramatic presence, artistic versatility, and endless wealth of color and nuance. One of today’s most sought-after sopranos on the opera, festival, and concert stage, she has dazzled European audiences at the Opéra National de Paris, Dutch National Opera, Salzburg Festival, and Féstival d’Aix-en-Provence. She makes a rare New York appearance with a global program of French melodies, American art songs, and folk songs from the Caribbean.

  • Artists Studio

    Double Bill: George Lewis & Amina Claudine Myers

    December 18, 2023

    MacArthur fellow George Lewis is a composer, musicologist, and trombonist who serves as the Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. On this concert, the US premiere of his Blombos Workshop (2020) for piano, which engages Sylvia Wynter’s celebration of the human, and Assemblage (2013) for nonet, which explores in musical form the practice of assemblage—artmaking that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and human-made objects—are performed by members of the Ensemble on a special double bill with Amina Claudine Myers. This multidimensional artist and creator is joined by her trio and actress, vocalist, and playwright Richarda Abrams to perform Stay in the Light, a partly notated, partly improvised composition that highlights her spiritual connection to the universe and reinforces positivity, faith, and love for all living things.

  • Artists Studio

    Amina Claudine Myers Choral Workshop

    December 17, 2023

    Prodigious pianist, organist, vocalist, composer, and improvisationist Amina Claudine Myers is a visionary in the areas of composition for vocal choirs and instrumental ensembles, composing a wide range of works that distinctly blend traditional influences from spiritual, gospel, and jazz, to extended forms and improvisations. The multi-talented trailblazer leads a vocal workshop for aspiring singers and the general public to perform some of her original compositions.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Zoe Anderson Norris

    December 4, 2023

    Zoe Anderson Norris (1860–1914), although little remembered today, was a foremother of modern-day social-justice advocates and confessional bloggers baring souls in print. In millions of published words of fiction and journalism—including in her own bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909-1914)—she documented desperate immigrant poverty from her “literary sanctum” on East 15th Street and called for the world to heed and help.

    Zoe (as everyone knew her) sometimes worked undercover, exposing issues that continue to resonate. She pleaded for government reforms while documenting corrupt policemen hassling immigrant street peddlers, overflowing trash cans spreading typhoid in mucky streets, sex workers pleading for help escaping from traffickers, charities splurging on their own expense accounts, and abusive men going unpunished. A Kentucky-born longtime Manhattanite, known as a “Queen of Bohemia,” Zoe also founded the Ragged Edge Klub, which met for weekly dinners combining activism and dancing. She handed out aristocratic titles to Ragged Edgers, such as Lady Betty Rogers of the Bronx and Baron Bernhardt of Hoboken. A few days after completing the last issue of The East Side, which described her recent dream that she would die soon, she suffered fatal heart failure—and her prediction made headlines in newspapers nationwide.

    Eve M. Kahn, former weekly Antiques columnist for The New York Times, gives a progress report on her Zoe Anderson Norris biography. The talk also covers how Kahn amassed a comprehensive collection of Norris’ work and related ephemera, including the only complete run of The East Side known to survive in private hands and souvenir postcards and even dinnerware from the Ragged Edge Klub’s favorite restaurants. The collection was exhibited in spring 2023 at the Grolier Club in midtown, earning acclaim from publications including The New Yorker.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Seasons of Dance

    December 3, 2023

    With diversity moving into the mainstream and modern dance at a crossroads, pioneering artistic directors, choreographers, and dancers gather to explore the intersection between creative vision and cultural context in the art form. Among this series of demonstrations and interactive conversations, Thomas F. DeFrantz moderates a consideration of the living legacy of Pina Bausch and a celebration of the diversity of contemporary dance flourishing in Africa today. He is joined by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airuado, dancers from the company of The Rite of Spring, and others.

    Presented in conjunction with the Armory’s presentation of The Rite of Spring/common ground[s], showcasing Pina Bausch’s seminal work as danced by a specially assembled company of 36 dancers from 14 African countries and a new companion piece by Germaine Acogny, the founder of the Senegalese company École des Sables, and Malou Ariaudo, who performed leading roles in many of Bausch’s early works as a member of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Rite of Spring / common ground[s]

    November 29, 2023 - December 14, 2023

    “How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die?” This is the central question asked by the late choreographer Pina Bausch of her dancers in 1975 when she created her seminal work The Rite of Spring, which examines unyielding ritual when the sacrifice of a “chosen one” changes the season from winter to spring. This pioneering work, establishing her iconic approach, has gone on to become one of the 20th century’s most significant and important bodies of dance theater.

    Faithful to Stravinsky’s visceral score, Bausch’s monumental choreography is given a thrilling new life by a specially assembled company of 36 dancers from 14 African countries. Danced on a peat-covered stage, they clash and engage in a wild and poetic struggle of life, ritual, and sacrifice that pays tribute to her unparalleled genius.

    Rite is paired with a new work created, performed, and inspired by the lives of two remarkable choreographers, professors, and grandmothers: Germaine Acogny, the founder of the Senegalese École des Sables who is widely considered to be “the mother of contemporary African dance,” and Malou Airaudo, who performed leading roles in many of Bausch’s early works as a member of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. This poetic and tender antidote to Rite reflects their shared histories, emotional experiences, and common ground.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Rough Rider and the Professor

    November 21, 2023

    Evoking the political intrigue of the Gilded Age, Laurence Jurdem's book The Rough Rider and the Professor chronicles the extraordinary 35-year friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

    Theodore Roosevelt was a uniquely gifted figure. A man of great intellect and physicality, the New York patrician captured the imagination of the American people with his engaging personality and determination to give all citizens regardless of race, color, or creed the opportunity to achieve the American dream. While Roosevelt employed his abilities to rise from unknown New York legislator to become the youngest man ever to assume the presidency in 1901, that rapid success would not have occurred without the assistance of the powerful New Englander, Henry Cabot Lodge. Eight years older than Roosevelt, from a prominent Massachusetts family, Lodge was one of the most calculating, combative politicians of his age. From 1884 to 1919 Lodge and Roosevelt encouraged one another to mine the greatness that lay within each of them. Despite their political disagreements, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge remained devoted friends until the Rough Rider took his final breath on January 6, 1919.

    Laurence Jurdem, PhD, is currently an Adjunct Professor of History at Fairfield University and Fordham College’s Lincoln Center campus. Jurdem is also the author of Paving the Way for Reagan: The Influence of Conservative Media on U.S. Foreign Policy. A frequent writer on American politics, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle.

  • Artists Studio

    The AACM: Power Stronger Than Itself

    November 18, 2023

    Founded on the virtually all-Black South Side of Chicago in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has played an unusually prominent role in the development of American experimental music, exploring an unprecedented range of methodologies, processes, and media. Scholar-composer George E. Lewis, Professor of Music at Columbia University and an AACM member since 1971, presents an historical overview of the works of the famed collective.

  • Artists Studio

    The Reggie Nicholson Percussion Concept

    November 18, 2023

    Reggie Nicholson‘s signature style and sound have made him one of the most inventive and inspirational drummer/percussionists of his generation, composing and improvising original music that showcases his formidable technique and considerable skill. He performs some of his recent works and world premieres for percussion ensemble, displaying his “exquisite splashes of color and unmetered cascades on the drums” (Chicago Tribune) with his ensemble, the Reggie Nicholson Percussion Concept.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

    November 14, 2023

    Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” John Adams thought his cousin “the most sagacious politician” of all. With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd, eloquent, and intensely disciplined man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams packaged and amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool in an innovative arsenal to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.

    In The Revolutionary, author Stacy Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. She is joined in conversation by Michael Gately to discuss the life of Samuel Adams and the process of writing this and other biographies.

    Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government.

    Michael Gately is Assistant Director of the Center for American Studies at Columbia University and Executive Director of BIO, the international organization of biographers. He is currently writing a book about Woodrow Wilson and cycling in the 1890s.

     

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    American Everyman: Winslow Homer

    November 6, 2023

    Biographer William R. Cross gives a lively account of artist Winslow Homer’s varied and important life, taken from the text of Cross’ book Winslow Homer: American Passage. Homer was the visual art counterpart to contemporaries in American literature such as Mark Twain, and rubbed elbows with consummate New Yorkers such as his friend General Francis Channing Barlow, whom he depicted in the profound Prisoners from the Front.

    Homer was witness not only to the rhythms of sea, storm, tide, and season but also to the times in which he lived. Those times included the US Civil War, colonial tyranny, invention, and industrialization, and the challenge of achieving a just and equitable society in the Gilded Age. Homer’s astonishing breadth of subject, media, and perspective reflects his restless mind and innovative hand. His legacy comprises few answers but a broad range of enduring, entrancing questions.

    Join us to see afresh the man behind the art, a major American figure hidden in plain sight.

    William R. Cross is the author of Winslow Homer: American Passage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which The Washington Post calls “an exemplary biography” and The New Yorker named one of the best books of the year. He has spoken widely in Europe and the United States, from the Cleveland Museum of Art to the National Gallery in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, he curated Homer at the Beach, A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869-1880, a nationally acclaimed exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum that revealed Homer’s formation as a marine artist. Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, he is a graduate of Yale College, magna cum laude, and of the Harvard Business School.

  • Recital Series

    Kate Lindsey & Justina Lee

    October 16, 2023 - October 17, 2023

    Mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey is one of the most promising voices of her generation, receiving ovations from audiences in the world’s most prestigious opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, and Salzburg, Glyndebourne, and Aix-en-Provence festivals. She performs on a far more intimate stage with a chamber program that beautifully highlights her vivacious musicality, agile technique, and unmatched command of an audience.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Mutant;Destrudo

    October 11, 2023 - October 15, 2023

    Arca (the pseudonym of shape-shifting artist, singer, DJ, performer, and composer Alejandra Ghersi) has made her indelible mark by developing a transcendent, transgressive body of work that has collapsed long-standing barriers between artist and art, human and technology, avant-garde and pop, and many disciplines from music to visual art to fashion and beyond. Whether it be on a growing list of discography credits including Lady Gaga, Laurie Anderson, Björk, Frank Ocean, and FKA twigs, or appearing in fashion shows and campaigns for Calvin Klein, Balmain, Loewe, and Bottega Veneta, her creative evolution has elevated her from an icon of the experimental fringe into a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

    Directed by Arca, Mutant;Destrudo congregates her close friends and collaborators around a shared vision of creating space to allow for deconstruction of preconceptions. This ambitious new project is steeped in electronic music sound design to induce various states of embodied physicality and synthesize new ways to mediate both the ego and identity at large. The resulting Armory commission continues her ongoing practice of creating instances which merge all forms of creative practice, reexamining the ritual of the concert as a moment of heightened connection between those present.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Corpus Delicti

    October 7, 2023

    At a moment of maximum anxiety and backlash over the fundamental human rights to autonomy, expressivity, modification, and self-transformation of the body, this convening of artists, activists, and intellectuals imagines and enacts transgender art and music as a vehicle for dialogue across differences.

    This afternoon happening features a series of panel discussions exploring topics including an examination of trans life through the lens of time, and multigenerational voices telling their stories and exploring the creative projects that have been born out of trans life. Participants include: celebrated transgender trailblazer Kate Bornstein (any pronouns); visual and performance artist Cassils (they/them); GLITSINC Founder and Executive Director Ceyenne Doroshow (pronounced Kai-Ann, lady/she); internationally celebrated author, activist, and public speaker and Co-Founder Trans Student Educational Resources Eli Erlick (she/her); Faltas author and founder of Trans Equity Consulting Cecilia Gentili (she/her); psychoanalyst and internationally recognized expert on gender identity Griffin Hansbury (he/him); Abram J. Lewis (any pronouns), Co-Founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project; genderless dragon Tiamat Legion Medusa (it/its); interdisciplinary artist Carlos Motta (he/him); trans Latina writer, artist, and organizer XCSN (Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu) (she/her); trans health consultant and artist D’hana Perry (they/he); traveling artist and activist Early Shinada (they/them); academic and founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies Sandy Stone (she/her); Dao X. Tran (she/her), editor and Interim Co-Executive Director of oral history nonprofit Voices of Witness, that work to advance human rights; multidisciplinary artist Dorian Wood (she/they); Sierra Leonean-American vocalist, composer, and sound artist ricky sallay zoker aka YATTA (they/them); among others.

    Additional on-site activations include media and reading rooms, and a sound installation created by Aviva Silverman on behalf of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a grass-roots, volunteer-based archive of over 200 interviews of trans New Yorkers. This thought-provoking salon serves as a hub of activity celebrating transgender liberation through intergenerational kinship—sharing stories of survival, joy, and the legacies of counter-cultural movement building.

    Presented in conjunction with Mutant;Destrudo, the Armory’s new commission by the multifaceted artist and creator Arca that continues her practice of addressing themes of psychosexuality, science fiction, and gender identity.

  • Recital Series

    Sandbox Percussion

    October 1, 2023 - October 3, 2023

    Sandbox Percussion has established themselves as a leading proponent of this generation of contemporary percussion chamber music, captivating audiences with performances that are both visually and aurally striking while showcasing the imagination, integrity, and courage of their music making. Their unique mix of youthful energy with the precision of a well-established group is on full display in the Veterans Room with a lively program that vibrantly underscores their solid technique, rhythmical musicality, and lively showmanship including a world premiere piece by Chris Cerrone commissioned by the Armory and the New York premiere of Viet Cuong’s Next Week’s Trees.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Doppelganger

    September 22, 2023 - September 28, 2023

    Composed in 1828 in Franz Schubert‘s final days, Schwanengesang (Swan Song) traverses a myriad of emotions, from despair and delusion to ecstasy and love, to form a series of masterful snapshots of all that life can offer. Sitting at the pinnacle of a vocalist’s repertory, these emotive works are given a thrilling new life in the world premiere of a theatrical staging by one of opera’s most adventurous directors, Claus Guth.

    Performed by world-renowned tenor Jonas Kaufmann with his long-time collaborator pianist Helmut Deutsch, the heart-melting collection of songs is amplified by additional Schubert repertory, an evocative soundscape, and transformative light and video projections to create a production that is part performance and part installation art. Named for the last song “Der Doppelgänger,” in which a soldier sees themselves and comes to terms with the reality that they did not return from war, this Armory commission beautifully explores the hunger for life and its beauty and the idea that death is not a sudden moment but a last journey.

  • Recital Series

    Julia Bullock & John Arida

    September 11, 2023 - September 13, 2023

    Known for “communicat[ing] intense, authentic feeling, as if she were singing right from her soul” (Opera News), American soprano Julia Bullock has headlined productions and concerts at preeminent opera houses, concert halls, and festivals around the world. Most recently dazzling Armory audiences in the North American premiere of Michel van der Aa’s technologically ambitious chamber opera Upload in 2022, the acclaimed vocalist returns with pianist John Arida in a much more intimate space—the Board of Officers Room—for a program spanning the breadth of the song repertoire from the Romantic period to today that beautifully showcases her versatile artistry and probing intellect.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Salon: Hidden Conversations

    June 18, 2023

    In commemoration of Juneteenth, Park Avenue Armory partners with National Black Theatre (NBT) to uplift the work and impact of NBT founder Dr. Barbara Ann Teer as well as the ways she and many others serve as hidden architects of culture to help empower society, drive innovation, and foster community and social impact.

    Harlem Soapbox leads audiences on a journey into the music of the 1960’s and the Black Arts movement with a sonic mash-up of some of the songs that helped to power and inspire the social movements of that time. Archivist and filmmaker Steven Fullwood explores the crafting of the AfroFuture and National Black Theatre’s contribution to the theatrical and cultural canon with queen of funk Nona Hendryx and NBT CEO Sade Lythcott. And a second panel explores poet, playwright, and essayist June Jordan’s legacy and impact on architecture as it relates to the lives of Black families and communities as well as architectural, cultural, and civic renewal through built space with artist and cultural strategist Ebony Noelle Golden, writer and manager of McArthur Binion’s studio Camille Bacon, and poet Mahogany L. Browne.

    Additional activations offer a glimpse into new exhibitions and works in progress from National Black Theatre studio artists, including experimental theater maker nicHi douglas, dancer and writer Jerron Herman, director and producer Awoye Timpo, and original compositions by sound designers/composers Aaron Marcellus, Mikaal Sulaiman, Holland Andrews, JOJO ABOT, and Justin Hicks shared in a botanical meditative space. This happening also includes a live silent disco with DJ Stormin’ Norman; a selection of original films curated and commissioned by National Black Theatre, and a Trans Liberation pageant led and created by Qween Jean, costume designer and founder of Black Trans Liberation.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Doctor

    June 3, 2023 - August 19, 2023

    Having amazed Armory audiences with his adaptations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (2022), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2022), and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (2021), visionary director and playwright Robert Icke returns with the North American premiere of this gripping moral thriller following lauded runs at London’s Almeida Theatre and in the West End. This scorching examination of our age, a striking reimagining of the 1912 play Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, utilizes the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, identity, race, gender, privilege, and scientific rationality.

    Olivier Award-winner Juliet Stevenson stars as the doctor at the center of the drama where nothing is quite what—or who—it seems. A galvanizing piece of theater, the production serves as a stark health warning for an increasingly divided nation, where clashing views about the way we see ourselves and the world we live in today only magnify the complexities of life.

  • Recital Series

    Pavel Kolesnikov

    May 22, 2023 - May 24, 2023

    Hailed as “a poet of the piano” (Bachtrack), Pavel Kolesnikov is celebrated for his imaginative, thought-provoking programming which offers the listener a fresh, often unexpected perspective on familiar pieces. He brings this inventive spirit to the Armory with two distinct programs that poetically showcase his sensitivity, musicality, and sheer mastery of the instrument. He opens his residency with one of the most challenging works for a pianist—Bach’s towering classical keyboard masterpiece the Goldberg Variations—and then looks upward with a program of works by Scarlatti, Chopin, Scriabin, Messiaen, and others theatrically curated in an homage to artist Joseph Cornell’s orrery Celestial Navigation, which invokes the myths, images, and theories once used to explain the predictable yet baffling patterns of the night sky.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Hapo Na Zamani

    May 20, 2023

    Led by Black artists, activists, and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Arts Movement helped to shape the ideologies of Black identity, political beliefs, and African American culture at that time and with impact that can still be felt today. Hapo Na Zamani reimagines a happening from that era for today, combining elements of painting, spoken word, music, movement, wonder, and surprise to blur the boundaries between life and art and invite attendees to not only witness but become a part of the art in action.

    Hosted by Carl Hancock Rux with musical direction by Vernon Reid, the evening centers around a set of concerts by the Grammy Award-winning musician and a band of renegade musicians from Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber inspired by the greats of the Black Arts Movement and honoring the musical legacy of the late writer and intellectual Greg Tate. Before and after seated performance times, audiences are invited to engage with screenings of interdisciplinary artist Stefanie Batten Bland‘s film Kolonial, as well as other activations and installations featuring Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson, Nona Hendryx, Somi, Wunmi, Carrie Mae Weems, Dianne Smith, and other surprise guests.

    Co-presented with Harlem Stage as part of their Black Arts Movement: Then and Now Conference, bringing elements of the past and present together to reflect, examine, and point to the full experience and legacy of this cultural movement.

  • Recital Series

    Allan Clayton & James Baillieu

    April 27, 2023 - April 29, 2023

    Tenor Allan Clayton is established as one of the most exciting and sought-after singers of his generation with celebrated performances from Baroque to contemporary at opera houses around the world, including the title role in the US premiere of Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera in spring of 2022. He makes his North American recital debut with a program of lieder as well as art and folk songs that showcase his dynamic vocal range, abundant musicality, and magnetic stage presence.

  • Artists Studio

    Double Bill: Thurman Barker & The Colsons

    April 22, 2023

    A versatile drummer and percussionist, Thurman Barker has performed with countless singers and artists from the worlds of classical, pop, jazz, and those that defy categorization. His ensemble performs excerpts from three of his orchestral scores—South Side Suite, Pandemic Fever, and Mr. Speed-str—on a special double bill with “musical power couple” (The New York Times) Adegoke Steve Colson and Iqua Colson and their longtime collaborators Chico Freeman and Douglas R. Ewart. The Colsons’ vast body of work focuses on many facets of the human experience, illuminating social issues while taking listeners inside the aesthetics of art.

    Time Factor: Thurman Barker Quintet
    Adegoke Steve Colson and Iqua Colson’s Unity Troupe with Special Guests Chico Freeman and Douglas R. Ewart

  • Recital Series

    Stéphane Degout & Cédric Tiberghien

    April 3, 2023 - April 5, 2023

    Renowned for the finesse and sensitivity he conveys in his interpretations, baritone Stéphane Degout has taken the opera world by storm with appearances at major opera houses and festivals around the world. He comes to the Armory to perform a program of French art songs and German lieder that offers audiences the chance to get to know the boundless technique and abundant musicality of the burnished baritone in one of the only spaces that could provide such a personal encounter—the Board of Officers Room.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Salon: Juke Joint

    March 31, 2023 - April 1, 2023

    Join us for a two-day event spotlighting the history of the juke joint in Black American social history and its legacy in music and culture. Emerging during a time when Black Americans were barred from and unsafe in white establishments, juke joints offered a gathering place and secular cultural arena while building community around versatile and innovative Black musicians that ultimately serving as the fertile ground for the birth and spread of blues and rock and roll. Today, the juke joint is not only a location, but a cultural symbol that continues to inspire artists across media.

    Poet, writer, performer, and activist Pamela Sneed (Funeral Diva) celebrates the role of women and femme artists in the evolution and cultivation of blues and rock with her band through a tribute cabaret to the legendary female blues artist Big Mama Thornton on Friday evening. The first artist to record “Hound Dog” and composer of “Ball and Chain” later made famous by Janis Joplin, Big Mama Thornton got her start performing on the concert circuit in the segregated South and went on to become a Black feminist blues icon.

    On Saturday afternoon, singer-songwriter and playwright Stew (Passing Strange, Notes of a Native Song) premieres a new cabaret piece inspired by the symbiotic relationship with audience and performer that developed in the juke joint and is displayed in the call-and-response nature of Black music. Featuring new songs and texts drawn from his experiences as a Black artist in the punk clubs of his youth, on Broadway, and now in Ivy league universities, this happening puts the audience in the role of collaborator to the storyteller and explores the effect of race and class dynamic on that relationship.

    Following this performance, Stew and Sneed discuss the significance and legacy of the Juke Joint and how the rebel spirit of Black and female innovators lives on today at the intersection of political commentary, music, and cabaret culture in a conversation introduced by Curator of Public Programming Tavia Nyong’o.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    LOVE

    February 25, 2023 - March 25, 2023

    Having dazzled UK audiences at the National Theatre and garnered widespread acclaim around the world, this engaging new play makes its North American premiere and marks the New York debut of writer and director Alexander Zeldin. This powerful piece of drama—written after a years-long process of community collaboration and immersion, personal interviews, and first-hand accounts—draws attention to the cracks in the welfare system when several families are brought together in a shelter in the lead up to Christmas.

    The audience is invited to step inside their reality and bear witness to some of the touching, humorous, and profoundly human instances of their combined existence. Played with the house lights up and audience members seated amongst the company, the heart-breaking production reveals the cast seeming to live rather than act. The result is an authentic and intimate story for our times that shows rather than tells, born out of the daily rituals of survival to expose the humanity behind housing insecurity.

  • Artists Studio

    AACM Listening Session

    February 18, 2023

    Hailed as “perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation” by The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill is joined by Artists Studio curator Jason Moran for an intimate discussion and listening session spotlighting the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and their creative impact on American music. This insightful event explores the creative practice of some of the most forward-thinking composers and multi-instrumentalists who have been blending art forms and pushing boundaries since the collaborative’s inception more than 60 years ago.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Symposium: Sound & Color

    January 14, 2023 - January 15, 2023

    Join a state-of-the-art conversation about how race matters in creative design for live performance in our current moment of creative, technological, and cultural unrest. Hosted by lighting designer Jane Cox, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, set designer Mimi Lien, and sound designer and composer Mikaal Sulaiman, this interdisciplinary forum allows artists, intellectuals, and designers to explore lighting, sound, costume, and set design, as well as augmented reality, as sites of innovation, magic, and transformation.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Modern Gothic

    December 7, 2022

    Over the course of their nearly 20-year partnership, immigrant cabinetmakers Anton Kimbel (1822–1895) and Joseph Cabus (1824–1898) developed one of New York’s leading furniture and decorating firms, capturing national attention with their inventive Modern Gothic designs. They melded British and Continental design sources to create a wide range of forward-looking forms that appealed to equally adventurous clientele. Based upon the recent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, curators Barbara Veith and Medill H. Harvey share new scholarship and fresh insight into the firm and its contributions to American design history. The talk takes place in the Veterans Room by Louis C. Tiffany, Associated Artists and is followed by a visit to the Company K Room by Kimbel & Cabus.

    Barbara Veith joined the Brooklyn Museum in 2018 as Curatorial Research Assistant to Dr. Barry R. Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts, to help organize the Modern Gothic exhibition and the accompanying publication; she is honored to have completed it in his memory as Guest Curator and Co-Author with Medill H. Harvey. She has continued at the museum as a research associate of Decorative Arts. From 2010 to 2017, Veith was adjunct faculty at the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons MA Program in the History of Design. She guest-curated Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company (2011–13), an exhibition that originated at the University Museums, University of Richmond, Virginia. From 1999 to 2009, she was a research associate in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and contributed to exhibitions including Women China Decorators in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001) and Louis Comfort Tiffany at Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate (2005). From 1989 to 1996 she worked at Christie’s.

    Medill H. Harvey is the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She oversees the collections of American silver, jewelry, and other metalwork, as well as mid-19th-century furniture. Harvey joined the staff of the American Wing to direct research for the exhibition Art and The Empire City (2000). She is Co-Author of Early American Silver in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013) and a contributing author for American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). She contributed to The Met’s 2009 and 2011 reinstallations of the American silver and jewelry collections and the exhibition Silversmiths to the Nation (2007). Her most recent publication is Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. (2021), written to accompany an exhibition that will be mounted at The Met in 2024.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Euphoria

    November 29, 2022 - January 8, 2023

    Known by Armory audiences for his 2016 presentation of the “utterly absorbing” (ARTNews) film installation Manifesto starring Cate Blanchett, artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt creates elaborately staged films that investigate the power of language and the conventions of cinema as an allegory for societal and individual behaviors. He continues this examination with the multi-channel film installation Euphoria, which explores capitalism, colonialism, and the influential effects of unlimited economic growth in society.

    This immersive new work is scored with original music composed by Samy Moussa with an additional composition by Cassie Kinoshi. Presented in an arena-like setting, this Armory commission fully surrounds the viewer with life-size projections of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and acclaimed jazz drummers Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, Yissy García, Eric Harland, and Antonio Sanchez, whose rhythmic and narrative nature mirrors the machinery of economy. Thoughts and musings from a variety of sources from economists, business magnates, writers, and celebrities from the likes of Warren Buffet, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman to Audre Lorde, John Steinbeck, Donna Haraway, and Snoop Dogg take on new meaning as they are reinterpreted as poetic monologues in real and imagined scenes of euphoric production and consumption, including a bank lobby that fills with surreal dance choreographies and acrobatics, five homeless men discussing economic theory, and an empty supermarket with a prowling singing tiger. The result is a searing monument to the history of greed that raises seminal questions around the success and enduring legacy of entrepreneurship.

  • Recital Series

    Ying Fang & Ken Noda

    November 19, 2022 - November 20, 2022

    “Star in the making” (The New York Times) soprano Ying Fang is cultivating a burgeoning international career on some of the world’s most important opera stages. The New York Times praised her performance at The Metropolitan Opera as “a source of pure joy and light…sung with a soprano of succulent sweetness.” She has appeared with the country’s top orchestras, including the San Francisco and Houston Symphonies, the Cleveland Orchestra, and more.

  • Artists Studio

    Camille Norment & Craig Taborn

    November 18, 2022

    Multimedia artist Camille Norment uses the notion of cultural psychoacoustics, defined by the artist as the investigation of sociocultural phenomena through sound and music—specifically instances of sonic and social dissonance, to create works that span the thresholds of the social and the political. She is joined by improvising pianist, composer, and electronic musician Craig Taborn, a longtime collaborator known to Armory audiences from their 2016 Artists Studio appearance, for a new project that blends the pair’s unique styles and instruments, from the piano, bells, and chimes to found instruments, electronics, and the rare glass armonica. Playing with overtones and intentional feedback, the resulting collaboration perfectly marries the varying aesthetics of the Veterans Room by also extending to the audience, who are invited to create their own sonic elements that feed into the larger, immersive sound world.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Design on Display

    October 17, 2022

    The department store redefined the shopping experience in New York at the turn of the 20th century. This transformation was the work of architects, window dressers, shopfitters, and interior decorators who made the department store a significant site for design production and innovation. Display became central to the economic aims and artistic pursuits of leading retail outlets including Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, Abraham & Straus, Wanamaker’s, and Siegel Cooper. Architects multiplied show windows, shopfitters customized casework, window dressers built ambitious arrangements, and decorators created immersive interiors. Stores’ success thrived on speed and change. Techniques and technologies of attraction developed to keep pace with consumer taste and demand. Exploring behind-the-scenes in window display workrooms, shop fitting factory floors, and architects’ and designers’ studios, this illustrated talk by curator Emily M. Orr highlights the department store’s dynamic role in design history.

    Emily M. Orr is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. She holds a PhD in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Her primary areas of scholarship include industrial design, retail history, and the modern interior. She is the author of Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor and author of E. McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in Advertising (Rizzoli Electa/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2020).

  • Artists Studio

    Rodney McMillian

    October 15, 2022

    History must be remembered, analyzed, and reworked to inform the current discourse and future discourses. This seminal theory lies at the heart of conceptual artist, writer, and performer Rodney McMillian‘s Hanging with Clarence. This performative work combines text from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ polarizing 1985 commencement address at Savannah State University—rich with conservative views on social programs and race—with funk-rock songs written by the artist, George Clinton and Fuzzy Haskins, and others. Performed by McMillian and talented back-up singers Tekeytha Fullwood and Shauna L. Howard, the resulting happening is part musical theater salon, part rock concert, and part spiritual testimony that all perfectly intertwine to further the artist’s ongoing exploration of history, race, and identity politics.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Symposium: Art at Water's Edge

    October 9, 2022

    Artists, activists, and designers engage the meeting of land with water. Facing climate change and rising sea levels, this event links New York with communities across the nation and globe that sit at water’s edge. This afternoon activation is inspired by acclaimed director Peter Sellars’ call to “listen to the oceans,” and by director and scholar May Joseph‘s call for cosmopolitan citizenship in “fluid New York.” From the work of Indigenous water protectors who challenge extractive futures to urban planners responding to waterfront access, Art at Water’s Edge will offer an intergenerational forum for the imagination in action.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)

    September 27, 2022 - October 8, 2022

    Fifty years ago, composer Morton Feldman wrote music to commemorate the opening of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. A half-century later, composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist and MacArthur “Genius” Tyshawn Sorey has created a new piece, commissioned by the Armory, as a tribute to both the deeply contemplative space and the work by this composer that has influenced his creative output. The resulting score provides the listener with the feeling of being enveloped in sound in much the same way that Mark Rothko’s paintings give in that space, revealing ever changing shades of color and texture.

    Visionary director Peter Sellars returns to the Armory following his unforgettable stagings of St. Matthew Passion (2014) and FLEXN (co-created with Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray in 2015, 2017) to ritualize this deeply moving work. Within the confines of a ceremonial chamber, audiences are immersed in Sorey’s composition, works by celebrated visual artist Julie Mehretu, and choreography by flex pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray to gain new perspectives on time, space, and movement. And while profoundly personal, this spiritual happening also serves as an invocation of the collective memory and ancestral trauma of our time and the distant but resonant past.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Tin Pan Alley and American Musical Comedy

    September 22, 2022

    Musical director Robert Lamont and singer-actress Gabrielle Lee celebrate the history and music of New York’s Tin Pan Alley with a fascinating look at the music publishing district’s relationship to musical theater and a performance of songs that illustrate the development of American musical comedy from 1890 to 1910. Lee and Lamont perform several works that were published on 28th Street and discuss the musical shows that introduced them to American audiences. The program focuses on important composers, songwriters, and performers who made major contributions to building the American show music industry during these two decades that constitute the golden age of Tin Pan Alley. Two songs from The Seventh Regiment Songbook that were published on Tin Pan Alley are also be performed. This event is presented in cooperation with the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project.

    Robert Lamont is a musical director, composer, and educator who has worked on and off Broadway as well as regionally with such artists as Carol Burnett, Jerry Orbach, Marc Anthony, and Duncan Sheik. A veteran public-school educator, he was Curriculum Development Co-Chair for the New York City Department of Education’s current Blueprint for Teaching Music. He is a board member of the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project.

    Gabrielle Lee is equally at home in theater, television, film, and concert performance with the NY Pops, among others. She has taken leading roles in Broadway and European tours, Off-Broadway, regionally, and more. Lee has performed as a backing vocalist with such artists as Aloe Blacc, Steely Dan, Natalie Cole, and Harry Belafonte. Also at home with the popular music and American Songbook performed in her shows, her globally successful one-woman show, Blackbirds, celebrates performers such as Florence Mills, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge—and the songwriters who gave them wings. She was a featured performer on Tin Pan Alley Day 2021.

    The Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project promotes appreciation for the historic beginning of American Popular Music and the modern music business on and around West 28th Street in New York City. Through telling the stories of the songwriters, music publishers, and songs that formed the sound and industry of American Popular Music in the first half of the 20th Century, the project connects people with the power of music as an essential element of New York City and American cultural history.

  • Recital Series

    Emily D'Angelo

    September 16, 2022 - September 18, 2022

    Internationally recognized Emily D’Angelo has made a name for herself as a trailblazing artist with her ongoing collaborations with some of today’s most prolific contemporary composers. A recipient of a 2020 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, the Birgit Nilsson Prize, and the Monini Prize from the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi, D’Angelo makes her North American solo recital debut with pianist Sophia Muñoz in a program of highlighted pieces from her debut album enargeia on Deutsche Grammophon, including songs by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Missy Mazzoli, and Hildegard von Bingen. The program also features works by other noted female composers Cecilia Livingston, Florence Price, Rebecca Clarke, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Clara Schumann as well excerpts from Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson and two songs by Schönberg.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    BLOOM

    September 10, 2022

    Speculums have shown up in archaeological digs as far back as 79 AD amidst the dust of Pompeii. However, the apparatus most women experience today in vaginal exams is credited to the physician James Marion Sims, sometimes called the “father of American gynecology,” a moniker earned on the backs of experiments conducted on enslaved women. Rooted in both research and object-making, legendary artist Nao Bustamante creates a cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of this medical tool and its use in the history of the pelvic examination.

    Joined by musician and performance artist Geo Wyex, interdisciplinary artist Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, and composer and reiki master Pamela Martínez, Bustamante creates a performance that is part séance, part pageant to make way for a new era of examination of the device as well as its patriarchal inventors. And while the desired result is an invitation to think about ways to make the tool less unpleasant for the millions of patients who encounter it each year, the work also boldly focuses on the speculum’s impact on timely issues of women’s health practices.

  • Recital Series

    Michael Spyres & Mathieu Pordoy

    September 7, 2022 - September 9, 2022

    One of the most sought-after tenors of his generation, Michael Spyres has been seen on stages across Europe and the United States including La Scala, Wiener Staatsoper, Aix-en-Provence Festival, and The Metropolitan Opera. He makes his North American solo recital debut in the intimate Board of Officers Room with pianist Mathieu Pordoy in a program of including Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, and Liszt’s Tre sonetti di Petrarca.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Skillshare

    August 21, 2022

    Join a range of Armory artists and partners for an enlightening and interactive afternoon of open studios, workshops, activations, and discussion for people of all ages to explore dance, poetry, music, and more.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Oresteia

    July 13, 2022 - August 13, 2022

    Aeschylus’ greatest and final play is a searing familial saga that examines the sins of a family over several decades and explores whether justice can ever really be done. Robert Icke‘s Olivier Award-winning adaptation of this moral dilemma comes to the Armory for its North American premiere following sold-out runs at the Almeida Theatre and on London’s West End.

    Icke radically reimagines this Greek drama for the modern stage, condensing the tragic trilogy into a single performance that electrifies and devastates in equal measure with Olivier Award-nominated Anastasia Hille (The Effect, The Master Builder) in the role of Klytemnestra. This daring update allows audiences to investigate the justification of vengeance, the possibility of finding justice in retaliation, and the role of judicial democracy at work—themes that continue to resonate nearly two and a half millennia after the play was written.

    This production will play in repertory with Hamlet for the first time, allowing audiences to experience the throughlines and connections in these classic dramas—depicting two epic family sagas written over 2,000 years apart—performed by the same cast.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Archer Aymes Retrospective: A Juneteenth Exhibition

    June 19, 2022

    Explore the legacy of emancipation through an immersive art installation curated by Carl Hancock Rux with Tavia Nyong’o and Dianne Smith of newly discovered works by Archer Aymes, the elusive subject of Rux’s Obie-award winning play Talk, which had its premiere at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. The retrospective includes a light and sound installation that reconstructs Aymes’ experimental film Mother and Son—based on his novel of the same name and cultural artifacts that may have helped Aymes construct its story. Also on display is an accompanying altar of lost and found objects from an impossible archive of images, objects, and sounds Aymes collected in his attempt to explore the never-ending racial injustice that continues to shape the lives of its victims into the 21st century.

    The event also features a concert performance by mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and pianist Aaron Diehl from the operatic repertoire of Puccini, Weill, and Bernstein that touches upon various themes, from Aymes’ rumored closeness to Nina Simone to the desolation of family separation.

    This event is one component of a three-part series curated by Carl Hancock Rux in commemoration of Juneteenth, in collaboration with Harlem Stage and Lincoln Center as part of the Festival of New York.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Hamlet

    June 10, 2022 - August 13, 2022

    Hailed as “one of the most important forces in today’s theatre” (The Observer, UK), Robert Icke has drawn acclaim from critics and audiences alike for his intelligent and accessible productions that bring fresh, new perspectives to classical texts. The Olivier Award–winning director unleashes his visionary creativity at the Armory with the North American premiere of a radical new staging of Shakespeare’s classic.

    This highly charged staging transforms the traditional family drama into a psychological thriller, transporting the action to our current surveillance society in which rolling media news feeds provide juicy updates of a life lived on screen while blurring the lines between public and private life. Alex Lawther (The Imitation Game, The Last Duel, The French Dispatch, Black Mirror) portrays the obsessive prince consumed by grief, brilliantly embodying his mental decay to boldly examine the devastating effects his anguish has not only on his own psyche, but on his family and country.

    This production will play in repertory with Oresteia for the first time, allowing audiences to experience the throughlines and connections in these classic dramas—depicting two epic family sagas written over 2,000 years apart—performed by the same cast.

  • Recital Series

    Justin Austin & Howard Watkins

    May 24, 2022

    Praised in Opera News as “a gentle actor and elegant musician,” Justin Austin brings his “mellifluous baritone” (The Wall Street Journal) to the Armory. Austin has worked with international opera companies such as Washington National Opera, The Metropolitan Opera, and Bayerische Staatsoper. Alongside Juilliard pianist, Howard Watkins, he will perform an intimate program in the Board of Officers Room featuring a series of art songs by Ricky Ian Gordon set to the poems of Langston Hughes as well as works by American composers including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Damien Sneed, and more.

  • Artists Studio

    Jason Moran

    May 20, 2022 - May 21, 2022

    Pianist and composer Jason Moran returns to the Armory’s Artists Studio series for a night of solo piano and jazz, his first solo program at the Armory since the series’ inception in 2016. He returns to the Armory after a sold-out run of his 2021 Social Distance Hall program Party in the Bardo, created with Laurie Anderson. This MacArthur “Genius” and jazz luminary is sure to excite with a new program created specifically for the Veterans Room.

  • Recital Series

    Ensemble Correspondances

    May 18, 2022

    The “musically exquisite” (The New York Times) Ensemble Correspondances brings together under the direction of the harpsichordist and organist Sébastien Daucé a collective of singers and instrumentalists, specialists in the music of the Grand Siècle. The ensemble has become a major force in the 17th-century French repertory and in period compositions of the early music canon. They will present a program of period music from the Plaisirs du Louvre, Music for the Chamber of Louis XIII.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Salon/Performance: Queer Hip Hop Cypher

    May 15, 2022

    Join us for an exploration of the queer origins and aesthetics of hip hop through discussion, film, performance, and food. The event includes a Black healing portal curated by Astraea award-winning duo Krudxs Cubensi, a session with Soul Fire Farm on BIPOC vegan foodways and their connection to community-centered activism, and a panel discussion centering on the queer underground hip hop scene led by Hip Hop Heresies author and scholar Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls.

    CLAGS (The Center for LGBTQ Studies) award-winning hip hop musician and dharma teacher Shanté Paradigm Smalls leads an enlightening roundtable discussion focusing on the ways that hip hop culture in film, visual art, and music in New York City from the 1970s to today offers queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality, and how this might affect the future of hip hop. Panelists include Creative Capital grant-winner and Priestess of Twerk Nia Witherspoon, Afro-Latina MC, artist, and activist Ms.Boogie; Chair of New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Dr. Jason King; and educator, poet, youth advocate, and hip hop artist tim’m west.

    Krudxs Cubensi headlines Black Healing Portal II: Más allá del tiempo / Beyond Time, a queer Afro-Cuban hip hop cypher featuring dance, drumming, projections, procession, and community offerings that links Afro-Yoruba spiritual practices to modern rapping and explores race, religion, gender, class, and sexuality. This immersive session features a presentation by Librada González Fernández of Archivo CubaneCuir, Afro-Cuban dancer Yesenia Selier and batá drummers, poet and Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Café Caridad “La Bruja” De La Luz, and the music and art of Krudxs Cubensi. Group members Odaymar Cuesta and Oli Prendes adhere to vegan lifestyles and politics, and the event includes a riveting keynote address delivered by Soul Fire Farm’s Co-Founder and Farm Manager Leah Penniman that underscores the importance of BIPOC food sovereignty, food justice, and ancestral connection between food and land, as well as a reading by Soul Fire Farm Director of Education and poet Naima Penniman.

  • Recital Series

    Alarm Will Sound

    April 14, 2022 - April 15, 2022

    New music ensemble Alarm Will Sound will take over the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall to perform Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams’ Ten Thousand Birds. Exploring the connections between nature and music, the work is based on the songs of birds that are native to or migrate through the American Northeast and Midwest and features new staging created specifically for the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

    Conceived, designed, and directed by Alan Pierson, with staging and assistant direction by Peter Ferry, this 70-minute interpretation follows the cycle of a day, following birdsongs from morning to afternoon, then evening, night, and returning to morning. It also uses the vast expanse of the Drill Hall by moving the performers around as they play and encouraging the audience to walk around to experience the music from many perspectives.

  • Artists Studio

    Joan Jonas

    April 2, 2022

    A pioneer of performance and video art, multimedia artist Joan Jonas works in video, performance, installation, sound, text, sculpture, and drawing, collaborating with musicians and dancers on improvisational works for both museums and theatrical stages. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas invests texts from the past with the politics of the present and disrupts the conventions of theatrical storytelling. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her work continues to inspire development in many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Upload

    March 22, 2022 - March 30, 2022

    Where does our identity reside: in our minds, our bodies, or our relationships? This seminal question lies at the heart of the latest work by visionary composer, film and stage director, and librettist Michel van der Aa. Having dazzled Armory audiences with his technologically ambitious chamber opera Blank Out in 2017, van der Aa returns for the highly anticipated North American premiere of this groundbreaking new operatic work that blends live performance, technical innovation, and immersive film.

    The acclaimed Julia Bullock and Roderick Williams star as a daughter and her father who, when confronted by his inevitable death, have his thoughts and memories uploaded to achieve virtual immortality. At once highly conceptual and deeply emotional, this thought-provoking work examines technologies of our near-future and the impact they play on fate, identity, and everlasting life.

  • Making Space at the Armory

    Salon: Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation

    February 20, 2022

    This Sunday Salon offers an opportunity to engage with the vision of Rashaad Newsome‘s Assembly by bringing the artist in dialogue with his collaborators and others engaged in the freedom fight for personal and collective liberation. Through roundtable discussions and a performance showcase, paired with an opportunity to experience Newsome’s world-building taken to new heights in the Drill Hall, this salon will invite attendees to take a quantum leap into Black visual complexity and spirit.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Assembly

    February 18, 2022 - March 6, 2022

    Assembly, a new multi-experiential work by interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome, commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, transforms the Armory’s expansive Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an exhibition space, performance hall, classroom, and theater. During the day, upon entering the Drill Hall, visitors will encounter many dimensions of Newsome’s practice: video-mapped walls that pulsate with projected imagery of computer-generated diasporic fractals inspired by the geometry within traditional African culture; a 30-foot-tall hologram sculpture of vogue performers morphing and transforming; and collage and sculptural works that merge and mutate images of Black and Black Queer culture, fashion, West African sculptures, textiles, and masks with 19th-century ebony Dutch-style frame. The next room contains Being who is at the center of Assembly. Being is a digital griot who generates poetry and models and instructs audiences in reflection, contemplation, movement, and dialogue. Being will lead three participatory workshops each day that teach decolonization through a combination of lecture, critical thinking, dance, storytelling, conversation, and mindfulness meditation. Visitors are invited to sign up in advance for the workshops, or simply observe from the theater seats. When not teaching, Being will recite poetry based on the work of queer poet Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes. Being’s recitations will be backed by a soundscape composed by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.

    In the evening, the work flows into performances featuring an international collective of dancers, singers, musicians, and MCs that celebrate the many facets of vogue culture in our world. Newsome says of his commission: “Assembly will offer audiences a new way of thinking about rights, liberty, and humanity, using the so rarely explored paradox of the Black experience and the advancement of technology as a jumping-off point. As visitors walk through the exhibition, they will be compelled to consider their relationship to technology and its connections to the culture of domination. Through explorations into the connections between quantum energy, Black sociality, and Black liberation movements, one thing becomes clear: the only way we will get to the future is together. This type of beloved togetherness starts with a real reboot.”

  • 2021 Season

    Land of Broken Dreams

    December 9, 2021 - December 11, 2021

    Accompanying Carrie Mae Weems’ monumental exhibition, The Shape of Things, Land of Broken Dreams is a large-scale, multidisciplinary convening and concert series that will activate the Armory with a wide range of conversations, presentations, and performances featuring artists, poets, singers, dancers, thinkers, and scholars sharing work and exploring some of the most urgent issues facing society today.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Hero of Two Worlds

    December 7, 2021

    Few in history can match the breadth and depth of the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over 50 incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought as one with righteous revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. As an idealistic and courageous teenager serving in the American Revolution, he used his considerable wealth and savvy to help the Americans defeat the British. He then returned home and was a principal player in the French Revolution. And, in his final act, at 70 years old, he was instrumental in the dramatic overthrow of the Bourbon Dynasty during the Revolution of 1830. Lafayette was a particular admirer of the old Seventh Regiment, which served as his honor guard in 1824, forging a bond between our regiment and France that remained long into the 20th century. Join author and podcaster Mike Duncan as he describes how Lafayette remained unshakably committed through an era of upheaval to his principles of liberty and democracy, his resolve never wavering.

    Mike Duncan is one of the most popular history podcasters in the world and author of The New York Times bestselling book, The Storm Before the Storm. His award-winning series, The History of Rome, remains a legendary landmark in the history of podcasting. Duncan’s ongoing series, Revolutions, explores the great political revolutions that have driven the course of modern history.

    For more information about Mike Duncan’s new book, Hero of Two Worlds, visit publicaffairsbooks.com.

    The Marquis de Lafayette (copy of the portrait by Joseph-Désiré Court in the Musee National, Versailles, France). Presented to the Seventh Regiment on April 12, 1934 by the Republic of France. Photo Credit: 7th Regiment Archives, NYSMM

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Shape of Things

    December 1, 2021 - December 31, 2021

    Carrie Mae Weems, an artist who has consistently and poignantly addressed the conditions of race in the United States, will create a multi-work installation and series of performances titled The Shape of Things. Weems’ unflinching gaze at what she describes as the “pageantry” and “circus-like” quality of contemporary American political life find form in a series of large-scale installations and a cyclorama (a panoramic image on the inside of a cylindrical platform) of six to eight projections of new and existing film footage where Weems addresses the turmoil of current events and the “long march forward.” Suggestive of a 19th-century carnival with dioramas based on spontaneous street memorials, peep shows, and a Pepper’s Ghost, The Shape of Things is an incisive, powerfully emotional, and critical reflection on events both deeply embedded in American culture and history and the explosive events of the past year.

  • Recital Series

    Jamie Barton & Jake Heggie

    November 19, 2021 - November 21, 2021

    Charismatic American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton partners with pianist Jake Heggie on a program of Brahms, Schubert, and Heggie, with special attention to female composers. Recipient of the Beverly Sills Artist Award, Richard Tucker Award, and BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition (both Main and Song Prizes), and a Grammy nomination, Barton is navigating a huge career on the opera and recital stage. “Leader of a new generation of opera stars” (The New York Times), Barton brings this leadership to what promises to be stirring and engaging performances. Barton will showcase the sheer beauty of her voice in the intimate Board of Officers Room.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Barbizon

    November 16, 2021

    Built in 1927, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious safe haven for the “modern woman” hoping for a career in the arts. Over time, it became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman seeking fame and fortune. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, and, over the years, its almost 700 tiny rooms with matching floral curtains and bedspreads housed, among many others, Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, and Jaclyn Smith; and writers Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, and Meg Wolitzer. Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, as did Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School its students, and the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. Before the hotel’s residents were household names, they were young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase and a dream. An Armory neighborhood landmark, the Barbizon offered its residents a room of their own and a life without family obligations. It gave women a chance to remake themselves however they pleased; it was the hotel that set them free. No place had existed like it before or has since.

    Paulina Bren is an award-winning writer and historian who teaches at Vassar College. She attended Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, later receiving a MA in international studies from the University of Washington, and a PhD in history from New York University. Her most recent book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster, 2021), is a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has received international press coverage, with reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian’s Sunday Observer, and The London Times, among others. In addition, Bren is a well-known scholar of everyday life and communism behind the Iron Curtain, starting with her groundbreaking book, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell UP, 2010), which cast the first line in what is now a new field of study.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Daughters of Yalta

    October 19, 2021

    ensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. For all that is known about “The Big Three” and their time spent deliberating the fate of postwar Germany and much of the world, too often overlooked is the parallel history of three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that powerfully colored these crucial days. Anna Roosevelt, Kathleen Harriman (the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union) and Sarah Churchill, through an intricate web of politics, clashing loyalties, and secret power brokering, each in her own turn played an intrinsic role in a conference that would shape the rest of history as we know it.

    Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian from Chicago. She graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a BA in history and in 2014 received her MPhil in modern European history from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, where she wrote her dissertation on the origins of modern counterintelligence practices. After graduating, Katz worked in finance in New York City before returning to history and writing. She is pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. The Daughters of Yalta is her first book.

  • Artists Studio

    Carol Szymanski & jaimie branch

    October 13, 2021

    One of today’s outstanding avant-garde trumpeters, jaimie branch, and Rome Prize Winner, sculptor Carol Szymanski, team up for the first time to present the Phonemophonic Alphabet Brass Band. Szymanski and her obsession with the shape of sound will fill the intricate architecture of the Veterans Room with a collection of instrument sculptures consisting of 26 brass horns whose shapes are based on the alphabet. The aural animation of this installation will be led by branch and joined with a large ensemble of fellow brass musicians.

  • Recital Series

    Will Liverman & Myra Huang

    October 10, 2021 - October 11, 2021

    Baritone Will Liverman brings his “velvet voice” (NPR) and “nuanced, heartfelt storytelling” (The Guardian) to the Armory’s Board of Officers Room alongside pianist Myra Huang for a program highlighting Black composers and writers as well as works from the traditional classical music canon. Liverman will perform songs by Black composers Brian McKnight, Damien Sneed, Margaret Bonds, and H. Leslie Adams. The program also includes works by Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Loewe, and Strauss.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Deep Blue Sea

    September 28, 2021 - October 9, 2021

    Following the sold-out run of Afterwardsness, renowned director, choreographer, and dancer Bill T. Jones returns to Park Avenue Armory to present and perform in the world premiere of his massive new work, Deep Blue Sea, which revolves around the interplay of single and group identities. Jones, Janet Wong, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company conceived this highly personal work in pursuit of the elusive “we” during these fractious times through a cast of 100 dancers/community members, and a deconstructed text from Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

    Conceived for the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Deep Blue Sea magnifies the vast space through a visual environment by Elizabeth Diller of the architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Tony Award-nominated projection designer Peter Nigrini. Diller’s design utilizes dynamic projections, supported by theatrical lighting. This non-traditional relationship between video and theatrical lighting transforms the entire stage into a large scale, immersive screen. The production creative team also includes lighting designer Robert Wierzel and costume designer Liz Prince. An original vocal score by composer Nick Hallett and electronic soundscape by Hprizm aka High Priest, Rena Anakwe, and Holland Andrews echoes the words of King and Melville. In addition to choreographing and directing, for the first time in over 15 years, Jones himself performs.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Seventh at Sea

    September 21, 2021

    Historian and author Gareth Russell, author of The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era (2019), is known for examining the personal lives and experiences of the Titanic’s more notable passengers to immerse his audience in the story of one of history’s greatest disasters.  In this lecture, he focuses on two men who were closely related to the Armory’s Seventh Regiment—Archibald Gracie IV, a veteran member of the Regiment and part of an old New York family, and Frank Millet, a notable artist whose work at the Armory in 1880 has been recently restored. Within a week of setting sail, they were caught up in the horrifying disaster of the Titanic’s sinking, one of the biggest news stories of the century. Today, we can see their stories and the Titanic’s voyage as the beginning of the end of the established hierarchy of the Edwardian era. Using previously unpublished sources and artifacts, Russell immerses his audience in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history.

    Gareth Russell is a historian, novelist, and playwright who was educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. His 2019 book, The Ship of Dreams, was named a Book of the Year by The London Times and a Best History Book of 2019 by The Daily Telegraph. Previous works include Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII (2017), A History of the English Monarchy from Boadicea to Elizabeth I (2015), and An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors (2014).

  • Recital Series

    Paul Appleby & Conor Hanick

    September 20, 2021 - September 22, 2021

    “Essentially lyric” (Opera News) tenor Paul Appleby and “brilliant” (The New York Times) pianist Conor Hanick make their Armory debuts in the opening of Armory’s 2021 Recital Series with a program of German Lieder in the intimate Board of Officers Room. Admired for his interpretive depth, vocal strength, and range of expressivity, Appleby showcases his strong commitment to the repertoire with songs by Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, and Berg.

  • 2021 Season

    Helga: The Armory Conversations

    July 14, 2021 - September 29, 2021

    Artist, performer and host Helga Davis brings a soulful curiosity about and love of people to the podcast Helga: The Armory Conversations. She draws the listener into intimate conversations with artists, scholars and cultural change-makers, famous and lesser known, who join her to share the steps they’ve taken along their paths. These inspiring conversations expand our world and our imaginations as we explore what we think we know about each other. The new season of Helga is a co-production of WNYC Studios and Park Avenue Armory. WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, On the Media, and Death, Sex & Money.Part American palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Enemy of the People

    June 22, 2021 - July 8, 2021

    Building on the institution’s commitment to presenting spectacular, unconventional productions that cannot be mounted in traditional theaters, Park Avenue Armory announces the fourth commissioned work in its Social Distance Hall series: the world premiere of Enemy of the People, written by Henrik Ibsen and adapted by the groundbreaking director and playwright Robert Icke (1984, The Doctor, Mary Stuart, Hamlet, Oresteia, and Oedipus). As conceived by Robert Icke, the play weaves a tale of morality, suspense, and controversy, with multiple characters represented by a single actor—Emmy Award-winning actor Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale).

    Commissioned by Park Avenue Armory and developed during the pandemic, the play centers on a small former manufacturing town that has been revitalized as a resort destination due to its natural hot springs. When a scientist, who is the sister of the town’s Mayor, finds that the water is contaminated and the baths must be shut down, a democratic society confronts, in public and in private, a complex ethical crisis. The audience will be seated at tables and will be invited to vote as a group at critical moments of the story—and the majority vote will determine the play’s direction at each juncture.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Afterwardsness

    May 19, 2021 - May 26, 2021

    Afterwardsness is a hypnotic new commission by Tony Award-winning choreographer, director, and dancer Bill T. Jones. Performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in the expansive Wade Thompson Drill Hall for an audience of 100, Afterwardsness addresses the isolation and trauma of the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and on-going violence against Black bodies. The poignancy of the movement is under-pinned by a musical landscape featuring a new vocal composition by Holland Andrews, a violin solo for George Floyd entitled “Homage” by Pauline Kim Harris, as well as excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s war-time composition Quartet for the End of Time.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Party in the Bardo

    May 5, 2021 - May 9, 2021

    The Armory’s Social Distance Hall commissioning initiative continues this May with Party in the Bardo, a collaboration between multidisciplinary artist and MacArthur “Genius” Jason Moran, who curates the Armory’s Artists Studio Series, and multi-Grammy Award–winning performance artist Laurie Anderson. Over four nights, Anderson and Moran will perform in the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, underpinned by the soundscape of LOU REED: DRONES, a sonic installation utilizing guitars from Reed’s collection and curated by his former guitar technician Stewart Hurwood. Anderson and Moran will invite two groups of artists to add their own layer of artistry over the Drones, joining them in these improvisational sonic meditations for the city of New York.

  • Interrogations of Form

    100 Years | 100 Women Conversation Series

    April 30, 2021 - August 27, 2021

    Join the Park Avenue Armory and The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a 100 Years | 100 Women Conversation Series, which will engage the project’s participants in a set of informal lunch-time chats. Starting on Friday, April 30, project partners will host two conversations every month through the end of August. Each moderated conversation features a discussion amongst a diverse, multidisciplinary group of participants that explores specific topics that resonate with the Project and are responsive to the complexities and turbulence of the pandemic era.

    Participants in the Conversation Series were invited by Park Avenue Armory and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with the nine other New York City cultural institutions that form the Project Partner group, including: Apollo Theater; The Juilliard School; La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club; The Laundromat Project; Museum of the Moving Image; National Black Theatre; National Sawdust; New York University (Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts; Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation; and Institute of African American Affairs and Center for Black Visual Culture); and Urban Bush Women.

    All episodes in the 100 Years | 100 Women Conversation Series will be archived on the 100 Years | 100 Women Project Archive website. Information about partner institutions and participants, access to YouTube Livestream links, and archived videos of the conversations will be accessible through the digital archive.

    All Conversations begin with a Native Welcome recorded by Henu Josephine Tarrant (Ho-Chunk/Hopi/Rappahannock) and end with Our Sisters, Daughters and Mothers, a Southeastern Woodlands contemporary Women’s Honor Song, created and recorded by Martha Redbone (Cherokee/Choctaw/African American descent).

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    SOCIAL! the social distance dance club

    April 9, 2021 - April 22, 2021

    SOCIAL! the social distance dance club, commissioned by the Armory for its Social Distance Hall, is a new interactive and experiential movement piece conceived by choreographer Steven Hoggett, Tony Award-winning set designer Christine Jones—both of whom are currently Armory Artists-in-Residence—and multimedia artist and musician David Byrne (Talking Heads, David Byrne’s American Utopia on stage and film, and Reasons to be Cheerful). With a playlist curated by Byrne, Hoggett, and Jones and mixed by New York City DJ Natasha Diggs, SOCIAL! invites participants to the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall to dance in their own socially distanced spotlights, all while listening to a wonderfully singular instructional voice over by David Byrne with choreography by Yasmine Lee. Moving free-form or in sync with the spoken choreography, audience members take part in a communal moment of cathartic release.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Age of Innocence at 100 Years

    December 15, 2020

    This year marks the centennial anniversary of Edith Wharton’s great novel, The Age of Innocence. This lavishly illustrated lecture will explore Edith Wharton’s New York, both the New York of the 1870s that is portrayed in The Age of Innocence, and the New York of Edith Wharton’s life, from her birth as Edith Newbold Jones in a building still standing at 14 West 23rd Street in 1862 to her move to Paris in the first decade of the new century. We will see how much of the world of The Age of Innocence can still be seen in the streets of New York (surprisingly, a lot more than you’d think). We’ll also look at the New York world she knew and wrote about in many works besides The Age of Innocence (such as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country), and in so doing cut a broad swath through 40 years of New York’s cultural history and social geography to see a city that is in some ways very remote from our own, and in remarkable ways very familiar to us more than a century later.

    Francis Morrone is an architectural historian, writer, and the author of 13 books, including Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes (W.W. Norton, 2013) and, with Henry Hope Reed, The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (W.W. Norton, 2011), as well as architectural guidebooks to Philadelphia and to Brooklyn. He is the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, Landmarks Lion Award of the Historic Districts Council, and New York University’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and was named by Travel + Leisure magazine as one of the “Thirteen Best Tour Guides in the World.”

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Playing with the Varsity

    December 1, 2020

    Gould Memorial Library, the last surviving major public building designed by Stanford White, emerged from a collaboration between a visionary educator, a generous donor, and two artists who, 15 years earlier, created the Veteran’s Room at the Armory. Collaborations in architecture can be fraught, and while the result was a great work of architecture, the design and construction of the library was no exception. The story begins in 1895 when New York University moved from Washington Square to University Heights and extends to the present, where today Gould forms the centerpiece of the landmark campus of Bronx Community College. Sam White’s lecture will trace a process that was rarely linear, occasionally messy, and begins with a cameo appearance of Gould Memorial Library on the silver screen.

    Samuel G. White is a founder and consulting partner at PBDW Architects, a New York firm focusing on designs that introduce new interventions to historic settings. The firm’s work ranges from the restoration of Park Avenue Armory, the Palace Theatre, and Astor Courts to the reconfiguration of the New-York Historical Society, additions for Saint David’s School and Packer Collegiate Institute, and new designs for Learning Spring Elementary School, and the Moise Safra Center.

    White is the author of The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, Nice House, and Stanford White in Detail, which was published in late October. He is co-author with Elizabeth White of McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks and Stanford White Architect. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, an Academician of the National Academy of Design, and a former adjunct associate professor of Fine Arts at New York University. White is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Providing a Platform for Women Painters

    November 10, 2020

    One of the most prominent monthly periodicals of the Gilded Age, Scribner’s Monthly/The Century was recognized for its extensive coverage of the arts in America. Its senior editor Richard Watson Gilder understood the expanding public desire for all things cultural, and devoted substantial space in its pages to the flourishing art scene, reporting on current exhibitions, collections, and artistic associations. Many of the ideas found in its featured articles and editorials were a result of Gilder’s close relationships with this “modern” art world, connections that resulted from his marriage to Helena de Kay. An important catalyst in the formation of such vital New York institutions as the Arts Students League and the Society of American Artists, De Kay held weekly evening gatherings in their home, creating a stimulating environment for young artists, including a number of prominent women painters. Aware of their important contributions and talents, the periodical hired women as illustrators, featured women painters working at home and abroad in articles, and also published reviews by female critics. Examining the vital role that the Gilders and the periodical played in supporting, developing and publicizing emerging female painters, illustrators, and critics, the lecture will explore the role of Scribner’s/The Century as a progressive mouthpiece for women artists in a burgeoning American art world.

    Page Knox is an adjunct professor in the Art History Department of Columbia University, where she received her PhD in 2012. She teaches Art Humanities and summer courses on American Art and Trans-Atlantic Exchange during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Knox also works in a variety of capacities at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: she gives public gallery talks and lectures in special exhibitions and the permanent collection; teaches classes at the museum; and, more recently, leads groups for Travel With The Met. Knox’s dissertation, “Scribner’s Monthly 1870–1881: Illustrating a New American Art World,” explored the significant expansion of illustration in print media during the 1870s, using Scribner’s Monthly as a lens to examine how the medium changed the general aesthetic in American art in the late 19th century. She continues to publish and lecture at conferences on the subject and is a contributing author for a recently released text book on the history of illustration.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    In with the “New Movement”

    October 20, 2020

    What was it like to be an artist living and working in New York in the transformative years following the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1870 incorporation? Through the lens of The Met’s early years and its developing collection of American art, this lecture will examine how established artists and founding trustees such as Frederic E. Church, Eastman Johnson, and John Quincy Adams Ward intersected with “New Movement” progressives like William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Helena de Kay, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. From savvy exhibition and acquisition strategies at The Met to the creation of alternative organizations, clubs, and schools, this younger generation of painters and sculptors established a vibrant cosmopolitan and modern art world that laid the groundwork for today’s cultural capital.

    Thayer Tolles is the Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A sculpture specialist, she served as editor and co-author of a two-volume catalogue of the Metropolitan’s historic American sculpture collection (1999, 2001), and has lectured and published extensively on 19th- and early 20th-century topics. Among her exhibitions are Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009) and The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925 (2013–15), both accompanied by publications. Most recently she co-authored the chapter “Creating a National Narrative” in the accompanying catalogue for the exhibition Making The Met, 1870–2020, on view through January 3, 2021.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Presidents Versus the Press

    September 29, 2020

    Seldom has our free press faced so great a threat as we see today, and yet, the tension between presidents and journalists is as old as the republic itself. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama all found ways to address the public directly, sidestepping traditional media channels. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson were all fixated on how they were represented by the press. FDR, JFK, and Clinton all found themselves with reasons to hope their personal lives would remain out-of-bounds. Nixon added journalists to his enemies lists and LBJ captured and threatened writers, editors, publishers, and broadcasters. The current relationship between the White House and the Press may be breaking the mold in many ways, but it is not without historical precedent. Join acclaimed scholar and Lincoln Prize winner Harold Holzer as he chronicles the eternal battle between the core institutions that define the republic, revealing that the essence of this confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation.

    Harold Holzer is the recipient of the 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize. One of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, Holzer was appointed chairman of the US Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission by President Bill Clinton and awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. He currently serves as Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, City University of New York.

  • Artists Studio

    Krency Garcia (El Prodigio)

    March 3, 2020

    Dominican accordionist El Prodigio brings his syncopated merengue playing to the Armory in an explosion of sound and joy. He and fellow band members introduce us to the multiple styles of merengue playing found in the Dominican Republic. El Prodigio, known for his contemporary and improvisational compositions, will travel through some of the rich musical styles of accordion merengue from the “güira” and the “tambura” and to the “perico ripiao.” Joined by his ensemble band, El Prodigio delivers an updated contemporary sound with harmonic and rhythmic colors resulting in an updating of this infectious musical form.

    Park Avenue Armory lanzará su serie 2020 Artists Studio con un programa del acordeonista dominicano El Prodigio, quien presentará una pluralidad de estilos de música merengue típica de República Dominicana en dos funciones, a las 7 p.m. en la histórica sala Veterans Room. El Prodigio, famoso por sus composiciones modernas y técnicas de improvisación, hará un recorrido por algunos de los ritmos musicales más sabrosos del merengue de acordeón, desde la “güira” y la “tambura” hasta el “perico ripiao”. Junto a su grupo musical, El Prodigio ofrece melodías contemporáneas y modernas, llenas de colores armónicos y rítmicos, que se traducen en una nueva cara de este estilo musical tan pegadizo.

  • Interrogations of Form

    100 Years | 100 Women Symposium

    February 15, 2020

    Don’t miss a day of talks and performances by noted artists, thinkers and cultural leaders as they explore the complex legacy of the 19th Amendment 100 years after its ratification. Participants include photographer and scholar Deborah Willis, actor-activists Kathleen Turner and Tantoo Cardinal, spoken word performer Caridad De La Luz “La Bruja”, vocalist Martha Redbone, visual artist Renee Cox, performance artist Karen Finley, and community organizer De’Ara Balenger and many others.

    This Symposium launches 100 Years | 100 Women, an initiative of Park Avenue Armory, with lead partner National Black Theatre, and nine major cultural institutions including, The Apollo Theater, The Juilliard School, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company, The Laundromat Project, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, National Sawdust, New York University (Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts; Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity and Strategic Innovation; and Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture), and Urban Bush Women, who will collectively commission one hundred artists who self-identify as women to respond to this significant anniversary.

  • Interrogations of Form

    December 15, 2019

    Held in our historic period rooms, these insightful conversations throughout the year feature artists, scholars, cultural leaders, and social trailblazers who gather to offer new points of view and unique perspectives on Armory productions, explore a range of themes and relevant topics, and encourage audiences to think beyond conventional interpretations and perspectives of art.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Judgment Day

    December 6, 2019 - January 10, 2020

    Ödön von Horváth’s play is an intriguing hybrid of theatrical genres: part moral fable, part sociopolitical commentary, part noirish thriller. A dutiful train station master, performed by Emmy® Award-winning actor Luke Kirby (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Deuce, and Slings & Arrows) is momentarily distracted and a tragic train crash results. This adaptation is a fresh take on who should bear responsibility for certain actions, a theme that resonates in today’s societal climate.

    Having dazzled Armory audiences and critics alike with his mesmerizing revival of The Hairy Ape in 2017, visionary director Richard Jones returns to take on this gripping play in a new adaptation by Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award®-winning playwright Christopher Shinn. Judgment Day dramatically plays on the interior of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of the original Grand Central Depot and the great train stations of Europe—as an immersive environment in which the characters become overcome by the burden of guilt.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Big Fella

    December 2, 2019

    In the 1920s, Babe Ruth was the biggest thing in baseball—and in America’s galaxy of celebrities. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the largest fines. After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927, he and teammate Lou Gehrig embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America that one newspaper called “the biggest show since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses offered their entire performance under one tent.” Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh—business manager, spin doctor, damage-control wizard, and surrogate father—Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom. Drawing on her new book, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, Jane Leavy will discuss Ruth’s journey from Baltimore to the big league to the center of the nation’s adulation. In conversation with Yankees expert Marty Appel, she will go behind the mythology to uncover the man whose approach to the game and to life was always to hit it with all you’ve got.

    Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Boy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball.” She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, first in the sports section, then writing for the style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. Before joining the Post, she was a staff writer at womenSports and Self magazines. She has also written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, and The New York Daily News.

    Marty Appel started his career in baseball at age 19 when he was hired by the Yankees to answer Mickey Mantle’s fan mail back in 1968. He went on to become the youngest public relations director in baseball history. Appel is considered one of the nation’s leading historians on the Yankees, and has written twenty-four books including Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss (2014) and Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character (2017).

  • Recital Series

    Leila Josefowicz & John Novacek

    November 21, 2019 - November 22, 2019

    Violin virtuoso Leila Josefowicz‘s commitment to and passion for contemporary music led to her being awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for her unique contributions to the arts. From child prodigy to go-to star for major commissions, the violin virtuoso curates inventive programs of modern music paired with pieces by 20th-century masters that have never sounded so contemporary in performance. Having recently won the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, she comes to the Board of Officers Room with pianist John Novacek to perform an adventuresome program that is sure to be breathtaking in its daring and excitement.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Everybody's Doin' It

    November 20, 2019

    In the seventy years before WWI, music, drink, dance, and sex mingled and thrived in the New York City underworld. In his talk musicologist Dale Cockrell explores the convivial meeting places where the big business of prostitution gave birth to new American music. Whether a single piano player or small band, live music was a nightly feature in hundreds of spirited basement dives, dance halls, brothels, and concert saloons. There men and women, and often blacks and whites together, danced wildly to intoxicating music—to the horror of the moralistic elite. This rollicking demimonde drove innovative new music, including ragtime and jazz, and the development of sexy new dance styles. “Everybody’s Doin’ It” illuminates the how, why, and where of America’s popular music and dance, and traces a buoyant journey that stretched from downtown Five Points to midtown Tin Pan Alley, then all the way to Harlem.

    Dale Cockrell a specialist in American popular music, is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at Vanderbilt University and a Research Associate of the University of the Free State (South Africa). He is the author of fourteen books and editions, and more than seventy articles, and is the founder of The Pa’s Fiddle Project, an educational program dedicated to recording the music of the Little House books and reconnecting the nation’s children with the rich music legacies embedded in them. He was recently honored with a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Society for American Music.

  • Recital Series

    Barbara Hannigan, Stephen Gosling & The Emerson String Quartet

    October 15, 2019 - October 17, 2019

    Barbara Hannigan has taken the classical music world by storm as a highly sought after conductor of leading orchestras and singing on the world’s greatest stages. The soprano has found herself as a muse and collaborator for a number of legendary composers of our time, creating operatic roles by adding a kind of virtuosity and artistry that contemporary music has rarely seen before. Following her whirlwind US recital debut at the Armory in 2017, this astonishing musical artist returns with an artfully curated residency showcasing her versatility. She opens the engagement with a program that includes the New York premiere of John Zorn’s “Jumalatteret,” and continues with a second program featuring the famed Emerson String Quartet.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Black Artists Retreat 2019: Sonic Imagination

    October 11, 2019 - October 12, 2019

    Theaster Gates, a charismatic figure in the contemporary art world, with a practice situated both within and without gallery walls, vacillating between aesthetics, urban planning, and activism, hosts his renowned Black Artists Retreat for the first time outside of Chicago.

    For this year’s retreat, Gates, an Armory Artist-in-Residence, welcomes black artists and allies from Chicago, New York, and beyond for a weekend of communion, celebration, and multi-disciplinary exploration of this year’s theme: sonic imagination.

    Retreat guests will be invited to actively think about the role of sound in the human experience and in art-making: the capacity to dream, feel, motivate and activate through sound, to think through and love through sound, to incant, incite or invoke using the invisible energy of wind and body to materialize form that moves us.

    Through presentations, formal and informal conversations, side-bars, sharings, tributes, screenings, and meditations, the Retreat will explore how artists, performers, curators, historians and other leading thinkers in the fields of art production, cultural production, music, film and video, sound engineering, and the adjacent technical crafts of sound production, play, pray, worship, commune, entertain, interrupt, celebrate, heal, mourn and invite unity.

    This gathering also celebrates the completion of the replacement of the wooden flooring of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which includes recycled pine planks milled by Gates’s workforce and repurposed from his Chicago urban manufacturing renewal project, Dorchester Industries, amongst other sources.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Most Magnificent Playground in the World

    October 7, 2019

    In 1891, the new Madison Square Garden Tower was dramatically unveiled in a blaze of electric lights and fireworks that stunned and excited the throngs of people that crowded the streets to see the remarkable 18-foot high nude sculpture of Diana at its pinnacle. Architect Stanford White and his friend and collaborator the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had created a palace for pleasure, sport, arts, merrymaking, and make-believe that captured the imagination of New York’s Gilded Age. Join author Suzanne Hinman for an illustrated book talk on her new publication, The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal & Architecture in Gilded Age New York, when she will discuss how both men pushed the boundaries of America’s parochial aesthetic, ushering in an era of art that embraced European styles with American vitality and created a playground for New York’s decadent era.

    Suzanne Hinman holds a Ph.D. in American art history and has been a curator, gallerist, museum director, and professor. She served as director of galleries at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the world’s largest art school, as well as owned a private art gallery in Santa Fe. Her interest in the artists and architects of the American Gilded Age and the famed Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire grew while associate director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Antigone

    September 25, 2019 - October 6, 2019

    Sophocles created characters with psychological depth and complexity in this universal play that are as resonant now as when it was written nearly 2,500 years ago. The Greek tragedy hinges on a young girl disobeying the king by giving her brother the same funeral rites that he had been denied after a fratricidal combat, challenging the injustice of men to obey the laws of the gods and following her heart by putting his soul to rest. What followed was an intense exploration of humanity, morality, law, and justice that left few unharmed.

    Famed Japanese director Satoshi Miyagi creates a new version of this fabled mythology that looks at this ancient play through the prism of Japanese culture. He turns the stage into a flowing river of water, known in many spiritual beliefs to separate the world of the living from that of the dead. This fresh take presents a riveting play about loss and memorialization in a way that is both timeless and timely, mixing the foundational principles of Greek tragedy, Japanese Noh theatre, Indonesian shadow play, and the Buddhist philosophy to negotiate the boundaries of intercultural encounters while creating a new theatrical universe of globalized proportions.

  • Recital Series

    Dudok Quartet Amsterdam

    September 19, 2019 - September 21, 2019

    The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam is one of most wide-ranging string quartets of our time, with heartfelt performances that spotlight the essence of their music—of both contemporary works and classics that feel revelatory and new. The esteemed ensemble makes their New York debut with programs focusing on works by Haydn and Ligeti that artfully showcase their versatility and superb musicianship. They open their residency with an evening of works that employ contrapuntal techniques in a variety of forms, intertwined with ancient short pieces ranging from the 11th century to J.S. Bach. The dramatic qualities in the works of Haydn and Ligeti are amplified in the second program, enlightened by Mendelssohn’s final string quartet, written as a deeply personal requiem for his suddenly deceased younger sister.

  • Artists Studio

    Rosa Barba

    September 16, 2019 - September 21, 2019

    Rosa Barba is an artist with a sculptural approach to film and the ways it articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Her projects encompass film, sculpture, installation, and text grounded in the material and conceptual qualities of cinema. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, often focusing on natural landscapes and man-made interventions into the environment that probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty. The cutting edge artist invites audiences into her conceptual practice by recasting their perspective in an act of radical reversal with images, collaborating with percussionist Chad Taylor on a performative work within a site-specific installation inspired by the Veterans Room.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Formative Years of the Funnies

    September 12, 2019

    American newspapers and magazines first regularly started to feature cartoons in the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that technology and demand for serial “picture stories” led to the regular publication of the “Sunday funnies.” The comics and their star characters became essential parts of American life and could be found in comic books, live-action and animated films, stage plays and radio programs and were used to market a wide range of products. This talk will focus on the pre-WWII period of comics history starting with the first printed cartoons in Europe and America, the major innovators, and the ground-breaking trends that developed in its earliest decades, illustrated in comics such as Hogan’s Alley, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, and others. Cartoonist and historian Brian Walker will also connect the comics in the Seventh Regiment Gazette published from this Armory in the wider context of the rise of comics nationwide and in New York in particular.

    Brian Walker is a professional cartoonist and historian who has been part of the creative team that has produced the comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois since 1984. He has written, edited, or contributed to forty-five books on cartoon art, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and magazine articles. His most significant books, The Comics—Since 1945 and a companion volume The Comics—Before 1945, were published by Harry Abrams in 2002 and 2004 respectively. He is a founder and former director of the Museum of Cartoon Art and is currently the Chairman of the Connecticut Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society. He has served as the curator on seventy-five cartoon exhibitions, including three major retrospectives, Masters of American Comics at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Sunday Funnies: 100 Years of Comics in American Life at the Barnum Museum, and 100 Years of American Comics at the Belgian Center for Comic Art.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Drill

    June 20, 2019 - July 21, 2019

    Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and cultural critic who roots her investigative practice in the proliferation of digital images and their large-scale implications. Her practice takes a strong political stand, while being unafraid to challenge the power of the art market, the politics of images, and the state of human consciousness in the age of technologically advanced capitalism. Taking the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography, her work is combined with dogged outspokenness and academics to critically influence agendas internationally.

    This creator reveals her most recent installation in the U.S. to date, commissioned by the Armory and curated by Park Avenue Armory’s visual arts curator Tom Eccles. Steyerl utilizes both the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and historic interiors of the building in mounting both pre-existing works as well as new projects commissioned by the Armory in her ongoing illumination of the world’s power structures, inequalities, obscurities, and delights. When viewed collectively, this material allows the viewer to zoom in on and out from some of the most complex and pressing issues of our time.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Everything that happened and would happen

    June 3, 2019 - June 9, 2019

    Heiner Goebbels's fascination with literature, politics, and anthropology manifests itself in richly textured visual compositions that integrate a wide range of classical, jazz, and contemporary music. Having captivated Armory audiences with his hypnotic use of zeppelins, nuns, and a flock of sheep in De Materie in 2016 as well as in-motion sculptural pianos and elements from nature in his haunting production Stifter’s Dinge in 2009, the visionary director and composer returns for his latest highly imaginative production blending live music, performance, sound, movement, and moving image.

    This new commission, originally produced by Artangel and adapted by Park Avenue Armory, is inspired by contrasting source materials in a sideways view of European history from the First World War to the present day including: Patrik Ouředník’s 2001 book Europeana, a surprising deconstruction of the 20th century that juxtaposes seismic events and trivial anecdotes often jumbled up and out of sequence; re-purposed costumes, props, and sets from Goebbels’s own 2012 staging of Europeras, John Cage’s interpretation of 200 years of European opera; and feeds from Euronews’s “No Comment”—original, unedited footage of that day’s news without commentary or mediation. Part-performance, part-construction site, this groundbreaking work is a poetic re-enactment of history, always on the verge of collapse and only to be rebuilt as if nothing had happened.

  • Artists Studio

    Malik Gaines & Alexandro Segade

    May 23, 2019

    Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade are founding members of the collective My Barbarian, who work at the intersection of theater, visual arts, critical practice, and performance to play with social difficulties, theatricalize historic problems, and imagine ways of being together. Realized as drawings, texts, masks, videos, music, installations, and audience interactions, their projects employ fantasy, humor, and clashing aesthetic sensibilities to cleverly critique artistic, political, and social situations. The duo creates and performs a new work, Star Choir, which was developed while serving as Armory artists-in-residence. The 45-minute musical performance tracks a group of humans who attempt to colonize a hostile planet after the Earth’s decline. Following some wonder and violence, a hybrid species is formed. Star Choir is performed by six singers and musicians playing synthesizer, cello, harp, horn, bass and percussion, and with animated projections.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    FKA twigs

    May 11, 2019 - May 12, 2019

    FKA twigs emerged as an enigma. From her earliest spellbinding music videos to her critically-acclaimed debut LP1 (2014), the English singer, dancer, producer, and choreographer’s distinctive amalgam of electronic music, R&B, and avant-garde pop has entertained fans as much as it has intrigued them. With vocals either as fragile as crystal stemware or sharp as a katana blade, she’s created songs that pulse with sexuality but reveal only glimpses of the woman who owns it.

    FKA twigs returns to New York City for the first time since dazzling audiences over three nights at her 2015 Red Bull Music Festival show, Congregata. Co-presented with Red Bull Music Festival, twigs will perform for two nights in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The Armory has previously worked with Red Bull Music Festival to produce extraordinary one-of-a-kind shows for Anohni (2016) and Oneohtrix Point Never (2018).

  • Recital Series

    Lindemann Young Artists

    April 22, 2019 - April 24, 2019

    The Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program has been a prestigious launching pad for a new generation of celebrated American and international opera singers who perform at the highest standards on opera stages around the world, with a roster of notable alumni including Paul Abbleby, Stephanie Blythe, Christine Goerke, Nathan Gunn, Mariusz Kwiecien, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Dawn Upshaw. Hear two of the next generation of singers from the program—soprano Leah Hawkins and baritone Adrian Timpau—with pianist Ken Noda in an intimate evening of song that beautifully showcases these stars on the rise.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Lehman Trilogy

    March 22, 2019 - April 30, 2019

    From the arrival of three brothers from Bavaria to America in search of a new life to the collapse of the firm they established, triggering the largest financial crisis in history, the story of the Lehman Brothers traces the trajectory of western capitalism by following the fortunes of a single immigrant family. Originally documented by Italian playwright Stefano Massini, this vast and poetic play gets a thrilling new life at the Armory following a sold-out run at the National Theatre in London in an adaptation by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes.

    Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles reprise their critically acclaimed portrayals of the Lehman Brothers, their sons, and grandsons spanning nearly two centuries and told in three parts on a single evening. Es Devlin’s set coupled with Luke Halls’s video design provides a panorama of a changing American landscape against which the dynastic drama unfolds. Making its highly anticipated North American premiere, this electrifying production serves as a parable of the shifting definition of the American dream.

  • Artists Studio

    Miya Masaoka

    March 13, 2019

    A prolific and consistently experimental composer, improviser, and performer, Miya Masaoka has developed a legendary reputation in New York and in global jazz and avant-garde circles with her compositions that expand on our understanding of sound. A longtime explorer of the intersection of technology and music-making, her practice includes performances with interactivity in her ongoing considerations of temporality and perception. Masaoka will perform a number of new works with her close collaborators and colleagues, including the premiere of Songs of Lost Dreams, a new work written for soprano Kamala Sankaram and percussionist Chris Nappi. The Momenta Quartet will perform Survival, along with guest violinist Clara Kim, and bassists Robert Black, James Ilgenfritz, Shayna Dulberger, and Zach Rowden join to perform Four Moons of Pluto. Masaoka will also perform her work Don’t Kill Plants (Leaves are Murder, Meat is Murder). The program concludes with a performance of States of Being, States of Becoming by S.E.M. Ensemble, with Petr Kotik conducting.

  • Artists Studio

    Roscoe Mitchell

    March 6, 2019

    Jazz titan Roscoe Mitchell—composer, saxophonist, and a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago—was part of the movement, embodied by the Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians, that turned conventional jazz on its head and brought a new, experimental sound to the world. His virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments spanning extreme registers, visionary solo performances, and assertion of a hybrid compositional/improvisational paradigm have placed him at the forefront of contemporary music for over four decades. This major figure in contemporary jazz comes to the Veterans Room to perform two distinct programs that spotlight his wide ranging compositional output from solo performances to larger groupings of musicians.

  • Interrogations of Form

    Symposium: Culture in a Changing America

    February 17, 2019

    Join an interdisciplinary group of artists, thinkers, activists, academics, and community leaders as they explore the role of culture in a changing America. Two main tracks feature keynote conversations, artist salons, open studios, intimate performances, and interactive workshops. The Art & Identity track explores how artists’ creative practices and individual identities reflect or respond to societal concerns; topics include artistic use of ever-evolving technology, shifting notions of gender, and courageous responses to the impact of racism on art. The Art & Activism track focuses on the power of artists to affect change in their communities; it features artist-activists from the film, television, and food industries, architecture practices, as well as artists working in partnership with New York City agencies.

    The symposium concludes with a special keynote conversation moderated by The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden, with Artistic Director, New York Live Arts, Bill T. Jones, the Kennedy Center’s Marc Bamuthi Joseph, artist Julie Mehretu, and musician Toshi Reagon centered on the state of American culture in the age of Trump, followed by a musical performance by Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely.

    This symposium is presented in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem.

  • Recital Series

    Ilker Arcayürek & Simon Lepper

    February 11, 2019 - February 14, 2019

    Austrian tenor Ilker Arcayürek has emerged as one of the most exciting and versatile vocal artists in recent years, making impressive debuts on opera and recital stages throughout Europe. Before making his U.S. operatic debut at Santa Fe Opera in summer 2019, hear this sumptuous tenor make his North American recital debut with a program of Schubert lieder that showcases the dynamic artistry and vocal beauty of this star on the rise.

  • Recital Series

    Benjamin Appl & James Baillieu

    January 6, 2019 - January 10, 2019

    Considered by many to be the father of German lieder, Franz Schubert was one of the most prolific of all German art song composers. His three published song cycles traverse the full spectrum of human emotion from hope to despair, obsession to anguish, life to death, and unrequited love. Known as one of today’s foremost interpreters of German art songs, the esteemed baritone Benjamin Appl makes his North American recital debut with a unique residency exploring the extraordinary emotional depths of the human psyche found in these cornerstones of the genre.

  • Recital Series

    Thomas Oliemans & Malcom Martineau

    December 17, 2018 - December 19, 2018

    Hailed as “one of the most renowned Dutch singers” (Volkskrant), Thomas Oliemans has been taking the opera world by storm with his dynamic vocal color and communicative singing style at major opera houses and festivals throughout Europe, including Dutch National Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro Real, and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Festival. He brings his burnished baritone across the Atlantic to make his U.S. recital debut in an artfully curated program of lieder and arts songs from the late Romantic period.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Head & the Load

    December 4, 2018 - December 15, 2018

    William Kentridge is a remarkably versatile artist whose evocative vision combines the political with the poetic through artistic media as diverse as printmaking, drawing, painting, sculpting, and filmmaking. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism, his highly personal work is often imbued with lyrical undertones in his critical examination of aspects of his native South African society and the aftermath of apartheid.

    The renowned artist synthesizes elements of his practice to conjure his grandest and most ambitious production to date, commissioned by the Armory. Kentridge works alongside long-time collaborator, Philip Miller—one of South Africa’s leading composers—whose powerful and evocative compositions offer a perfect complement to Kentridge’s feverishly imaginative work.

    A play on the Ghanaian proverb, “the head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” the large-scale work expressively speaks to the nearly two million African porters and carriers used by the British, French, and Germans who bore the brunt of the casualties during the First World War in Africa and the historical significance of this story as yet left largely untold. This processional musical journey—as much an installation as a performance piece—melds performances by orchestra collective The Knights, and an international ensemble cast of singers, dancers, and performers accompanied by a chorus of mechanized gramophones alongside multiple film projections and shadow play to create a landscape of immense proportion and imagination that utilizes the vast sweep of the Wade Thompson Drill to upend standard notions of scale.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    “Ever Since the Town Went Dry”

    November 26, 2018

    In the 1910s, at the height of the Progressive Era, a national movement to prohibit the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol swept the United States. Prohibition, its supporters promised, would end the abuse of alcohol, curb the corrupt influence of the distilling and brewing industries, and usher in a new era of prosperity and “clean living.” But in American cities like New York, with large immigrant populations and deeply entrenched saloon cultures, the call for Prohibition was met with skepticism and resentment. Urban opposition to the dry movement was strong, and the “wet” sentiment in cities remained a substantial obstacle to the passage of a constitutional amendment banning alcohol. The United States’ entry into World War 1 in 1917, however, changed everything. Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on wartime patriotism, the dry movement used the war to paint its opponents as traitors who would support the German war effort, squander national resources, and undermine the war effort for the sake of a drink. For a time, it worked. The dry movement used World War I to push successfully for the passage of Prohibition. Once enacted, however, chaos ensued. As WWI ended and the 1920s arrived, New Yorkers entered the dry era determined to defy “the noble experiment.”

    Michael A. Lerner is the principal of Bard High School Early College, a partnership between Bard College and the New York City Department of Education. He is the author of Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (2007) and served as a consultant on the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition (2011). He lectures frequently on Prohibition and New York City history. He holds a Ph.D. in History from New York University and a B.A. in History from Columbia University.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The First United Lenape Nations Pow Wow & Standing Ground Symposium

    November 18, 2018

    Join us for the first large-scale Lenape Pow Wow on Manhattan Island, transpiring on land that once belonged to the Lenape and marking the first congregation of dispersed Lenape elders in the area since their forced migrations in the early 1700s. The Pow Wow has been a traditional gathering by Native Americans for centuries as a way to congregate, celebrate, and share cultural traditions and heritage. Presented in partnership with members of the Lenape community, this event provides an opportunity for members of the Lenape to gather, while also inviting the New York City community to learn about the Lenape’s historical and cultural ties to New York in a fun and interactive day of presentations.

    The Pow Wow features a dance competition for hundreds of dancers of all ages, competing in traditional Native American dress and regalia, with musical accompaniment by drumming and singing groups Red Blanket, Young Blood, and Silver Cloud. In addition, there will be featured performances by Kalpulli Huehuetlahtolli Aztec/Mexica Dance, Inuit Throat Singer Tanya Tagaq, and Taino Dancers from the Kasibahagua Taino Cultural Society showcasing the varied traditions of their respective cultures, as well as opportunities to purchase authentic Native jewelry, crafts, clothing, and food from numerous vendors and artisans.

    The Standing Ground Symposium will provide an opportunity to meet Lenape elders as well as hear the perspectives of academics and community leaders regarding key issues facing the Native American community, including internationally renowned activists for indigenous people Winona LaDuke and Roberto Mukaro Borrero, and author Steve Newcomb. The Symposium also includes performances and activities for the whole family including Native flute players and theater groups exploring mythic traditions and stories that the community has passed down through generations, screenings of films that explore the complexities of Native life and made by Native filmmakers, and a display of bespoke creations by Native fashion designers.

  • Recital Series

    Severin von Eckardstein

    November 13, 2018 - November 14, 2018

    Few other pieces showcase Schumann’s creative expression and unrestricted imagination than his fantasy works, written both early and late in his career. Making his New York recital debut, pianist Severin von Eckardstein captures the subtle variety of this dreamy music in two distinct programs that showcase his superb technique and emotional depth. He opens his residency exploring the connection between Schumann and Russian composer Nikolai Medtner through their exploration of fantastical elements, and then turns to darker myths in a program that pairs the composer’s works with those of Wagner and Liszt.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Unexpected President

    November 5, 2018

    Chester Arthur, our nation’s 21st president, went from a promising start as a young lawyer in Manhattan to being known as a crooked crony of the New York Republican political machine. As Quartermaster General for the New York State Militia during the Civil War and as a socially ambitious businessman, he interacted with the members of the Seventh Regiment repeatedly throughout his career. With the assassination of President Garfield, Arthur found himself in the Executive Mansion in September 1881 (which he would later hire the same artists who worked at our Armory to redecorate). He was truly a Gilded Age president for the nation but little is known about him today due to his distrust of the press and his destruction of his private papers before his death. Author Scott Greenberger will introduce us to this New York president and describe how from the moment Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave, going up against the very forces that had controlled him for decades. He surprised everyone—and gained many enemies—when he swept house and took on corruption, civil rights for African Americans, and the issues of land for Native Americans.

    Scott S. Greenberger is the executive editor of Stateline, a nonprofit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he guides a team of veteran journalists who report on state politics and policy in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Before joining Pew, Greenberger was a staff writer at The Boston Globe, where he covered education, served as City Hall bureau chief, and was the primary policy reporter in the Globe‘s State House bureau. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and GQ. He is the co-author, with former Sen. Tom Daschle, of The New York Times best-seller Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Sargent's Women

    October 11, 2018

    John Singer Sargent’s high-society portraits defined the Gilded Age. Stanford White helped launch the artist’s career in America, spreading the word among his firm’s rich clients that a portrait by Sargent would be the perfect decoration for their massive mansions. Extremely prolific, Sargent insisted that his portraits were not psychological studies that he merely painted what he saw. Yet with some of his young women he seemed to have an uncanny ability to divine their internal landscapes. New York Times best-selling author Donna Lucey will speak about four of those women, whose lives she chronicles in her book Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas. These women all inhabited a rarefied world of large fortunes and strict conventions, yet managed to do something unexpected, something shocking, to upend society’s rules. Basing her research on original letters and diaries, Lucey uncovers lives out of an Edith Wharton novel. What emerges are stories of forbidden love, family conflict, ambition, desire, and triumph.

    Donna M. Lucey is the author of Sargent’s Women, The New York Times best-selling Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, the award-winning Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, as well as other books, articles, and a feature-length screenplay. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants and was a 2017 writer-in-residence at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. Ms. Lucey also serves as media editor at Virginia Humanities in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  • Artists Studio

    Juliana Huxtable

    October 10, 2018

    Juliana Huxtable straddles the worlds of art, fashion, and night life, exploring the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and sexuality through a fluid mix of media including self-portraiture, text-based prints, club music and parties, poetry, and social media. Throughout her practice, Huxtable combines and reinvents cultural histories, questioning the presentation and perception of identity in artworks that often reference her own body and history as she examines socio-political issues. The art icon and powerhouse DJ creates a new work combining video, sound, spoken word, and performance in her ongoing exploration of what it is to be human and the resistance to the caging of people within fixed selves, private bodies, and prescribed identities.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Six Brandenburg Concertos

    October 1, 2018 - October 7, 2018

    Few musical works are as beloved as the six Brandenburg concertos by J.S. Bach. Virtuosic, audacious, and overflowing with richly imaginative music, these six works display a lighter side of the composer’s imperishable genius and still sound as fresh and exciting today as they must have when audiences first heard them nearly 300 years ago. Taking this iconic masterpiece as a ready-made score, famed Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker explores the movement, dance, and transcendental dimension found in this celebrated music in a new, evening length work.

    Making its North American premiere, this new dance piece embodies Bach’s polyphonic mastery by setting 16 dancers originating from different generations of her company Rosas in direct dialogue with musicians from the baroque ensemble B’Rock, who perform the concertos live under the baton of Amandine Beyer in their North American debut. This production continues a rich lineage of exploring Bach’s enduring legacy at the Armory, including St. Matthew Passion (Peter Sellars, Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle in 2014) and the Goldberg Variations (Igor Levit and Marina Abramović in 2015). And in the hands of one of the most prominent artists in contemporary dance today, these performances are sure to make audiences think about and feel this classic composition in an entirely new way.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Walt Whitman, the Civil War, and New York's Seventh Regiment

    September 25, 2018

    America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman, whose bicentennial birthday arrives in 2019, was the quintessential 19th-century New Yorker. Our understanding of his work is enriched through knowing the people, politics, arts, science, and philosophy of his times as described in Professor David Reynolds’s award-winning Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Whitman had many connections to the New York’s Seventh Regiment and witnessed many of the militia’s impressive parades and marches, from the 1824 greeting of the Marquis de Lafayette to the military escort of President Lincoln’s coffin through the city forty-one years later. Such pageantry enlivened Whitman’s poetry and prose. He hobnobbed with figures associated with the Seventh Regiment, including artist Thomas Nast, poet Fitz-James O’Brien, and author Theodore Winthrop. The heroism of New York’s soldiers in the Civil War inspired him and contributed to his view of the war as the central event in American history.

    David S. Reynolds is the Distinguished Professor of American literature and U.S. History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include John Brown, Abolitionist (winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Prize), Beneath the American Renaissance (winner of the Christian Gauss Award), Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America, A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, and Lincoln’s Selected Writings: A Norton Critical Edition. Professor Reynolds is a regular book reviewer for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal.

  • Interrogations of Form

    Sunday Salon: Literature

    September 23, 2018

    Armory Artist-in-Residence and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins hosts fellow playwrights and collaborators in an intimate afternoon of conversation, readings and performances featuring both rising talents and luminaries, all of whom are actively exploring and testing the boundaries of the literary art form.

  • Recital Series

    The Crossing

    September 19, 2018 - September 20, 2018

    Having “made a name for itself in recent years as a champion of new music” (The New York Times), The Crossing comes to the Armory to perform an ambulatory concert that utilizes the corridors and historic rooms to create a unique kind of seamless music with fluidity of movement from room to room. The program includes world and New York premieres by David Lang, Louis Andriessen, and a new work by Ted Hearne, co-commissioned by the Armory. The new music champions are dedicated to expanding the contemporary choral music experience through commissions, collaborations, community, and performances that are characterized by a distinctive unity of sound and spirit.

  • Artists Studio

    Charlemagne Palestine

    September 14, 2018

    A pioneer of experimental music, Charlemagne Palestine creates intense, resonant music centered on layered overtones, electronic drones, and dense hypnotic rhythms created by percussive repetition to playfully defy the conventions and contexts most associated with modernist composition. He also explores the world of experimental sound through performance and immersive installation, incorporating bears and other plush toys viewed as representations of the soul that are either hand-made by the artist or found—into truly unique performance environments that are often shamanistic and overtly spiritual in nature. The multifaceted artist creates an immersive, site-specific installation in the Veterans Room that invites audiences into his colorful, fantastical world.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Damned

    July 17, 2018 - July 28, 2018

    Tony Award-winning director Ivo van Hove unleashes his visionary creativity at the Armory with the prestigious Comédie-Française, which for more than three centuries has boldly faced the perils of the stage, for the North American premiere of his adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s desperately dark drama The Damned. The historic walls of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall form the backdrop for this remarkable production, which employs cameramen prowling amongst the actors to catch close ups of key moments that are projected on massive screens amongst the minimalist set to create scenography that borders on installation art.

    Using the screenplay rather than Visconti’s film as a starting point, van Hove traces the disintegration of the wealthy Essenbeck family and their steel dynasty during the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933 in Germany, reflecting the ideological debauchery of a society ready to make the most venomous alliances for the benefit of its sole economic interests. This sharply drawn familial chronicle combines intrigue and ambition with betrayal and murder in the insidious struggle for power, and the corruption of relationships echoes the cruelty and brutality of the political context—themes that have the makings of a great modern tragedy.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Let Go: An Evening of Artistic Responses

    June 26, 2018

    Songwriter and musician Nona Hendryx, vocalist and artist Helga Davis, dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper, and FLEXN dance pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray and his company of dance activists the D.R.E.A.M. Ring will respond to the installation in an evening of site-specific performative responses curated by Nick Cave.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Let Go: Freedom Ball

    June 14, 2018

    Party-goers are invited to don their most outrageous outfit in this high octane evening of fashion, dance, and house music by the legendary Marshall Jefferson and hosted by celebrity night life glitterati. A “dress to express” ball-style competition hosted by a panel of leading tastemakers takes place at 11:00pm with multiple categories and the chance to win a cash prize of up to $10,000.

    Dress to Express Ball-Style Competition

    Speak your passion through fashion and dress up to let go in “chase,” Cave’s monumental kinetic sculpture within The Let Go. The competition begins at 11:00pm and winners will split a $20,000 purse prize ($5,000 for the top look in each category, plus a $5,000 bonus prize for the top look overall). Contestants must arrive by 10:00pm to enter the competition.

    Categories

    1. State of the World: Express your views through your body politic
    2. Unlike Anything Else: Celebrate your beautiful difference and gorgeous self
    3. Dare-Flair: Push your limits—werk the floor

    Hosted by Matthew Placek
    APPARATUS, House of Yes, Ladyfag,
    Papi Juice, Saada of Everyday People
    Opening Ceremony, TELFAR, and VISIONAIRE

    Special Guest Judges

    Nick Cave, Mickalene Thomas, Racquel Chevremont, Mickey Boardman, and Adam van Eeckhout

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Let Go

    June 7, 2018 - July 1, 2018

    Interdisciplinary artist Nick Cave creates a dance-based town hall—part installation, part performance—to which the community of New York is invited to “let go” and speak their minds through movement, work out frustrations, and celebrate independence as well as community. The reimagined Wade Thompson Drill Hall allows for social gatherings and is activated by “chase,” a multi-colored, 100-foot-long mylar sculpture that glides across the dance floor.

    Up Right Performances
    On weekday evenings Cave will orchestrate a cast of dancers in his signature Up Right performances, a call to arms where the soundsuits are engaged in a transformative journey to face the forces that stand in the way of selfhood. Practitioners and initiates perform new site-situated choreography by Cave and dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper that celebrates self-determination in a grand procession around “chase,” accompanied by the melodic voices of baritone Jorell Williams and Vy Higginsen’s Sing Harlem Choir with additional musicians.

    Installation Hours
    During weekends, visitors and community organizations such as yoga practitioners, hula-hoopers, church choirs, and school groups from across all boroughs are invited to express themselves through movement within the installation to music curated by some of New York’s leading DJs played as a soundtrack or mixed live. Participants will be engaged by dancers leading games of Twister, Soul Train lines, a special line dance called “The Let Go” created for the installation, soundsuit invasions, and other dance-based encounters. Also on display in the Armory’s historic rooms are a collection of Cave’s soundsuits, wearable sculptures that create a second skin to conceal race, gender, and class to force the viewer to observe without judgment. Weekend DJs include Ana Matronic (June 9), Johnny Dynell (June 10), Joe Claussell (June 16), JD Samson (June 17), Noise Cans (June 23), Sabine Blaizin (June 24), Sammy Jo (June 30), and Tedd Patterson (July 1).

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    myRiad

    May 22, 2018 - May 24, 2018

    Musician, composer, and Mercury Prize nominated-producer Oneohtrix Point Never‘s world-building approach to creating works spans across the mediums of film, poetry, and visual art. Having just won the best Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for the film Good Time, Oneohtrix Point Never comes to the Armory with a project of unprecedented scope: a hyperstitial “concertscape” imagined from the perspective of an alien intelligence. MYRIAD is Oneohtrix Point Never’s most ambitious project to date, and builds on a practice of site-specific concertscapes presented at the Museum of Modern Art (2011), Tate Britain and MoMA PS1 (2013), and Edinburgh International Festival (2015), amongst many others.

    Pulling from long-standing fascinations with film and television tropes, abstract sculpture, game ephemera, poetry, apocryphic histories, internet esoterica, and philosophies of being, MYRIAD generates a conceptual spectrum that is as much a speculation on the unthinkable future as it is an allegory for the current disquiet of a civilization out of balance with its environment. Oriented around behaviorally choreographed set pieces and lighting, the theatrical installation takes a directly formal approach to themes latent in his work by placing the audience inside the architecture of the music itself. Using the scale of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to explore disorienting relationships between space and sound, MYRIAD mutates forms of live musical performance. The world premiere of MYRIAD is presented as a four-part epochal song cycle by the Park Avenue Armory and the Red Bull Music Festival New York City.

    Music performed at MYRIAD will be released as a new album—“Age Of”—on June 1, 2018 on Warp Records. The release is his most cohesive and richly composed work to date, weaving a tapestry of disparate musical histories—early music, country and folk balladry, melodic pop, computer music, and much more—that demonstrate both the complexity and range of the artist’s repertoire. With sounds that are unsettlingly familiar and uniquely his own, “Age Of” guides us through an unclassifiable new world.

  • Interrogations of Form

    Confrontational Comedy

    May 11, 2018

    Aparna Nancherla (Late Night with Seth Meyers, Master of None) headlines an evening of comedy sets and a conversation highlighting the power of humor to confront stereotypes and engage audiences around uncomfortable topics. Joining her are comedians Jordan Carlos (Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Broad City, The Colbert Report), Jena Friedman (former field producer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and writer for Late Show with David Letterman) and Jes Tom (who regularly shares stages with artists of myriad styles, mediums, and points of view). The evening is hosted by Warrington Hudlin (Founding President, Black Filmmaker Foundation, producer of House Party and Boomerang).

  • Artists Studio

    Matana Roberts

    April 24, 2018

    “Panoramic sound-quilting” is the term internationally renowned composer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts uses to describe her combination of instrumental music, singing, text, and visual imagery. Exploring themes of American history, memory, and ancestry, her very personal and improvisatory body of sound work is startling in its originality and gripping in its historic, political, and social power. She brings her creative practice as a musician merged with social consciousness to the Veterans Room for a site specific performance in her ongoing anthropological examination of music, storytelling, and the long, diverse history of her birth country.

    Matana Roberts’ visual work will be on view at Fridman Gallery March 25–April 25, 2018.

  • Interrogations of Form

    Sunday Salon: Film

    April 15, 2018

    Acclaimed Australian immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth hosts an afternoon salon exploring the power of emerging interactive technologies and gestural interfaces, including virtual reality, to reveal fragile human states of grace and connect people with the natural world. View Wallworth’s Emmy-winning VR film Collisions (Commission & World Premiere, World Economic Forum, 2016) and the multi-channel HD video Still Walking Country, as well as a presentation and Q&A with the artist in the historic Veterans Room.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Yerma

    March 23, 2018 - April 21, 2018

    Federico García Lorca’s 1934 devastating drama is radically reimagined by Australian director and dramatist Simon Stone, who transforms the achingly powerful tale of a provincial Spanish woman’s desperate desire to have a child into a parable of modern life. Having won 2017 Olivier Awards for Best Revival and Best Actress for Billie Piper when staged at the Young Vic in London, this full-blooded production is transported to the Armory for its highly anticipated North American premiere.

    Making her New York stage debut, the extraordinary Piper delivers a fearless performance as the woman—now a blogger and journalist—driven to the unthinkable by her obsession with her own infertility while brutally documenting her trauma amidst the internet-surfing blogosphere of today. Stone—in his New York directorial debut—superbly stages this requiem for lost hope in a glass encasement that transforms from luxurious apartment to garden to wild music festival at an electrifying pace. Intersecting the audience, this highly unusual staging serves as a strikingly effective visual metaphor to imitate life under a microscope and lived online while heightening our sense of voyeurism.

  • Artists Studio

    Alvin Curran

    March 14, 2018

    A founding member of the radical collective Musica Elettronica Viva, experimental composer Alvin Curran has shaken up the music composition world with his radical take on sound—tinkering with synthesizers, instruments, natural sounds, and using non-musical objects as instruments to challenge notions of form and performance in his startlingly original work. Whether they are solo performances, urban sound events, or large-scale installations, his avant-garde compositions flow organically between contemporary classical music, improv, free jazz, and all points in between, yet forge a very personal language through recombinant invention. The iconoclastic sound artist performs “The Alvin Curran Fake Book,” combining his Shofar Shoals, a work that features one of the most archaic music instruments—the ram’s horn—plugged into a computer to create sonic fireworks out of its few humble tones, with works that include his Endangered Species, Era Ora, and Unstandard Time.

  • Recital Series

    Lindemann Young Artists

    March 6, 2018 - March 7, 2018

    With notable alumni including Stephanie Blythe, Christine Goerke, Nathan Gunn, Mariusz Kwiecien, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Dawn Upshaw, The Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists Program is considered one of the most prestigious programs for artists through training and performance opportunities on the Metropolitan Opera stage. Hear some of the next generation of opera greats from the program—mezzo soprano Emily D’Angelo, bass David Leigh, and pianists Valeria Polunina and Nate Raskin in an evening of song in the Board of Officers Room.

  • Interrogations of Form

    Looking Back | Looking Forward

    February 17, 2018

    Artists, thinkers, activists, academics, and community leaders gather for a symposium of conversations, performances, and open studios exploring artistic, social, and political perspectives on the extraordinary world-changing events of 1968, the fifty years that followed, and the promise of the next fifty years. Artistic interventions and multi-disciplinary conversations across visual and performing arts, activism, literature, film, and poetry will take place in the historic period rooms—including the Board of Officers Room, Veterans Room, and second-floor Company Rooms.

    Presented in Collaboration with The Aspen Institute Arts Program & ArtChangeUS

  • Recital Series

    Nadine Sierra & Bryan Wagorn

    February 16, 2018 - February 18, 2018

    The youngest winner ever of both the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the Marilyn Horne Foundation Vocal Competition, Nadine Sierra is being hailed as one of the most promising new talents in opera today, with impressive recent debuts at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Paris Opera, and San Francisco Opera. She performs a wide-ranging program of art songs from Schumann and Strauss to Barber and Bernstein and works by Spanish and Brazilian composers that offers audiences the chance to get to know the seamless technique, abundant musicality, and vocal beauty of this star on the rise in one of the only spaces that could provide such a personal encounter—the Board of Officers Room.

  • Recital Series

    Isabel Leonard & Ted Sperling

    January 5, 2018 - January 7, 2018

    Highly acclaimed for her expressive intensity, impeccable technique, and charisma, Grammy Award-winning Isabel Leonard has thrilled audiences around the globe both in the opera house and on the concert stage at the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, and at the Salzburg and Glyndebourne Festivals, amongst others. Having also become an audience favorite on the Metropolitan Opera stage, the celebrated mezzo-soprano moves to a much more intimate space—the Board of Officers Room for a program of beloved songs and lesser-known gems by Leonard Bernstein in celebration of the centenary of his birth.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    A Room in India

    December 5, 2017 - December 20, 2017

    What is the role of theater and art in a world dominated by terrorism and hostility? This is the central question at the heart of A Room in India (“Une chambre en Inde”), the latest epic by the matriarch of exploratory French theater Ariane Mnouchkine and her company Théâtre du Soleil. After astonishing Armory audiences with their two-part work Les Éphémères—“steady stream that ultimately opens out into a vista of beauty both humble in its mundane details and immense in its emotional impact” (The New York Times)—in 2009, this visionary collective returns for the North American premiere of this landmark new work, following the adventures of a touring French theater company stranded in India without a director while the world around them falls into disarray.

    Performed by 35 multinational actors, this tour-de-force transcends Eastern and Western drama and features a special performance of Terukkuttu—a traditional form of theater practiced in South India. The production touches on pressing issues that societies around the globe are currently facing, from terrorism and religious extremism to climate change and gender equality. The end result is a manifesto of the power of theater to heal a community, as well as an exploration of how to talk about the chaos of a world that has become incomprehensible.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Edith Wharton and France at War

    November 28, 2017

    One hundred years ago this fall, the men of the 7th Regiment left New York to train for combat before leaving for the trenches of France. Included in their ranks were two members of the Rhinelander family, cousins to Edith Wharton, along with Van Rensaellers, Livingstons, and Roosevelts—a who’s who of young men of New York’s Gilded Age. Wharton thought it the duty of young men to serve in the war and celebrated their sacrifices in her writings. Hermione Lee, Wharton’s most noted biographer, will describe the great American novelist’s feelings for France, the amazing story of her activities on behalf of her adopted country during the First World War, and her complex relationship with America at the time.

    Hermione Lee is the President of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, and a biographer, critic, and Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and one of The New York Times 10 best books of 2014). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has reviewed regularly for The Guardian and for The New York Review of Books. She was Chair of the Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006.

  • Artists Studio

    Dominique Eade & Ran Blake with Kavita Shah

    November 21, 2017

    The influences and improvisational fluidity of jazz take center stage in a thrilling double bill of artists who infuse their sets with unique musical cultures and perspectives.

    Known for reshaping mostly familiar melodies into art songs with their genre-blurring mastery of jazz, blues, classical, folk, and gospel music, vocalist Dominique Eade and pianist Ran Blake showcase their strikingly unique harmonies, lyrical force, and evocative atmospheres with a set that includes songs from their latest release—Town and Country—as well as other standards, originals, and tributes.

    Kavita Shah seamlessly weaves together diverse cultural traditions into her jazz-based repertoire, from the Indian tabla and West African kora to African and Brazilian rhythms, placing seemingly eclectic songs, instruments, and artists in dialogue with one another to create a new type of jazz with global sensibilities that defies categorization. For her appearance at the Armory, Shah will be debuting the new work “Folk Songs of Naboréa,” a song-cycle for seven voices that imagines the folk music of a futuristic, post-nuclear society.

  • Recital Series

    Barbara Hannigan & Reinbert de Leeuw

    November 16, 2017 - November 18, 2017

    Barbara Hannigan has made a name for herself as a muse and collaborator with a number of legendary composers, creating roles on leading opera stages around the world by adding a kind of virtuosity that contemporary music has rarely seen before. The soprano comes to the Board of Officers Room to make her U.S. recital debut with programs that showcase her versatility and superb musicianship. She opens her residency with an artfully curated look at the Second Viennese School, where new musical language was developed through the extraordinary collaboration between composers, painters, writers, and other artists in the city’s salons and cafes at the turn of the century. She then looks to Paris to explore the work of Erik Satie, from his dramatic music written for ballet to his magnum opus Socrate, in a unique program performed with renowned Satie interpreter Reinbert de Leeuw.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Eleanor Roosevelt

    November 15, 2017

    There is no woman more interconnected with the history of the 7th Regiment Armory than Eleanor Roosevelt, whose father was a prominent member during her childhood and whose uncle was a role model to the Gilded Age men of the National Guard. She hosted events at the Armory to raise money for unemployed women during the Great Depression, attended dance festivals in the drill hall, and donated funds for the Armory’s maintenance when money was tight. Professor Wiesen Cook’s extensive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt has been praised as the essential portrait of a woman who towers over the 20th century. The third and final volume (Viking, 2016) takes us through World War II, FDR’s death, the founding of the UN, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962. It follows the arc of war and the evolution of a marriage, as the first lady realized the cost of maintaining her principles even as the country and her husband were not prepared to adopt them. These years—the war years—made Eleanor Roosevelt the woman she became: leader, visionary, guiding light.

    Blanche Wiesen Cook is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt Volume I was a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and both volumes (I and II) were New York Times bestsellers. Her other publications include The Declassified Eisenhower and Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution. She was a featured speaker in the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts.

  • Artists Studio

    Rashaad Newsome

    November 7, 2017

    Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is deeply invested in how images used in media and popular culture communicate distorted notions of power and status. Whether it be in his series of compositions created by “throwing shade” or his various works documenting the dance form known as vogue, his interests lie in critiquing the popular appropriation of the dance, music, and vernacular expression developed in Harlem’s queer ballroom scene of the 1970s.

    He comes to the Armory to premiere Running, a new immersive performance evoking an abstract portrait of soul created through light and voice. Running is centered on the musicology term for a singer’s improvised embellishment; a “vocal run” is a rapid series of ascending or descending musical notes sung in quick succession. Running is a vocal effect that spans a variety of musical genres from the 19th century to today. Newsome’s stirring performance features three local New York City vocalists performing an original score composed by the artist, which incorporates samples of vocal runs by Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, James Brown, and Kelly Price, among others.

  • Recital Series

    Patricia Kopatchinskaja & Jay Campbell

    October 9, 2017 - October 10, 2017

    Born into a Moldavian family of musicians, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a bundle of energy known as much for the passion and virtuosity of her playing as for the fact that she often performs barefoot. Despite the fact that the classical music world has dubbed her the “wild child” of the violin—or, perhaps, because of it—she has been steadily performing concerts around the world and garnering praise for her charm, charisma, and an expressiveness likened to that of a stage actor’s. The natural phenomenon comes to the Board of Officers Room with cellist Jay Campbell to perform duos from a wide ranging repertoire that perfectly showcases the pair’s extreme styles of music making, from the early music of Gibbons to classical works by Ravel and contemporary compositions by Xenakis, Ligeti, and a world premiere by Michael Hersch.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Répons

    October 6, 2017 - October 7, 2017

    Pierre Boulez was a French composer and conductor who helped blaze a radical new trail in classical music during the 20th century, composing innovative scores that showcased his musical creativity. And no work better showcases his compositional audacity than Répons, a work constructed on various types of calls and responses between a combination of acoustic instrumentation from an ensemble with soloists whose sounds are digitally transformed and regenerated live.

    Rarely staged in concert halls given its unconventional configuration of the space, this spatial masterwork is realized at the Armory with the ensemble positioned in the center of the audience, who is surrounded by the soloists and amplification with waves of sound spiraling and circling throughout and above. The world renowned contemporary music group Ensemble intercontemporain, under the baton of conductor Matthias Pintscher, performs this emblematic work twice in succession each evening, with the audience changing seats in between to gain a new sonic perspective. This remarkable presentation marks the first performance in New York of a major work by Boulez since his death in early 2016.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Henry James

    October 5, 2017

    Henry James famously compared The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to an enormous, million-windowed house, a building that opened on to any number of possible scenes. But what about the actual houses that figured in his work—the places where he wrote or the ones he took as models in which he set his characters that so compellingly captured the Gilded Age?  This lecture examines three different houses that figure in James’s novel: Hardwick, the country house in the south of England on which he based Gardencourt, in which the novel begins; the Florentine villa that served as the model for the house of the novel’s villain, Gilbert Osmond; and James’s own Lamb House, on the English coast, where he revised the novel in the early years of the 20th century.

    Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985, and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Earlier books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997); and The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990). He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a National Book Critics Circle award. Gorra’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the TLS, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. His current work in progress is William Faulkner’s Civil War.

  • Recital Series

    Sabine Devieilhe & Anne Le Bozec

    October 1, 2017 - October 3, 2017

    Coloratura soprano Sabine Devieilhe is quickly making a name for herself as one of the most exciting young voices around, making lauded debuts at opera houses throughout Europe including Dutch National Opera, Opéra national de Paris, Aix-en-Provence Festival, and the Glyndebourne Festival. She makes her North American recital debut with a program that centers on singer, composer, pianist, and teacher Pauline Viardot, one of the most remarkable artistic personalities of the 19th century, and the famed gatherings at her Parisian salon that drew a veritable “who’s who” of the international artistic scene.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Casey Stengel

    September 28, 2017

    As the 2017 World Series draws near, join baseball expert Marty Appel as he discusses New York baseball and his new book on the legendary Hall of Famer Casey Stengel—the only man to wear the uniforms of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets. For more than five decades, he was the quirky, hilarious, and beloved face of baseball in America. As a legendary manager, he formed indelible, complicated relationships with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Billy Martin and he revolutionized the role of manager while winning a spectacular 10 pennants and 7 world championships. Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees in the early 20th century and builder of Yankee Stadium was a member of the 7th Regiment and the connections from this East Side Armory to the Bronx run deep. For this lecture, archival items related to baseball will be on display.

    Marty Appel started his career in baseball at age 19 when he has hired by the Yankees to answer Mickey Mantle’s fan mail back in 1968. He went on to become the youngest public relations director in baseball history. As the man responsible for Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, he worked closely with Stengel in the 1970s. Appel is considered one of the nation’s leading historians on the Yankees, and has written 24 books including Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss (Bloomsbury, 2014), considered the definitive history of the team. A lifelong New Yorker, he has won an Emmy Award for his production of Yankee baseball and is a regular commentator on sports news. His new book Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character (2017) is the first major biography of Stengel in more than 30 years.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Blank Out

    September 21, 2017 - September 27, 2017

    Composer Michel van der Aa is a multidisciplinary figure in the contemporary music scene, combining composition with film, stage direction, and script writing. Classical instruments, voices, electronics, actors, video, apps and even web browsers are all seamless extensions of his broad musical vocabulary, allowing him to create works that are as visual as they are aural.

    This dynamic young creative voice comes to the Armory for the North American premiere of his latest work, a chamber opera for soprano and 3D film. Soprano Miah Persson sings live, combined with replayed loops of herself and the voice of baritone Roderick Williams on film to create haunting musical passages and ensembles. Based on the life and work of South African poet Ingrid Jonker, this groundbreaking work combines live action, innovative techniques of interactive film, and inventive music to consider human memory, the ways in which we reconstruct and deal with traumatic life events, and notions of individual realities.

  • Recital Series

    Lawrence Brownlee, Myra Huang & Jason Moran

    August 9, 2017 - August 11, 2017

    Known as one of the world’s leading bel canto tenors, American-born Lawrence Brownlee has captivated audiences and critics alike with a wide range of roles from opera to contemporary music and jazz. The acclaimed singer comes to the Armory for a progressive concert that bridges multiple historic period rooms. The evening begins in the Board of Officers Room with a recital of lieder and art songs and continues in the Veterans Room with jazz standards and American spirituals, both designed to showcase his unique vocal artistry as well as the ambience of the spaces in which it is showcased.

  • Recital Series

    Wu Man & The Shanghai Quartet

    June 20, 2017 - June 21, 2017

    The acclaimed Shanghai Quartet and pipa (Chinese lute) virtuoso Wu Man unite to perform new works by contemporary Chinese composers. Called “wonderfully ferocious and illuminating” by The Washington Post, the Shanghai Quartet are recognized for their unique fluency in both Eastern folk and Western Classical idioms. Hailed as a leading ambassador of Chinese music, Wu Man is “the artist most responsible for bringing the pipa to the Western world” (Los Angeles Times).

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Hansel & Gretel

    June 7, 2017 - August 6, 2017

    Pritzker Prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and artist/activist Ai Weiwei explore the meaning of public space in our surveillance-laden world, referencing the story of Hansel and Gretel in which the children lose their way and feel a sense of menace in a space they know and trust. The artists take advantage of the vast openness of the Drill Hall, creating a 21st century public place in which the environment is disconcerting, the entrance is unexpected, and every movement is tracked and surveyed by drones and communicated to an unknown public.

    The work builds on the artists’ shared practice as designers of form and investigation (the Beijing Olympic Stadium and “quite simply the best summer Serpentine Pavilion ever” according to Time Out London) and their deep interest in the public realm whether through activism or architecture. Ai Weiwei has described their collaborations as follows: “My experience of working with Jacques and Pierre is that we never think separately. It’s like three soldiers in the war—and that’s a good feeling: we have a constant understanding.”

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    FLEXN D.R.E.A.M. Ring Benefit

    May 21, 2017

    Join us for a special celebration of FLEXN, Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, and the D.R.E.A.M. Ring’s own evolution from one-on-one, community-based dance combatants to an international touring troupe of acclaimed dance activists.

    Following the 3:00pm matinee, there will be a D.R.E.A.M. Ringmaster event where two-man and tag-team performances are showcased, followed by a party with the company where demonstrations by the OGs (Original Generation) of flex will trace the growth of the movement from its roots in the Jamaican bruk-up style popular in dance halls and reggae clubs of Brooklyn in the 1990s, to its performances now. The party will also serve as a celebratory send-off to D.R.E.A.M. Ring as they embark on their third international tour, produced by Park Avenue Armory.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    FLEXN Evolution

    May 18, 2017 - May 21, 2017

    Dance pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, visionary director Peter Sellars, and members of the D.R.E.A.M. Ring return to the Armory for FLEXN Evolution, re-envisioned with newly created scenes since the Armory premiere in 2015 that embody the next steps in a form that breaks news from the artistic and political front lines. The performances feature a series of self-choreographed and improvisational scenes by 16 dance-activists from the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, a creative engine of acclaimed artists that unite communities through movement for social change around the world. Using the flex dance vocabulary—characterized by sharp, rhythmic contortion, pausing, snapping, gliding, bone-breaking, and animated showmanship—the dance-activists confront issues of social justice and racial equality within our nation’s law enforcement and judicial systems.

  • 2017 Season

    Madd Pain

    May 18, 2017 - May 21, 2017

    Madd Pain is a photographic installation by New York City-based photographer Carol Dragon presented in conjunction with FLEXN Evolution from May 18 through 21 in the Armory’s Colonels Room.

    After first encountering FLEXN at the Armory in 2015, Dragon began documenting the flex community and its dancers in her studio, on the street, at dance battles, and in their homes. Capturing the explosive energy, constant motion, and ephemeral grace specific to flex, her portraits offer audiences a unique perspective on each participating dancer’s style and movement. Dragon was awarded a 2017 Creative Engagement grant by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to develop this immersive, multi-layered work, which is being presented for the first time at the Armory.

  • Artists Studio

    Ryuichi Sakamoto

    April 25, 2017 - April 26, 2017

    Ryuichi Sakamoto has won or been nominated for Academy, Grammy, and Golden Globe Awards for his lauded scores from films including The Last Emperor, Little Buddha, and The Revenant. But this talented Japanese renaissance man is also a musician, producer, pianist, activist, writer, actor, dancer, and electronic music pioneer, with a diverse resume and fan base having collaborating with numerous artists on projects ranging from electronic to classical and world music. His work has been inspired by culture and history around the globe, writing music inspired by the traditions of Okinawa, Indonesia, and Brazil, amongst others. He comes to the Veterans Room with his long-time collaborator and visual artist, Shiro Takatani, to present a work that mixes both sound installation and musical performance for the first time in his career.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Hairy Ape

    March 25, 2017 - April 22, 2017

    Written in 1921 by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill, this iconic piece of expressionist drama is a searing social commentary of the divide between the rich and poor in the industrial age. This timeless story of class and identity gets a thrilling new life in a production by visionary director Richard Jones, who boldly reimagines his acclaimed staging at The Old Vic for the soaring Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

    Tony-nominated actor Bobby Cannavale stars as Yank, the unthinking laborer who embarks on a search for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the wealthy. His journey from the bowels of a transatlantic ocean liner to the wealthy neighborhoods of New York society literally revolves around the audience like the conveyer belt of a larger machine, serving as a metaphor for the struggle between the working man and the industrial complex found at the heart of the play. This fresh approach creates an inventive and contemporary rallying cry addressed as much to our own gilded age as to O’Neill’s that rattles the cages of capitalism.

  • Recital Series

    Sarah Connolly & Joseph Middleton

    March 15, 2017 - March 17, 2017

    Sarah Connolly is “unrivaled: simply the best, most exciting, most galvanizing performer we have today” (The Independent, UK), performing in some of the world’s most renowned opera houses including English National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival, Covent Garden, Bayreuther Festspiele, and the Metropolitan Opera. The celebrated British mezzo-soprano moves from the vast opera stage to the intimate Board of Officers Room for a recital that showcases her communicative power of lieder and art song.

  • Artists Studio

    Dawn of Midi

    February 18, 2017

    Dawn of Midi may share the instrumental makeup of a traditional jazz piano trio, but the Brooklyn-based acoustic ensemble have made a name for themselves by discovering entirely new avenues of sound that are focused on rhythm and dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. They come to the Veterans Room to play a set based on their acclaimed album Dysnomia, utilizing sophisticated rhythmic structures from North and West African folk traditions to weave a sonic tapestry of trance-inducing grooves.

  • Recital Series

    Lindemann Young Artists Concert

    February 1, 2017 - February 2, 2017

    The Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program has trained a new generation of celebrated American and international opera singers who perform at the highest standards in productions at the Met and opera houses around the world, with a roster of alumni that includes Paul Appleby, Stephanie Blythe, Nathan Gunn, Mariusz Kwiecién, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Dawn Upshaw.

    Hear exceptional artists from the program in an intimate evening of song that beautifully showcases these opera stars in the making.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Manifesto

    December 7, 2016 - January 8, 2017

    Artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt has made a name for himself not only for his photography, but also for his elaborately staged films that investigate the language and conventions of cinema as an allegory for societal and individual behaviors. He continues this exploration with the film installation Manifesto, a collage of artistic declarations from the past century reinterpreted as poetic monologues to provoke timeless questions about the gendered, social, and political contexts that shape the artist’s role in society.

    These angry, youthful, and powerful texts are brought to life in a tour-de-force of acting by Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett, who creates a kaleidoscopic series of different characterizations ranging from a TV anchorwoman to a corporate CEO to a homeless man. Presented simultaneously on massive screens, the 13 scenes draw on more than 50 manifestos by artists, architects, choreographers, and filmmakers at early points in their career, woven together into dramatic soliloquies that highlight specific movements or schools of thought. Connecting these famous texts to the humanity of everyday characters and actions, this highly theatrical cinematic installation makes its highly-anticipated North American premiere in an immersive reimagining that takes full advantage of the soaring Wade Thompson Drill Hall to allow viewers to experience both the intimacy of individual scenes and the cacophony of the work as a whole like never before. The resulting polyphonic plea for aesthetic change boldly recaptures the defiant spirit of its source material for a contemporary audience.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    A Crystal Palace Soiree

    November 29, 2016

    Professor Tim Barringer along with special musical guests will explore one of the wonders of the Victorian age: the Crystal Palace, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Visited by six million people, the exhibition was the most spectacular ever mounted with exotic and innovative objects from all over the world. The Unites States was a key exhibitor, sending pioneering machines (such as Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper), manufactured goods, and artworks. Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan McCullough will reconstruct a period-style performance, allowing them to give new life to the many songs, ballads, and piano pieces that celebrated the wonders of the exhibition, some of which have not been performed for more than a century. Professor Barringer will then look at the legacy of the Great Exhibition, including the New York Crystal Palace of 1853 (which took place at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue), and subsequent Expositions and Worlds’ Fairs.

    Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012), Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005), and Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock. He co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. Additionally, Barringer is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avante-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow, and Tokyo 2013) and curator of Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills, an exhibition of landscape painting from the National Museum of Wales, which is touring four U.S. museums till the end of 2016.

  • Artists Studio

    Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch

    November 21, 2016

    “There is nothing else in today’s art world even remotely like Ryan Trecartin‘s videos,” proclaimed Art in America. “It’s a sci-fi theater of the absurd for our manically paced YouTube era.“ Within these fluidly structured and visually commanding works, Trecartin’s groundbreaking sound design—a densely layered mix of rapid-fire dialogue, electronic music and live instrumentation—extends the depth, intensity, and insane hilarity of his art. He is joined by his principal collaborator Lizzie Fitch, music producer and DJ Ashland Mines (aka Total Freedom), and composer/producer Aaron David Ross (who will be conducting and doing the music direction) to present a new, digitally-inflected sonic composition live for the very first time.

  • Recital Series

    Kate Royal & Joseph Middleton

    November 18, 2016 - November 20, 2016

    British lyric soprano Kate Royal has generated significant excitement among fans of great singing with appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne Festival, Paris Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, and the English National Opera. Equally at home on the recital stage, the “elegant, thoughtful singer” (The New York Times) comes to the Armory to perform an artfully-curated selection of lieder and song by Robert and Clara Schumann, Mahler, and Samuel Barber.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Rightful Heritage

    November 18, 2016

    Franklin Roosevelt’s extraordinary legacy as our 32nd president encompassed shepherding the nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War and engineering the New Deal programs that endure to this day. But in this lecture, historian and author Douglas Brinkley will discuss how FDR’s lasting contribution to our country extends further—across the entire continent in fact—through his passionate and resolute efforts to preserve and conserve our natural resources. Although Theodore Roosevelt is generally considered America’s great conservation president, FDR was at the forefront of the national debate about the future of America’s land and was the founder of the Civilian Conservation Corps. He went on to designate dozens of State Park systems such as the Great Smokies, the Everglades, Joshua Tree, the Olympics, Big Bend, Channel Islands, and Mammoth Cave. Mr. Brinkley will give us a fresh look at the life and legacy of one of our most beloved presidents.

    Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, the CNN Presidential Historian and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” New York Times bestseller Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America is his most recent book (2016). Six of his previous books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year including Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years 1952-71 (1992), Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (1992), The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House (1998), Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress (2004), The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2007), and The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2010)

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”

    November 9, 2016

    Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure—a riddle—a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people—including his own family—in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever. Professor Annette Gordon-Reed will discuss the many shifting “selves” of Jefferson: father, husband, slave owner, diplomat, politician, and cosmopolitan. This character study will analyze that changing image of Thomas Jefferson—from the 1940s, when the Jefferson Memorial was first built, up until this moment when the Broadway musical Hamilton is helping to shape attitudes about him today.

    Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, and a Professor of History at Harvard University. Her new book Most Blessed of Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination (with Peter S. Onuf) was published in April 2016. Ms. Gordon-Reed received the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009). She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1998) and Andrew Johnson (2011).

  • Recital Series

    JACK Quartet

    October 30, 2016 - October 31, 2016

    Known as “superheroes of the new music world” (The Boston Globe), JACK Quartet has emerged over the past decade as the go-to ensemble for contemporary music with their impeccable musicianship, intellectual ferocity, and a take-no-prisoners sense of commitment. This virtuosic young ensemble perform the world premiere of FLiGHT, a fully-staged event with string quartet, real-time computer-derived sound, readings, and projections to explore humankind’s aspiration to fly, with music by Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Reynolds, video by Ross Karre, and electronics by Paul Hembree.

  • Artists Studio

    Camille Norment & Craig Taborn

    October 16, 2016

    Representing Norway at the 2015 Venice Biennial, multimedia artist Camille Norment uses the notion of cultural psychoacoustics to explore the perception of sound through installation, sculpture, and performance. She is joined by improvising pianist, composer, and electronic musician Craig Taborn for a performance that blends the pair’s unique styles and instruments, from the piano to electronics to the rare glass armonica. Having known each other since their college days, the duo now partner for the very first time in a presentation that traces the fringes of sound, perception, and historical memory and perfectly marries with the varying aesthetics of the space.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Circle Map

    October 13, 2016 - October 14, 2016

    Across a crowded contemporary musical landscape, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho stands apart with her sensual, expansive soundscapes. A composer of immense imagination, her spellbinding scores evoke luminous color and emotional depth while being full of new instrumental techniques that often blend acoustic instruments with subliminal electronic manipulation. After dazzling Armory audiences with their program of spatial music in 2012, the revered New York Philharmonic returns, this time under the baton of the Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence and Saariaho’s fellow countryman Esa-Pekka Salonen, for performances of some of her seminal works that need to appropriate a massive space and require surround sound for their full realization.

    The program features the New York premieres of Circle Map, a new work for orchestra and electronics that builds out from six stanzas by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, and D’om le Vrai Sens, written for and performed here while moving through the audience and orchestra by clarinetist Kari Krikku. The evening also includes the U.S. premiere of Lumière et Pesanteur as well as Lonh, a work that combines medieval love poetry sung by rising soprano Jennifer Zetlan with an electronic score that manipulates sounds from nature to evoke a distant, luminous landscape.

  • Recital Series

    Sonia Wieder-Atherton & Bruno Fontaine

    October 7, 2016 - October 8, 2016

    Having delighted Armory audiences in 2015 with her program of Benjamin Britten’s powerful suites and Sylvia Plath’s haunting poetry, renowned cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton returns to the Board of Officers Room with the North American premiere of a program that boldly re-imagines the radical, sometimes fierce music of Nina Simone. With her cello taking the role of the torch singer’s voice, Wieder-Atherton digs deep into Simone’s universe and delivers a kaleidoscope of emotions, from honey-sweet to raw and uncompromising, and an exploration of diverse styles in this musical tour de force.

  • Artists Studio

    Lucy Raven

    September 29, 2016 - September 30, 2016

    Lucy Raven is an artist whose practice encompasses a wide variety of forms, including animated films, sculptural installations, performative lectures, and interventions into live television. Connecting all of these disparate strands is the artist’s continuing exploration into the effects of technology on the world. She comes to the Veterans Room to reimagine her work Tales of Love and Fear, a unique instance of cinema that is as much a film as it is a kinetic sculpture performing the architecture of the space it inhabits. A single stereoscopic photograph is split by two projectors into left and right eye perspective which slowly counter-rotates around the room, utilizing 3D film technologies to expand the perception of the cinematic beyond the screen through an art-historical lens.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    An Occupation of Loss

    September 13, 2016 - September 25, 2016

    Taryn Simon is an enigmatic and groundbreaking artist whose practice involves rigorous research and investigation into the power and structure of secrecy, often underscoring our operational and emotional vulnerabilities. A conceptual artist working primarily with image and text, Simon breaks form with her first ever directed performance in which she considers the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems that we devise to contend with the irrationality of the universe.

    Each night at sundown, more than thirty professional mourners populate Simon’s sculptural installation, broadcasting their lamentations. The status of the lamenters as professionals—performing away and apart from their usual contexts—underscores the tension between authentic and staged emotion, spontaneity and script. Open during the daytime, visitors are invited to activate the sculpture of inverted wells with their own sounds.  A subtle drone created from distilled recordings of the mourners’ rituals provides a white noise that echoes the evening performances.

    The resulting work blends sculpture, sound, architecture, and performance in a monumental exploration of the boundaries of grief between living and dead, past and present, performer and viewer.

  • Recital Series

    Andreas Ottensamer & José Gallardo

    September 8, 2016 - September 9, 2016

    Born into a musical family in Vienna, clarinetist Andreas Ottensamer dabbled with the piano and cello before taking up the clarinet. The young Austrian prodigy has gone on to become principal clarinetist of the Berliner Philharmoniker, capturing audiences and critics alike with his diverse musicality and the singular beauty of tone that he coaxes from the instrument. He makes his North American recital debut in the Board of Officers Room with a program that perfectly showcases what the clarinet can do in a space that highlights the sheer beauty of chamber music.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    How We Got Here

    September 8, 2016

    The Park Avenue Armory has seen a parade of presidents and candidates come through its doors, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush. But who will be next? In the case of the 2016 election, what’s past is prologue. As Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off for the presidency, history continues to shape the issues facing voters and candidates alike. Political commentator David Gergen will explore how political, social, and economic history—both in the American and global context—have shaped 2016 and what it means for Election Day on November 8th.

    David Gergen is a professor of public service and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, positions he has held for more than a decade. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. Starting with the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour in 1984, he has been a regular commentator on public affairs for some 30 years. In the past, he has served as a White House adviser to four U.S. presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He wrote about those experiences in his New York Times bestseller, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton (Simon & Schuster, 2001). He is an honors graduate of Yale and the Harvard Law School, and has been awarded 27 honorary degrees.

  • Artists Studio

    Milford Graves & Deantoni Parks

    June 13, 2016

    The art of music making gets examined through the lenses of science and technology in this thrilling double bill of music and projection by percussion pioneers. Seminal drummer and acupuncturist Milford Graves is an innovator of free jazz, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role to inform an entirely new sound.  He has since gone on to build technologies for transforming human biorhythms into electronic sounds in order to explore their percussive link to music. The ever-evolving relationship between music and technology is explored by extraordinary drummer and musician Deantoni Parks, who augments his natural talents with the benefits of sampling and technology to fuel his own singular vision, as showcased on his newly-released debut album Technoself.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Martin Creed: The Back Door

    June 8, 2016 - August 7, 2017

    Winner of the 2001 Turner Prize, British artist Martin Creed has pursued an extraordinary path by confounding the traditional categories of art and employing a minimalistic approach that strips away the unnecessary while preserving an abundance of wit, humor, and surprise. Crossing all media including painting, drawing, music, dance, theater, film, sculpture, fashion, and more, Creed’s practice meditates on our everyday existence and the visible and invisible structures that shape our lives.

    Creed continues his ongoing exploration into rhythm, scale, and order in his largest installation in the U.S. to date, a survey of his work from its most minimal moments to extravagant, larger-than-life installations. Utilizing both the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and the historic interiors of the building, Creed will reimagine the space with opening and closing doors, curtains, a slamming piano, and balloons, amongst other new works made for this exhibition. These materials and situations, when grouped together, create a playful spectacle within a framework that provides the viewer with a fascinating way to counter our visually overloaded, choice-saturated culture.

  • Recital Series

    Andreas Scholl & Tamar Halperin

    May 21, 2016 - May 22, 2016

    The countertenor voice—a male who sings in the pitch range more typically associated with the alto or mezzo—came to prominence in the mid-17th century before falling from favor not even a century later. It has since enjoyed a powerful resurgence, with many countertenors now commanding praise on the world’s greatest concert and operatic stages. Andreas Scholl, who possesses one of the most beautiful countertenor voices of his generation, comes to the Board of Officers Room with a program that explores the poetry and artistic expression of the English Renaissance and Baroque at the height of the voice type’s original popularity.

  • Artists Studio

    Conrad Tao & Tyshawn Sorey

    May 20, 2016

    A thoughtful artist and dynamic performer, 21-year-old pianist and composer Conrad Tao has already garnered praise from audiences and critics alike for his imaginative performances of a wide range of classical and contemporary repertoire. This next big thing in classical piano is joined by multifaceted percussionist and instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey, a pivotal figure in contemporary improvisation practice in his own right who operates in a wide cross-section of musical idioms.

    The dynamic pair unite to create a collaborative, evening-length work that explores the liminal space between notated and improvised music, melding keyboard works by Ligeti, Boulez, and Elliott Carter with their own spontaneous musical forms to obliterate the borders between them, eliminating the separation between composition and improvisation.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Anohni: Hopelessness

    May 18, 2016 - May 19, 2016

    Park Avenue Armory and Red Bull Music Academy are proud to present the world premiere of Anohni’s live show for her new album Hopelessness. Featuring original films and a band that includes Oneohtrix Point Never, the celebrated singer, composer, and visual artist will bring her politically charged masterpiece to audiences in an environment unlike any other. Having dazzled Armory audiences with her haunting vocals as showcased in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović in 2013, Anohni has established herself as one of the most fragile and emotive vocalists with her work in Antony and the Johnsons and her flooring contributions to the Hercules & Love Affair project. Expect to see another breathtaking chapter to her evolving story take shape for the first time ever.

  • Recital Series

    Kristóf Baráti & Klára Würtz

    April 27, 2016 - April 28, 2016

    There is no doubt that the ten Beethoven sonatas represent the most important body of work for violin and piano, setting the standard to which all other composers aspired for many years to come. Having received rave reviews for their recording of these brilliant works, celebrated duo Kristóf Baráti and Klára Würtz arrive at the Armory to interpret a selection of these wondrous works.

  • Artists Studio

    Pauline Oliveros & Ione

    April 1, 2016 - April 2, 2016

    Pauline Oliveros is an American composer and accordionist who is a central figure in the development of experimental and electronic art music, redefining the boundaries of music making for more than 50 years. She is joined by noted author, director, and dream specialist IONE in the Veterans Room to present a Deep Listening Intensive, exploring the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening through movement and sonic, interactive meditations. Conducted in multiple sessions over two days, the experience reengages the listener with the sounds of daily life, nature, imagination, and dreams, to offer a new sonic reality that shows that there is more to listening than meets the ear.

  • Recital Series

    Roomful of Teeth

    March 31, 2016 - April 1, 2016

    The Grammy Award-winning Roomful of Teeth is a project dedicated to mining the expressive potential of the human voice, exploring singing traditions and techniques from around the world in an effort to commission new vocal works without borders. Having been heralded as “blazing a new trail” in choral music by The New Yorker, the group performs a program of works that include Elliot Cole’s Hanuman’s Leap and others that redefine vocal music for the 21st century.

  • Artists Studio

    Louis Andriessen & Jason Moran

    March 23, 2016

    Dutch contemporary composer Louis Andriessen creates music that is carefully structured, strictly notated, and technically demanding, yet he loves to improvise and is influenced and passionate about jazz as heard in many of his works. As a counterpoint to the visionary production of his monumental De Materie, he is joined by pianist Jason Moran for an evening spotlighting these jazz influences as well as other improvisations. This artfully-curated set for two pianos gives a contemporary context to musical improvisation, moving this extemporaneous art form from its origins in the time of Bach and Beethoven to the modern age.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    De Materie

    March 22, 2016 - March 30, 2016

    Louis Andriessen is one of Europe’s most eminent and influential composers, whose music is marked by the combination of forward propulsion, sparseness, and clarity from large blocks of sound to minimalism. But there is nothing minimal about De Materie, starting with its all-encompassing theme: the relationship between matter and spirit. Like four voluminous chapters of a book or movements of a symphony, this exceptional music theater masterwork is better thought of as a series of visions, as much choreographic as it is operatic.

    Visionary director Heiner Goebbels stages this monumental work in a highly-imaginative production that infuses the work’s journey through a sequence of non-narrative tableaus with stunning visual imagery to help convey its meaning, with references to Mondrian and Madame Curie as well as floating zeppelins and a flock of sheep. The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) under the direction of Peter Rundel takes on the sonically varied score, which serves as its own journey through eras and styles of music history from early Renaissance, to the jazz-tinged roaring 20s, to contemporary music of today. The vastness of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is the perfect setting to fully realize this rarely-performed work, which premiered more than 25 years ago and only now makes its highly-anticipated North American stage premiere.

  • Recital Series

    Lindemann Young Artists

    March 8, 2016 - March 10, 2016

    With a roster of alumni that includes Stephanie Blythe, Nathan Gunn, and Dawn Upshaw, the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program has solidified its place in the opera world as a leader in nurturing the next generation of operatic superstars. Hear a preview of three of these soon-to-be opera greats from the program – soprano Clarissa Lyons, mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, and tenor Kang Wang – in intimate evenings of song in the Board of Officers Room.

  • Artists Studio

    Jason Moran

    March 7, 2016

    Jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran has a rich and varied body of work that is actively shaping the current and future landscape of jazz. Having released nine of his own albums in addition to over 30 recordings with others, Moran has garnered international acclaim including a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Album in 2014. He inaugurates the Veterans Room with a performance of works for solo piano, commemorating the auspicious occasion with a live recording for future release.

  • Recital Series

    Roderick Williams, Jenny Agutter & Susie Allan

    February 4, 2016 - February 5, 2016

    Baritone Roderick Williams has made a name for himself on both the opera and concert stage, singing a wide repertoire of rarely-heard Baroque gems to contemporary music of today. The burnished baritone makes his North American recital debut with a performance of Schubert’s final and one of the most enduring song collections, elucidating the songs with interspersed poetry and readings for a poignant and heartfelt evening that could only be felt in the perfectly intimate setting of the Board of Officers Room.

  • Recital Series

    Lisette Oropesa & John Churchwell

    January 12, 2016 - January 13, 2016

    A winner of the Met’s National Council Auditions in 2005, Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa has been taking the opera world by storm ever since with vocally commanding performances at the Metropolitan Opera as well as other opera houses in the U.S. and Europe. She performs a program of Spanish art songs as well as works by Schubert and Schumann, offering audiences the chance to get to know this star on the rise in one of the only spaces that could provide such an intimate encounter – the Board of Officers Room.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Goldberg

    December 7, 2015 - December 19, 2015

    Among his most beloved works, J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations is a towering keyboard masterpiece with a life of its own, with themes, harmonies, and contrapuntal strands of the musical sequence that await the creative imagination of both performer and listener to connect them. Igor Levit, who made his impressive North American recital debut at the Armory in 2014, interprets this classic composition in an installation created by seminal artist Marina Abramović.

    Having redefined what performance art is for nearly 40 years, she now re-imagines the concert-going experience by employing her Abramović Method to explore the relationship between performer and observer, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Goldberg invites audiences to become a part of the music and experience the work in an entirely new context. The audience will prepare for Levit’s performance by dispossessing themselves of the trappings of everyday society by placing their personal belongings—including cell phones, watches, and other technological devices—inside a private locker. Upon entering the drill hall, the crowd will sit in silence for an extended period of time, after which Levit will perform all 30 variations to heighten the effect of the piece on their mind and body.

    This concentrated durational work reflects upon music, time, space, emptiness, and luminosity, with the audience becoming a part of the work and in the process, connecting with themselves and with the present — the elusive moment of the here and now.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Holiday Entertaining in the Gilded Age

    December 1, 2015

    Discover the elaborate etiquette and enchanting entertainments of a century ago with vivid descriptions of dinner parties, cotillions, and elegant holiday events that will transport you back in time. The Gilded Age— a time of calling cards, horse-drawn coaches, afternoon tea, formal dinners—a time when even picnics were served on fine china. Learn the popular toasts of the era and when it’s proper to remove your gloves or tip your hat as you play a guessing game on the uses of dozens of unique, but now obsolete objects of the time.

    Francine Segan one of America’s foremost food historians, is a public speaker, author, TV personality, and consultant. She is a noted James Beard-nominated author of six books including her most recent two on Italy, Dolci: Italy’s Sweets and Pasta Modern: New & Inspired Recipes from Italy. She is the host on NYC’s popular i-italy TV series “Americans Who Love Italy,” and also appears on many other programs, including the “Today” show and “The Early Show” and has been featured on numerous specials for PBS, the Food Network, and the History, Sundance, and Discovery channels. She lectures across the USA for the prestigious speakers’ bureau Cassidy & Fishman and is a frequent guest speaker at NYC’s premiere cultural center the 92nd Street Y, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, Smithsonian Institution in DC, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and American Museum of Natural History among others. She recently moderated a panel for the Tribeca Film Festival on food in film.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    When Iridescence Met Incandescence

    November 18, 2015

    Thomas Edison and Louis Comfort Tiffany—innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs, autodidacts, visionaries, and friends—both loomed large in Gilded Age America. They worked together on the design of the old Lyceum Theatre on Fourth Avenue, the first theater in the world to be fully electrically lit. Their meeting also gave the world the Tiffany lamp. Both men worked on the Seventh Regiment Armory, although at separate times; Tiffany as designer of two rooms in 1880 and later Edison’s company provided electricity to the building in 1897. Join historian Francis Morrone for an illustrated talk on these two creative titans whose backgrounds could not be more dissimilar but whose parallel paths yet converged and lit up the world around them.

    Francis Morrone is an architectural historian and a writer, author of eleven books, including Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes (W.W. Norton, 2013) and, with Henry Hope Reed, The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (W.W. Norton, 2011), as well as architectural guidebooks to Philadelphia and Brooklyn. He was for six and a half years an art and architecture critic for The New York Sun, and his writings appear in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Daily News, The New Criterion, and Humanities.

  • Recital Series

    Christian Gerhaher & Gerold Huber

    November 10, 2015

    While he has triumphed in international opera and oratorio appearances, Christian Gerhaher is also today’s foremost interpreter of lieder, with his vocal artistry profoundly conveying the poetry and emotional seed of each song. After inaugurating the reopening of the Board of Officers Room in 2013, the burnished baritone returns with his longstanding recital partner Gerold Huber for a program that highlights the Viennese peak of the art song tradition.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated Artists Decorate Mark Twain’s House

    October 28, 2015

    Mark Twain and his family moved into their new house in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1874 and lived there until 1891. The years between were filled with endless dinner parties, billiard games, the raising of three daughters, the meteoric rise of Twain’s literary success, and the ascendance of his social standing in the elite Nook Farm neighborhood. In 1881, the family hired Associated Artists, the decorating firm put together by Louis Comfort Tiffany, to redecorate the interior of the house just after the firm finished its work at the Park Avenue Armory. Tracy Brindle, the Mark Twain House’s new curator, will examine Twain’s connections with Tiffany and Associated Artists, including Candace Wheeler, Lockwood de Forest, and Samuel Colman, and the extensive decoration of the house, known by Twain as “the loveliest home that ever was.” The house went through many alterations through the decades, coming close to demolition at one time, and has undergone a series of meticulous restorations since 2003.

    Tracy Brindle is the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Chief Curator at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. She joined the museum’s staff in April 2015. New to the East Coast, she previously worked as the Collections & Exhibitions Assistant at Midway Village Museum in Rockford, Illinois, a living history museum composed of a group of structures of the Gilded Age. There she was involved in many exhibitions and translated the museum’s collections into compelling local stories as author of an acclaimed museum blog.

  • Under Construction Series

    Imani Uzuri

    October 25, 2015

    Imani Uzuri presents a new exploratory work-in-progress inspired by Sister Gertrude Morgan’s “all white” prayer room. A visual, performative, and sonic installation entitled Prayer Request, the piece explores the intersection of spirituality, ritual, spectacle and sound and their impact on our perceptions of what is our “salvation” and what makes us “feel”.

    Vocalist, composer and cultural worker Imani Uzuri creates music that reflects her rural North Carolina roots where she grew up singing Spirituals and line-singing hymns with her grandmother and extended family in their small rural church. Her compositions for bands, choral ensembles, chamber orchestra, musical theater and solo voice also include influences from her travels around the world to places like Hungary, Morocco, Ethiopia, Russia, Kazakhstan and Japan where she shared these foundational American musical sounds with international audiences and communities while also learning about their musical traditions. Uzuri’s new album, The Gypsy Diaries, draws on her roots as well as influences ranging from Sufi devotionals to Romany laments. Uzuri creates and performs concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions and sound installations in international venues/festivals including Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, New York’s Central Park SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, Performa Biennial, France’s Festival Sons d’hiver, London’s ICA, and MoMA. Uzuri has also collaborated with a wide range of noted artists across various artistic disciplines including musicians Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Vijay Iyer; visual artists Wangechi Mutu, Carrie Mae Weems, Sanford Biggers; choreographer Trajal Harrell and composer Robert Ashley. 

  • Recital Series

    Rushes Ensemble

    October 23, 2015

    With one of the most unorthodox ensembles imaginable, New York City-based Michael Gordon, composer and founder of the iconic Bang on a Can collective, offers a sonic meditation for seven bassoons in its New York City premiere. Best known for music driven by rhythmic intensity and power, Gordon explores interweaving textures and the timbre of a surplus of double reeds to form a steadily pulsating, unbroken wall of woodwind sound.

  • Under Construction Series

    Brent Green

    October 17, 2015

    Brent Green presents his animated films accompanied by a live performance featuring his sound sculptures, live Foley sound effects, and a thirteen-piece band. The performance will be followed by a studio visit to further examine his creative process. During his residency Green will continue to work on his film, EE, about his grandfather and the ways in which people influence others around them. Simultaneously, Green is creating a series of new sound sculptures, including a 16’ tall accordion filled with pipe-organ reeds – which he will add to his portfolio of similar works.

    Working in the Appalachian hills of rural Pennsylvania, Brent Green is a self-taught visual artist and filmmaker. Green’s films have screened, often with live musical accompaniment, in film and art settings alike at venues such as MoMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Hammer Museum, The Boston MFA, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Rotterdam Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and even extending to rooftops, warehouses and galleries throughout the globe. Often, his sculptural work and large-scale installation are displayed alongside his animated films, most recently with solo exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum, Site Santa Fe, 21c/Art Without Walls, Diverseworks Houston and the Berkeley Art Museum. Green has received grants from Creative Capital and the MAPfund. His work is in some fine permanent collections including the Progressive Collection, the Hammer Museum and MoMA. He serves on the Board of Directors for Rooftop Films and the Susan J. Weiler Foundation.

  • Recital Series

    David Fray

    October 6, 2015 - October 9, 2015

    Franz Schubert had a tragically short but extremely productive life. While known for composing over 600 songs and song cycles, his works for piano are perhaps some of the most beautiful pieces of chamber music ever composed. French pianist David Fray harnesses the delicacy and richness of color in his playing to interpret three of these expressive works in the Board of Officers Room.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Habeas Corpus

    October 2, 2015 - October 4, 2015

    Iconic performance artist Laurie Anderson expands upon her work fusing storytelling and technology, creating an installation and performance piece that examines lost identity, memory, and the resiliency of the human body and spirit.

    This gripping new artwork interweaves film, sculpture, music, and video to examine the story of Mohammed el Gharani, one of the youngest detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Open to the public during the day, Habeas Corpus encourages visitors to use the drill hall as place to meditate on time, identity, surveillance, and freedom. The evocative environment within the Drill Hall includes an original, immersive soundscape that blends guitars and amps in feedback, originally designed by Lou Reed, with sounds derived from audio surveillance and nature. The space will also be activated by improvised music performances throughout the day and concludes at night in a celebratory concert and dance party with Syrian singer Omar Souleyman, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, guitarist Stewart Hurwood, and Anderson herself.

    The installation also includes additional film installations including From the Air, which explores the impact of global events on daily life and resonates with many of the themes explored in el Gharani’s story.

    The result is a groundbreaking new work that spans the worlds of visual art, performance, and experimental music as created by one of America’s most renowned and daring artistic pioneers.

  • Under Construction Series

    600 Highwaymen

    September 26, 2015

    600 Highwaymen begin with the infamous Rite of Spring as inspiration for their new theater piece, The Fever.  Involving a large group of people, the work explores human beings inside systems of organization – who we are together and who we are alone.

    Obie Award-winning company 600 Highwaymen construct theater pieces that illuminate the inherent poignancy and theatricality of people together.  Formed in 2009 by directors Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone and based in Brooklyn, NY, 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s performances have been awarded distinctions by The New Yorker, New York Times, Village Voice, Flavorpill, and Time Out New York. Productions include The Record (Invisible Dog Arts Center, Under The Radar/The Public Theater; Noorderzon Festival, The Netherlands; Parc de la Villette and Centre Pompidou, Paris; Theaterformen, Germany),  Employee of the Year (Mt. Tremper Arts; Crossing the Line; upcoming: Wexner Center for the Arts, International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven; Theaterformen, Germany; Noorderzon Festival, The Netherlands), This Time Tomorrow (“Best Of”; L Magazine), This Great Country (Fusebox Festival and River to River), Empire City (Editors Pick: Village Voice, Time Out New York), Everyone Was Chanting Your Name (Abrons Arts Center). Browde and Silverstone have received fellowships and residencies from the Drama League, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab,  Theater Masters, New York State maximum-security prisons, A.R.T./NY, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and numerous colleges and universities.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    New York City's Historic Armories

    September 24, 2015

    Between the Civil War and World War II, New York built the most sophisticated and monumental armories in America for the State National Guard. This collection of fortresses epitomized a new and uniquely American building type and served as models for the nation. The Seventh Regiment Armory was at the forefront of this movement and has been described as the flagship for the new American armory, a model never matched for its grandeur. This lecture will trace the evolution of the armory through local military history and discuss the reasons for the rapid pace of the construction of armories across the five boroughs, focusing on Manhattan and Brooklyn examples, and how those armories were used for training, as clubs, and for social activities. Architectural historian Nancy L. Todd will also examine the 20th-century decline of the armories in our city; what’s been saved and what’s been lost.

    There will be a tour and reception of the historic Seventh Regiment Armory at the conclusion of the lecture. This event is part of Armory Month with the Landmarks 50 Alliance.

    Nancy L. Todd is a lifelong resident of New York’s capital district and an architectural historian who recently retired after 31 years at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, where she worked to preserve landmarks of the Finger Lakes Region. She is the author of New York’s Historic Armories: An Illustrated History (State University of New York Press, 2006) for which she received the Adjutant General’s Award from the NYS Division of Military and Naval Affairs.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Tree of Codes

    September 14, 2015 - September 21, 2015

    Visual art, electro-pop, and contemporary dance intersect in an illuminating new work directed by award-winning choreographer Wayne McGregor, artist Olafur Eliasson, and producer/composer Jamie xx. Performed by fifteen soloists and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor, this new type of modern dance layers classical and contemporary styles with visual wizardry and sonic imagination in this highly-anticipated U.S. premiere.

    This new evening-length work takes as its starting point Jonathan Safran Foer’s enigmatic publication, at once a novel and a piece of art created by making incisions into the pages of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. Utilizing Foer’s merging of genres and sculptural techniques, the piece features a site-specific environment that reinvents the performance space with a shape-shifting kaleidoscope of light, color, and reflective mirrors that challenges preconceived notions of the role of the viewer from the moment they enter the Drill Hall.

  • Under Construction Series

    Andew Ondrejcak

    September 2, 2015

    Writer/director/designer Andrew Ondrejcak continues work on ELIJAH GREEN, his adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, which follows the journey of a divine spirit as it wanders on earth, delving into the contemporary tedium of the everyday human. For Under Construction, Ondrejcak will open his studio to show his work in progress, including large-scale drawings and prototypes of the scenery and costume elements.

    Born and raised in Mississippi, Andrew studied architecture and painting at Savannah College of Art and Design then playwriting at Brooklyn College. While making experimental theater in New York, Andrew was asked to conceptualize a fashion show; he quickly became one of New York’s most sought-after production designers in the fashion industry, known for large-scale environmental installations. He works with Vogue, Bazaar, Italian Vogue, Wallpaper*, W, V, among others. He is currently the art director for Vivienne Westwood’s upcoming retrospective.

    Ondrejcak’s performances have been presented at Guggenheim Museum’s Works in Process curated by Robert Wilson, the Under The Radar Festival at The Public Theater (2014) and the upcoming BAM Next Wave Festival (2015). Outside of New York, his original performances have been produced at Holland Festival (Amsterdam), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah), deSingel (Antwerp), and Kampnagel (Hamburg). He reperformed the work of Marina Abramovic at MoMA (2010). In 2013, Ondrejcak was Artist in Residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governor’s Island.

    As an arts educator, Ondrejcak taught workshops on performance and design at Domaine de Boisbuchet in Lessac, France (2013-2014) and, since 2002, has been a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

    Currently, Ondrejcak is Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City where he is working on a new performance, Elijah Green, which will premiere at The Kitchen in March 2016, for which he received a MAP Grant and a National Theater Project grant through the New England Foundation for the Arts, generously provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

    In 2016, Ondrejcak will begin creating a new performance while in residence at The Watermill Center.

  • Under Construction Series

    Taylor Mac / Machine Dazzle

    August 6, 2015 - August 9, 2015

    Taylor Mac presents new material and musical arrangements from his on-going durational concert called A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which includes performances of songs from the last 24 decades of popular music. Each decade has a different costume designed by Machine Dazzle; those created during the residency will also be on display during the Under Construction showing. Ultimately all 24 decades will be stitched together, culminating in a 24-hour long extravaganza (in 2016), which will feature Taylor Mac, a 24-piece orchestra, dancing beauties, special guests, and the audience.

    Taylor Mac is a theater artist (who uses the gender pronoun “judy”)—a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, cabaret performer, performance artist, director and producer. judy’s work has been performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center and The Public Theater, the Sydney Opera House, American Repertory Theater, Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, and London’s Soho Theatre, among other theatres, museums, music halls, cabarets and festivals around the globe. judy is the author of sixteen full-length plays and performance pieces including Hir (recently premiered at San Francisco’s Magic Theater), The Lily’s Revenge (Obie Award), The Walk Across America for Mother Earth (named One of the Best Plays of 2011 by The New York Times), The Young Ladies Of (Chicago’s Jeff Award nomination for Best Solo), Red Tide Blooming (Ethyl Eichelberger Award), The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award). In collaboration with Mandy Patinkin, Susan Stroman and Paul Ford, Mac created The Last Two People On Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville, in which judy is currently performing/touring with Mr. Patinkin. judy is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Sundance Theater Lab residencies, three Map Grants, The Creative Capital Grant, The James Hammerstein Award for playwriting, three GLAAD Media Award Nomination, two New York State Council on the Arts Grants, a Massachusetts Council of the Arts Grant, an Edward Albee Foundation Residency, The Franklin Furnace Grant, a Peter S. Reed Grant and The Ensemble Studio Theatre’s New Voices Fellowship in playwriting. Mac is a proud alum of the HERE Arts Center Resident Artists program and is currently a New Dramatists fellow and a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect.

    Machine Dazzle (né Matthew Flower) is a performance artist, who moved to New York City in 1994 after attending The University of Colorado Boulder. Mixing odd jobs by day with art and dance clubs by night erupted in a unique lifestyle grounded in costume and performance art. Dazzle’s DIY and transgressive nature comes face to face with his conceptualist-as-artist identity; the results can be seen on stages all over the world. Machine has worked with Taylor Mac, Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias, Julie Atlas Muz, Big Art Group, The Crystal Ark, The Dazzle Dancers, Stanley Love Performance Group and The Pixie Harlots, to name a few. 

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS

    June 11, 2015 - August 2, 2015

    In the past two decades, Philippe Parreno has almost single-handedly reshaped the very notion of what it means to experience art by turning the dynamics of a show into an evolving, situational process, exploring its possibilities as a singular, coherent object rather than as a collection of individual works.

    In his largest installation in the U.S. to date, Parreno continues his interrogations into the radical redefinition of the exhibition ritual at the Armory, in one of the few spaces in the world in which such an epic experience could occur. Within the monumental interior of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, he will construct a scripted space where a series of events fold and unfold onto the space itself, creating an architecture of attention on a scale of operatic proportions. This dramatic composition fuses the spectral presence of sound—both recorded and performed live by Mikhail Rudy— with film, light, collaborations, apparitions, and memory to guide and manipulate the viewer’s experience and perception. This sensory journey through both remastered existing works and new projects reveals strata that while present, were previously invisible, and metamorphoses the building into a quasi-living, perpetually evolving organism.

  • Recital Series

    The Night Dances

    April 22, 2015 - April 26, 2015

    Explore the subtleties of Benjamin Britten’s suites for solo cello through the lens of the American poet Sylvia Plath, considered one of the leading cultivators of confessional poetry. Acclaimed actor Charlotte Rampling and renowned cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton bring together Plath’s haunting poetry and Britten’s powerful music for the U.S. premiere of this intimate melding of artistic voices.

  • Recital Series

    Ian Bostridge & Wenwen Du

    April 17, 2015

    Celebrated for the remarkable passion, drama, and directness of his elegant performances, British tenor Ian Bostridge is widely admired as one of the world’s most perceptive and accomplished musicians. A supremely expressive storyteller of song, Bostridge is joined by the eminent pianist Wenwen Du to present an artfully curated program of songs exploring the music and poetry of the Great War. The program ranges from songs by soldier composer George Butterworth to Britten’s setting of poems about children in wartime.

  • Under Construction Series

    Ulysses Owens Jr.

    April 8, 2015

    Ulysses Owens, Jr. blends the movement of the under-celebrated choreographer Ulysses Dove, selections from the James Joyce novel Ulysses, and his own compositions in a multi-disciplinary project that explores the melding of art forms inspired by the name “Ulysses.”

    Multi-Grammy Award Winning drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. has performed with world-class musicians, including Patti Austin, Terence Blanchard, Russell Malone, Wynton Marsalis, Mulgrew Miller, Maceo Parker, and Dianne Reeves. In 2010 Owens received his first Grammy Award for his performance on Kurt Elling’s Dedicated To You, and in 2012 his second Grammy Award for Christian McBride’s Big Band Album The Good Feeling. His 2009 debut recording It’s Time For U featured several original compositions and arrangements. His second album,Unanimous, released in 2012 on European jazz label Criss Cross, features Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, Jaleel Shaw, Mike Dease and Christian Sands, and has been hailed by critics and audiences alike as “...the best jazz album of 2012.” This year, Owens will produce three albums, one of which with the Alicia Olatuja, who was the featured Vocalist at the Re-Inauguration of President Barack Obama. Owens is the Co- Founding Artistic Director of Don’t Miss A Beat, his family’s non-profit organization. Don’t Miss A Beat’s core mission is to blend music and art with focus on academic achievement, civic engagement and to inspire and empower inner city students to strive for their dreams.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    FLEXN

    March 25, 2015 - April 4, 2015

    Characterized by pausing, snapping, gliding, bone breaking, hat tricks, animation, and contortion, flex is a form of street dance that has evolved from the Jamaican bruk-up found in dance halls and reggae clubs in Brooklyn. This electrifying phenomenon is showcased at the Armory in a new project that confronts issues of social injustice, with the dancers exploring personal narratives through their own unique movement vocabulary in post-modern dance.

    Created in the era of unrest following rulings on Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, this powerful new work is staged by visionary director Peter Sellars and flex pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray in collaboration with a crew of 21 flex dancers from the very neighborhoods where the movement first took shape. Performing both as individuals and in groups to choreography created by the ensemble itself, the dancers utilize their breathtakingly beautiful movement to tell deeply human and sometimes heart-wrenching stories that address these troubling issues of our time.

  • Recital Series

    Lindemann Young Artists

    March 19, 2015

    The Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program nurtures the most talented young artists through training and performance opportunities, with alumni of the program that have gone on to become stars of the opera stage, including Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Dean Griffey, Nathan Gunn, Heidi Grant Murphy, and Dawn Upshaw. See three of the next generation of opera greats from the program — soprano Christine Price, tenor Andrew Stenson, and bass-baritone Brandon Cedel—in an intimate evening of song in the Board of Officers Room.

  • Recital Series

    Alina Ibragimova

    March 10, 2015 - March 14, 2015

    With a recent five-star performance at Wigmore Hall of Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas, violinist Alina Ibragimova was hailed as “one of today’s outstanding interpreters of the most elemental music in the repertoire” (The Guardian, UK). Still representing the pinnacle of violin mastery for more than two centuries after Bach’s death, these cherished works are again revisited by this expressive violinist in the beloved Board of Officers Room.

  • Under Construction Series

    AGING MAGICIAN

    January 11, 2015 - January 13, 2015

    A new music-theater work, AGING MAGICIAN uses a composite of sonic and visual elements to follow a man entering his final stages of life to the fantastical world of Coney Island. Composed by Paola Prestini with libretto by Rinde Eckert, direction by Julian Crouch, scenic design by Julian Crouch and Amy Rubin, instrument designer Mark Stewart, and projection designer, S. Katy Tucker, AGING MAGICIAN’s creative team combines music, theater, puppetry, instrument-making, and scenic design to create an enduring work for the stage. This work features vocalist Rinde Eckert with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and string quartet.

    Paola Prestini is a composer and director and co-founder of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary collective that has created over 70 multimedia productions worldwide. Her music has been performed by such ensembles as International Contemporary Ensemble, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony, and the Kronos Quartet in venues including Carnegie Hall, The Barbican Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and The Kennedy Center. Named by NPR as one of the Top 100 composers in the world under 40, Ms. Prestini has received commissions from Concert Artists Guild and Carnegie Hall, among other organizations. Current commissions include The New York Philharmonic, The Krannert Center, and upcoming works at BAM and MASS MoCA. She is currently working with Roomful of Teeth, Isabelle Leonard, Rinde Eckert, Julian Crouch, Maya Beiser, Cornelius Dufallo, The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Young People’s Chorus, Michael Counts, Helga Davis for a Bric Residency, and artists Erika Harrsch, Carmen Kordas, and Ali Hossaini. She is the Creative Director for Original Music Workshop, a Brooklyn-based venue slated to open in 2015.

    Rinde Eckert is a writer, composer, director, performer, and singer known for the flexibility and inventiveness of his voice and his uniquely interdisciplinary productions. His works move beyond the boundaries of what a “play,” a “dance piece,” an “opera,” or “musical” might be, and include And God Created Great Whales (2000 OBIE award), Orpheus X (2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama Finalist), Highway Ulysses, Four Songs Lost in a Wall, and Horizon (2008 Lucille Lortel Award). He is the recipient of a Mark Blitzstein Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), the Alpert Award in the Arts (2009), and a Grammy for Best Small Ensemble Performance (2012) for his vocals on Lonely Motel: Music from Slide with Steve Mackey and eighth blackbird. In April 2012 The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation named Mr. Eckert as one of 21 inaugural Doris Duke Artists.

    Puppet designer and theater-maker Julian Crouch was a founding member of Improbable Theatre and was co-director and co-designer of the international and West End phenomenon Shockhead Peter. Other shows for Improbable include Satyagraha in a co-production with the English National Opera and The Metropolitan Opera; Spirit, which Crouch directed, and which was a co-production with The Royal Court; Coma, which he co-devised and co-designed; Sticky, the Hanging Man; and 70 Hill Lane. He designed and was associate director on the multi award-winning Jerry Springer: The Opera at the National Theatre, West End, and UK tour. Other recent productions include Cinderella  for The Dutch National Ballet, Dr. Atomic for The Met/ENO, The Magic Flute for Welsh National Opera, The Addams Family for Broadway, and The Enchanted Island for The Met. Mr. Crouch was an Artist-in-Residence at Park Avenue Armory in 2011.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    tears become...streams become...

    December 11, 2014 - January 4, 2015

    Art, music, and architecture converge in the latest work by Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon and acclaimed pianist Hélène Grimaud. This site-specific installation features an immense field of water that harnesses light, reflection, music, and sound to amplify and transform the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, encouraging viewers to acknowledge their surroundings and reexamine one of the most historic spaces in New York.

    For ten nights only, Grimaud will perform a program of water-themed works by Debussy, Ravel, Liszt, and others within the space, creating a confluence of live music and visual art that allows audiences to experience this celebrated music in a refreshingly new way. The large-scale installation will also be open to the public during the day, offering viewers a more meditative and reflective experience, with a player piano silently performing as both an evocation of the previous night’s recital and a premonition of performances to come.

    The result is a genre-defying, deeply moving experience, which not only turns the Armory’s iconic architecture quite literally upside down, but turns on its head the traditional concert-going experience for audiences while redefining the creative practice of one of the most prominent visual artists of his generation.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    An Aristocracy of Wealth

    December 1, 2014

    The Gilded Years of the late 19th century were a vital and glamorous era in New York City. Families of great fortune sought to demonstrate their new status by building vast Fifth Avenue mansions filled with precious objects and important painting collections and hosting elaborate fêtes and balls. This is the moment of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” the rise of the Vanderbilts and Morgans, Maison Worth, Tiffany & Co., Duveen, and Allard. Old and new wealth competed in excess expenditures, and members of our own Seventh Regiment (Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Kemps, Harrimans, Belmonts, and Stewarts) were some of the best examples. Curator Jeannine Falino surveys the social and cultural history of these years through the lens of the architecture, furniture, fashion, and jewelry of the time.

    Jeannine Falino is an independent curator and museum consultant. She was formerly the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Currently she is adjunct curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, where she will open What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder’s Vision in September. She is also co-curator of the Museum of the City of New York exhibition entitled Gilded New York: Design, Fashion & Society. Falino was co-curator for the major survey exhibition entitled Crafting Modernism: Mid-Century American Art and Design (Museum of Arts and Design, 2011), lead author and co-editor of Silver of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Vol. 3 (2008), guest co-curator for Artistic Luxury: Fabergé-Tiffany-Lalique (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2008), co-author and co-editor for American Luxury: Jewels from the House of Tiffany (Antique Collectors Club, 2008), and curator for Edge of the Sublime: Enamels by Jamie Bennett (Fuller Craft Museum, 2008).

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Stepchild Regiment

    November 18, 2014

    The campaign to establish New York State’s first black National Guard regiment emanates from the belief that martial institutions are an instrument of full and equal citizenship. New York, far from progressive on matters of race, refused to recognize black militias in the Civil War and witnessed the deadly and destructive Draft Riots of 1863, targeting helpless and innocent black citizens, their homes, businesses, and institutions. With no recognition in the Spanish-American War, black New Yorkers, buoyed by their growing numbers as well as economic and political influence, determined to organize an institution dedicated to that end. Under pressure, the State recognized the mostly African-American Fifteenth New York National Guard in 1916. The Fifteenth Regiment, Harlem’s “Rattlers,” went on to fight in France in 1917 and 1918, but their experience in training and combat differed sharply from that of the other two Upper East Side regiments, the Seventh Regiment and Squadron A. In the end, the Harlem Rattlers became one of the most decorated United States units in World War I.

    Jeffrey Sammons is a professor of history at New York University, where he has taught since 1989. He is a graduate of Rutgers College and earned his masters degree in history from Tufts University followed by his Ph.D. in American History at the University of North Carolina. From there, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston and in 1983 – 84 was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town. In 1987, Sammons was named Henry Rutgers Research Fellow at Rutgers University-Camden and completed his critically acclaimed Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. In 2001 he was awarded a fellowship by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and soon after received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2002 – 2003 in support of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War which was published in April 2014 by the University Press of Kansas.

  • Under Construction Series

    Sasha Frere-Jones

    November 12, 2014

    During his residency, Sasha Frere-Jones will continue writing for The New Yorker, conduct research for several book-length projects, and develop BATAN, a nomadic music and art collective.

    On November 12, he will present an intimate evening with the performance company Sister Sylvester. They will present The Fall: A Performative Screening, a work-in-progress based on, but not limited to, Peter Whitehead’s 1969 cult film, The Fall, which documents the social and political turmoil of Vietnam-era USA. The piece uses live performance and audio recordings of those involved in — and affected by — the film. This interpretation of The Fall explores the power of art to change society, the ways in which radical politics are transformed through memory, documentation, and the exigencies of history.

    Sasha Frere-Jones joined The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic in 2004. Prior to that, he was the music critic for Slate. Since 1995, he has written for the Village Voice, Spin, The New York Times, the New York Post, The Wire, and Pretty Decorating. His work has been anthologized in the Da Capo “Best Music Writing” series six times. In 1991, Mr. Frere-Jones formed the band Ui, which toured America and Europe and released five albums.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

    November 4, 2014

    Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece of memorial sculpture The Shaw Memorial commemorates the service and sacrifice of the first regiment of African-Americans formed in the North during the Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, and their commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (a former Seventh Regiment member). Dedicated in 1897 on the Boston Commons, the work is an artistic essay on loyalty, self-sacrifice, and commitment. Using classical forms of art and symbolism with a thoroughly modern theme, the artist presents a commanding image of uncommon courage. The continuing power of the monument rests partially in its accuracy of historical detail and its combination of the “ideal with the real” as Saint-Gaudens expressed it. Curator Sarah Greenough examines the enduring significance of this beloved monument. Original daguerreotypes and carte-de-visite portraits of the actual members of the 54th Massachusetts along with works by such contemporary artists as Richard Benson and Carrie Mae Weems tell the story of the legacy of the 54th’s celebrated Battle of Fort Wagner and their enduring significance.

    Sarah Greenough is the Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She has organized numerous exhibitions for the Gallery, including Alfred Stieglitz (1983), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography (1989), and Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (2009). She was also co-curator of Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840 – 1860, (2008), Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial (2013), and curator of Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (2010). Greenough is the author of many publications, including My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915 – 1933, Yale University Press, 2011. Her exhibitions and publications have won many awards, including the International Center of Photography Publications Award for On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set.

  • Under Construction Series

    Jason Akira Somma

    October 14, 2014 - October 15, 2014

    Visual artist and choreographer Jason Akira Somma will preview a series of works-in-development as part of the Armory’s Under Construction Series. In addition to viewing a gallery of his visual art, Akira Somma will also be showcasing his work with dance, fracturing the movement of live dancers using analog technology to create an entirely new way to view the art form through interactive media and practices. The Under Construction Series offers audiences an inside look into the creative process of the Armory’s artists-in-residence, who set up studios and offer intimate public previews of works-in-progress.

    Jason Akira Somma is a New York-based visual artist and choreographer who merges practices and incorporates science, new technologies, and kinesthetics into transcendent performances and experiences. In addition to his creative work, Mr. Akira Somma has lectured internationally at universities, museums, and national theaters on “Arts and Science/Performance and New Technology” via the U.S. Embassy, and has had the unique opportunity to be a guest consultant for the University of Glasgow in the Neuroscience department for a research study focusing on how the perception of movement affects brain imaging and transcranial magnet stimulation. He is the first American to receive the Rolex Arts Initiative for Dance and has been working under the mentorship of Jiří Kylián.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    St. Matthew Passion

    October 7, 2014 - October 8, 2014

    Regarded as one of the quintessential masterpieces of classical sacred music, Bach’s revered account of Christ’s Passion from the Gospel of Matthew is detailed through sublimely beautiful music that is eloquent and profoundly moving, both in its humanity and spirituality. While a highlight of concert seasons and festivals around the world for more than 150 years, Bach’s final and most dramatic Passion was never intended to be staged.

    Renowned for his highly original takes on operatic works, Peter Sellars ritualizes this magnificent masterpiece to create a communal grieving process while illuminating Bach’s unmatched gift for presenting both deep hardship and the possibility of transcendence. This radically inclusive approach eliminates the separation between artist and audience—there are no spectators, only observers and participants—with musicians and singers moving amongst each other. Hailed as “the single most important thing we ever did here” by Simon Rattle when the production premiered at the Berlin Philharmonie in 2010, Rattle again leads the Berliner Philharmoniker, a cast of superb singers including Mark Padmore and Christian Gerhaher, and extensive choral forces for the U.S. premiere of this epic production.

  • Recital Series

    Anna Lucia Richter & Gerold Huber

    October 2, 2014 - October 6, 2014

    The songs of Hugo Wolf offer some of the greatest challenges in the entire lieder repertory for rising singers and vocal veterans alike, both for their nuanced musical subtlety and their complex interaction between prose and music. German soprano Anna Lucia Richter comes to the Board of Officers Room to interpret these glittering vocal works in her U.S. recital debut.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    A Tale of Two Lockwoods

    September 29, 2014

    Seventh Regiment member and artist Lockwood de Forest was one of the primary importers of East Indian crafts and design to America in the late 19th century, an influence which can be viewed in the Armory’s period decoration. His admiration for the skills of Indian woodcarvers introduced a new decorative element into the American interior — the elegantly perforated jali screen. De Forest, a charismatic, swashbuckling figure who began as a landscape painter but soon expanded his interests into the decorative arts, developed his passion for Indian art and architecture under the tutelage of an older man, his friend and business partner Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was one of the most fascinating figures in the history of the British Raj. A brilliant illustrator and a professor of sculpture at the School of Art in Lahore, he met de Forest when the American visited India with his new wife in 1880. Lockwood Kipling’s son Rudyard based the Jungle Book stories on experiences from this period in the life of his family. Between them, Lockwood Kipling and Lockwood de Forest Indianized the decorative arts of Britain and the United States. Professor Tim Barringer explores the relationship between the two Lockwoods and their impact, which can still be felt today.

    Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing the book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow and Tokyo 2013).

    Special Event
    This talk will be followed by a reception hosted by The Olana Partnership in association with their exhibition “All the Raj, Frederic Church and Lockwood de Forest: Painting, Decorating and Collecting at Olana” on display through November 2, 2014. The exhibition features oil sketches and paintings by Church and his student Lockwood de Forest, and a rare 19th century collection of decorative arts from India designed and provided by de Forest for the house at Olana. The reception will be open to all members of The Olana Partnership and Park Avenue Armory.

  • Under Construction Series

    Lauren Flanigan

    September 13, 2014 - September 28, 2014

    Following her residency in 2012, soprano Lauren Flanigan returns to the Armory with her amazing ensemble to expand upon her work on the unknown songs of Kurt Weill with filmmaker James Mathew Daniel, stage director Kevin Newbury, accordionist William Schimmel, violist Julie Goodale, and pianist Christopher Cooley.

    Lauren Flanigan has enjoyed a 30-year career that includes performances at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Glyndebourne, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and New York City Opera. She has been featured in 10 world premieres, 11 CDs, five Live from Lincoln Center telecasts, one major motion picture, and has received 15 awards for her musical and humanitarian work. In 2002, Carnegie Hall commissioned composer Phillip Glass to write Symphony No. 6, Plutonian Ode for her. She started Comfort Ye …, now in its 20th year, an annual musical event to raise food and awareness for New York’s homeless. She is the founder and director of Music and Mentoring, a not-for-profit organization providing hands-on mentoring and full room and board to students studying in the arts in New York City.

  • Recital Series

    International Contemporary Ensemble

    August 17, 2014 - August 21, 2014

    The cutting-edge ensemble performs an intimate chamber music series crafted with the Board of Officers Room in mind. Two of ICE’s three performances will be portrait concerts of leading female composers, Sofia Gubaidulina and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, with the final concert featuring three New York premieres among works by John Zorn, Dai Fujikura, Alvin Lucier, and a new arrangement of a chamber work by Messiaen.

    Co-Presented with the Mostly Mozart Festival

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Passenger

    July 10, 2014 - July 13, 2014

    An encounter between two women—one a former Auschwitz guard, the other a former inmate of the female barracks—aboard an ocean liner plunges them both back into the horrors of the Holocaust, pitting perpetrator against victim in a moral battle between guilt and denial, retribution and absolution. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel Pasazerkaby by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, exiled Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera is an astonishing account of the horrors of World War II and the unshakable hold that memories and torment from that time can have, even today.

    Visionary director David Pountney brilliantly stages this landmark work, taking audiences on a voyage from the stylish deck of the luxury liner to the squalor of a Nazi death camp where cruelty, despair, and unspeakable courage are evident in equal measure. Conductor Patrick Summers leads the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra and Chorus through Weinberg’s emotionally-searing score, which had been banned by Soviet authorities upon its completion in 1968, resurfacing for its first full staging some 40 years later and only now makes its eagerly-awaited New York premiere.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Macbeth

    May 31, 2014 - June 22, 2014

    Shakespeare’s classic tale of ambition and treachery gets a thrilling new life in the U.S. premiere of the electrifying production by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh, following its acclaimed sold-out run at the Manchester International Festival in England. Kenneth Branagh, in his first Shakespeare performance in more than a decade, is joined by Alex Kingston, in their highly-anticipated New York stage debuts, as the once great leader and his adored wife, who incites him to sell his soul in the quest for greater power.

    Utilizing the Armory’s unique space and military history, this audacious staging brings to life one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies in an intensely physical, fast-paced production that places the audience directly on the sidelines of battle. Blood, sweat, and the elements of nature can be directly felt as the action unfurls across a traverse stage, with heaven beckoning at one end and hell looming at the other.

  • Recital Series

    István Várdai

    May 21, 2014 - May 22, 2014

    Thought to be some of the most beautiful and important compositions ever written for cello, Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello are a collection of dances, each prefaced by a searching prelude. Cellist István Várdai makes his North American recital debut in a survey of these lauded works, from the open serenity of the G major to the powerful radiance of the D major, known as a “symphony for solo cello.”

  • Recital Series

    FLUX Quartet

    April 26, 2014

    The FLUX Quartet has “established its credentials as one of the most fearless and important new-music ensembles around,” playing with “precision and tenderness” (San Francisco Chronicle). Hailed by Alex Ross as “legendary for its furiously committed, untiring performances,” the intrepid ensemble brings their remarkable skill and passion to Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, a six-hour feat of endurance and transcendence for both performers and audience alike.

    q2  This performance was live streamed by Q2 Music at q2music.org.

  • Under Construction Series

    Wally Cardona & Jennifer Lacey

    March 21, 2014 - March 23, 2014

    Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey’s work together has been described as “utterly original, deeply comic, and deviously beautiful.”  Their current collaboration, The Set Up, is a multi-year eight-part project that posits western contemporary practice as yet one cultural specificity among others. Made with an international assembly of artists viewed as masters in their respective disciplines, each master is invited to teach what they think is most important about the form to which they have devoted their lives. This is followed by periods of response and reflection that culminate with a final piece.

    This fourth installment of the series began in Central Java and continued while in residence at Park Avenue Armory. Against the backdrop of the Armory’s historic period rooms, the residency centered around an encounter with classical Javanese dancer Heni Winahyuningsih, dancer/teacher at the Sultan Palace in Yogyakarta for over 30 years. The result, presented as part of the Under Construction series, is a work made for three dancers, two singers and the historic Board of Officers room.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The xx

    March 19, 2014 - March 29, 2014

    The xx has made big noises across the pop landscape while barely raising their voices above an ear-grazing whisper. Their poignant, minimalist music is a tribute to their unflinching drive for originality, which has ensured their position as one of the most in-demand bands of our time.

    After headlining major festivals and huge outdoor venues like Coachella and Lollapalooza and sold-out runs at quintessential venues like Radio City Music Hall, the Mercury Prize-winning trio comes to the Armory for a much more intimate experience. Defying perceptions of a traditional concert, the xx creates a site-specific environment to delve into uncharted levels of depth in their sound where dark and light collide as the memory of the outside world falls away. This uniquely voyeuristic and deeply personal setting is the perfect oasis for the band to perform, while in the process redefining their music and their relationship to the audience that surrounds them.

  • Recital Series

    Igor Levit

    March 12, 2014 - March 13, 2014

    With a recent five-star performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall that “shows he is set to be one of this century’s big names” (The Telegraph, UK), pianist Igor Levit makes his North American recital debut with a program of Beethoven’s most cherished sonatas performed in the most intimate of settings.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Life and Death of Marina Abramović

    December 12, 2013 - December 21, 2013

    At the intersection of theater, opera and visual art, director Robert Wilson’s reimagining of performance artist Marina Abramović’s extraordinary life and work begins with her difficult childhood in former Yugoslavia, and chronicles her journey to the present day. Abramović, who plays herself as well as her imposing mother, is joined by world-renowned actor Willem Dafoe and singer ANOHNI, performing original music and songs created for this ‘quasi opera.’

    Having premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2011, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović has played to sold-out audiences and rave reviews in Madrid, Basel, Antwerp and Amsterdam. For the Armory, Wilson is creating a new staging that uses the full sweep of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to draw the audience in as though they are part of the story.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and America

    November 18, 2013

    Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer will explore the radical artistic practices of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain and its American counterpart, the artists associated with the New York journal The New Path, which was dedicated to the “Advancement of Truth in Art.” The English painters John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti turned their back on academic art-making by returning to what they believed to be the truth and sincerity of early Italian painting. As the movement developed, it embraced a form of hyperrealism influenced by emerging technology. In America, a group of artists including William Trost Richards, John William Hill and Thomas Charles Farrer pioneered a distinctly American variant of Pre-Raphaelite realism, dedicated to the truthful delineation of the flora and landscape of the New World.

    Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-authored American Sublime,and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book, Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock, and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow and Tokyo 2013).

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Thomas Nast

    November 4, 2013

    Thomas Nast, the founding father of American political cartooning and a member of the Seventh Regiment, is perhaps best known for his works portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast’s legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. Fiona Deans Halloran will focus this talk not just on Nast’s political cartoons for Harper’s but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlight the many contradictions in his own life.

    Fiona Deans Halloran, the author of Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, teaches American history at Rowland Hall St. Mark’s School in Salt Lake City. She holds a PhD in history from UCLA and has been the recipient of research support from the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, the Huntington Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    “I am afraid of this man”

    October 7, 2013

    Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Commodore Vanderbilt had a troubled but ultimately successful relationship with high society in New York. After years of mutual hostility, the turnabout came with his success in helping to invent the giant corporation. The practice of corporate diplomacy changed his own character to some extent, and the riches he gained allowed him to overshadow the patricians and force his way into their company. His business and social success set the stage for the later Vanderbilt dynasty that came to define the lasting idea of Gilded Age social aristocracy.

    T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, a New York Times Notable Book and a Journalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A past Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he is currently working on a biography of George Armstrong Custer with the support of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Massive Attack v. Adam Curtis

    September 28, 2013 - October 4, 2013

    An extraordinary collaboration connecting the dark, intense music and visual work of Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack with the thought-provoking vision of documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, this site-specific event is a new kind of imaginative experience that integrates music, film, politics, and breathtaking moments of illusion in a hallucinatory ride through the dreams and hidden realities of our strange, anxious age.

    Collaborating with Del Naja and Curtis are a visionary team of artists and designers that also includes the innovative art and design practice United Visual Artists (whose commissions for venues such as Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum intersect sculpture, architecture, live performance, and digital installation). This groundbreaking production includes performances by Massive Attack and places the audience at the center of arresting stories of politics and power over the past 30 years.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Matthew Brady

    September 16, 2013

    Mathew Brady was one of the most prolific photographers of the 19th century – a master of both the studio portrait and field documentation of the Civil War. In his half-century as an icon of American photography, Brady had many crucial roles in the medium’s development— innovator, entrepreneur, role model, collector, and booster of the form’s artistic potential—but his achievement in the actual making of photographs, before, during, and after the war, should not be overlooked. Using his images to establish Brady as the master of his art form, Robert Wilson draws from his new biography, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, to reintroduce the photographs of the single most important American in photography’s first decades. Photos by Brady of members of the Seventh Regiment will also be on display.

    Robert Wilson is the editor of The American Scholar, a former editor of Preservation, the founding literary editor of Civilization (all three of which won National Magazine Awards during his tenure), a former book editor and columnist for USA Today, and a former editor at The Washington Post Book World. His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Smithsonian, The Washington Post Magazine, and The Wilson Quarterly and on the op-ed, opinion, and bookreview pages of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Machine

    September 4, 2013 - September 18, 2013

    In 1997, Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest grandmasters the chess world has ever produced, arrived in New York City for the match of his life. He was playing against Deep Blue, conceived by IBM as the most powerful super-computer on the planet. What started as a bid by IBM to raise its profile and stock price became a historic encounter that pitted Kasparov against Deep Blue and its creator Doctor Hsu, a genius in his own right with a lifelong dedication to the game.

    Staged by Donmar Warehouse Artistic Director Josie Rourke, this new work by British playwright Matt Charman explores Kasparov’s dramatic battle with Deep Blue and its wunderkind inventor as the world breathlessly watched on live television. The Drill Hall will be transformed into an intensely intimate environment to capture this epic struggle of man against machine.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    WS

    June 19, 2013 - August 4, 2013

    The “ribald, pop-culture-obsessed provocateur” (The New York Times) Paul McCarthy applies his signature, irreverent wit to take aim at American myths and icons in WS, his largest work to date and the pinnacle of his creative output. Adding a touch of malice to subjects that have been traditionally revered for their innocence or purity, McCarthy weaves together a massive, fantastical forest of towering trees with grotesque video projections of iconic characters playing out their own fairy tale drama in a replica of his childhood home.

    This daring social commentary lampoons the American dream and its cherished icons, bombarding the viewer with a sensory overload of scatological, sexual, violent, and debaucherous imagery that boldly forces the viewer to acknowledge the twisted underside to saccharine idols in popular culture. The result is a visceral, very challenging, immersive experience by one of the most influential and important artists of our generation.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Oktophonie

    March 20, 2013 - March 27, 2013

    Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most significant composers of modern and electronic music, influencing artists from The Beatles to Bjork, Miles Davis to Animal Collective, Frank Zappa, and more. Performed by one of his original collaborators Kathinka Pasveer, the maverick composer’s Oktophonie from his opus Licht gets an exciting new life in an epic production of this monumental composition.

    Acclaimed contemporary visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija stages the work as the composer originally intended—in outer space—creating a lunar floating seating unit to fully envelop the listener in octophonic sound. Adorned in white, the audience takes a ritualistic musical journey from plunging darkness into blinding light to fully immerse themselves in the all-encompassing score and surroundings. The vastness of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is the perfect setting to fully realize this rarely performed work that Stockhausen so boldly envisioned in its highly-anticipated New York premiere.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The event of a thread

    December 7, 2012 - January 6, 2013

    Visual artist Ann Hamilton combines the ephemeral presence of time with the material tactility for which she is best known to create a new large-scale installation for the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Commissioned by the Armory, the event of a thread references the building’s architecture, as well as the individual encounters and congregational gatherings that have animated its rich social history. A multisensory affair, the work draws together readings, sound, and live events within a field of swings that together invite visitors to connect to the action of each other and the work itself, illuminating the experience of the singular and collective body, the relationship between the animal and the human. The address of the readers to the pigeons shifts at the end of each day, when a vocalist on the drill hall’s balcony serenades their release to flight. Each day’s song is cut with a record lathe, and the resulting recording is played back the next day.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Seventh Regiment

    December 3, 2012

    Military Historian and Park Avenue Armory Chairman Elihu Rose will present an overview of more than 200 years of New York City military history through one hometown regiment. Once nicknamed “The Silk Stocking Regiment” due to the high social status of its members, New York’s Seventh Regiment has a long history dating back to 1806 when a British ship’s firing upon a New York merchant vessel and the killing of an American seaman led to the formation of a new militia in New York to help guard the harbor. It was the first American militia to call itself “National Guard” and it played a vital role in New York City through the riots and violent labor disputes of the 19th century. It was famously known as the first militia to each the capitol when the South seceded in April 1861, though their role would be short-term guard duty until the US Army arrived. The Regiment’s moment of greatest military service was on the fields of France in World War I where the members of the Seventh were instrumental in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line.

    Elihu Rose graduated from Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations in 1978 from New York University and shortly thereafter started teaching military history. He has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland and recently retired after 29 years as Adjunct Associate Professor of History at New York University. He has also lectured at several other institutions nationally and internationally, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. In 2002, he received The Outstanding Teaching Award from NYU. Mr. Rose has published articles on military history and sociology.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Woodrow Wilson

    November 29, 2012

    A Democrat who reclaimed the White House after 16 years of Republican administrations, Wilson was a transformative president—he helped create the regulatory bodies and legislation that prefigured FDR’s New Deal and would prove central to governance through the early 21st century; he guided the nation through World War I; and, although his advocacy in favor of joining the League of Nations proved unsuccessful, he nonetheless established a new way of thinking about international relations that would carry America into the United Nations era. Professor John Cooper reshapes our understanding of the man himself: his Wilson is warm and gracious—not at all the dour puritan of popular imagination. Ever the academic, Wilson relied on the strength of his intellectual convictions and the power of reason to win over the American people.

    John Milton Cooper, Jr., is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Breaking the Heart of the World: Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations and The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, among other books. His most recent publication, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. He was recently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Thomas Jefferson

    November 13, 2012

    Thomas Jefferson was an original thinker and a master politician who helped create and sustain the American republic. In his new book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham brings to life the complete man, from birth to his last days—through the Revolutionary War and his years as president. We see the Founding Father who steered the states to nationhood, wrote the Declaration of Independence, and as a master politician president, doubled the size of America through the Louisiana Purchase. With a powerful narrative, Meacham guides us through the life and extraordinary times of a man often admired but, until now, never truly understood in all his complexity.

    Jon Meacham is an Executive Editor at Random House and a former editor of Newsweek. Born in Chattanooga in 1969, he is a graduate of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is the author of The New York Times bestsellers American Lion (winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography), American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Emancipating Lincoln

    October 24, 2012

    As we near the Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th anniversary, author and historian Harold Holzer will examine this foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These 1,700 words caused Lincoln to be hailed as the Great Emancipator and pilloried by those who consider his effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted. Holzer uncovers Lincoln’s very modern manipulation of the media—from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation—in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his “greatest act” in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln’s endeavor. Holzer examines the impact of Lincoln’s announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time.

    Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer and frequent guest on television, Holzer serves as chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, successor organization to the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), to which he was appointed by President Clinton in 2000 and which he co-chaired from 2001 to 2010. President Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Murder of Crows

    August 3, 2012 - September 9, 2012

    The largest sound installation to date by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Murder of Crows is a compelling “sound play” that envelops the audience in an unexpected physical and aural environment. Moving and weaving through ninety-eight speakers mounted within the cavernous Drill Hall, the work narrates a captivating and confounding melodrama, investigating concepts of desire, intimacy, love and loss. The multifaceted soundscape uses a fluttering of voices and sounds, from crashing waves to the hubbub of a factory floor, to transport the listener to an unexpected dream-like world.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Astral Converted

    July 10, 2012 - July 14, 2012

    Legendary choreographer Trisha Brown brings her company to the Armory’s Drill Hall for the restaging of Astral Converted, with visual and costume design by Robert Rauschenberg and original music by John Cage. Rauschenberg’s metal frame towers, restored for this production, house the lights and sound system and are built from automotive supplies. The towers are activated by motion sensors to detect the dancers and respond to their movement. At once serene and highly physical, Astral Converted is the culminating piece in Brown’s Valiant Series, which premiered at the National Gallery of Art in 1991 as an adaptation of Astral Convertible (1989).

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Philharmonic 360º

    June 29, 2012 - June 30, 2012

    In two epic evenings, the New York Philharmonic will explore the spatial qualities of the Armory’s soaring, 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall with four iconic works in which the orchestra members surround the audience. The centerpiece of the evening will be the rarely-performed Gruppen by Karlheinz Stockhausen—a work that requires three orchestras and three conductors. Also on the program are Pierre Boulez’s Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna, the Finale of Act I from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, and Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    SPACE PROGRAM: MARS

    May 16, 2012 - June 17, 2012

    Artist Tom Sachs takes his SPACE PROGRAM to the next level with a four week mission to Mars that recasts the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall as an immersive space odyssey with an installation of dynamic and meticulously crafted sculptures. Using his signature bricolage technique and simple materials that comprise the daily surrounds of his New York studio, Sachs engineers the component parts of the mission—exploratory vehicles, mission control, launch platforms, suiting stations, special effects, recreational amenities, and Mars landscape—exposing as much the process of their making as the complexities of the culture they reference.

    SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is a demonstration of all that is necessary for survival, scientific exploration, and colonization in extraterrestrial environs: from food delivery systems and entertainment to agriculture and human waste disposal. Sachs and his studio team of thirteen will man the installation, regularly demonstrating the myriad procedures, rituals, and tasks of their mission. The team will also “lift off” to Mars several times throughout their residency at the Armory, with real-time demonstrations playing out various narratives from take-off to landing, including planetary excursions, their first walk on the surface of Mars, collecting scientific samples, and photographing the surrounding landscape.

    Beneath the compulsive tinkerer’s mentality and ribald wit that permeate SPACE PROGRAM: MARS, and Sachs’ work at-large, is a conceptual underpinning that addresses serious and profound issues—namely the commodification of abstract concepts such as originality, shock, newness, and mystery—expressing them in the personal and physical terms of production and process. With the recent shuttering of NASA’s shuttle program and the shifting focus towards privatized space travel, SPACE PROGRAM: MARS takes on timely significance within Sachs’s work, which provokes reflection on the haves and have-nots, utopian follies and dystopian realities, while asking barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Tune-In Music Festival: Philip Glass at 75

    February 23, 2012 - February 26, 2012

    Comprised of five separate programs over the span of four days, the Tune-In Music Festival will feature  Philip Glass’s own music, including his definitive work Music in Twelve Parts, as well as music, poetry, and art created and performed by his muses, collaborators, and protégées. 

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Merce Cunningham Dance Company

    December 29, 2011 - December 31, 2011

    The Merce Cunningham Dance Company returns to New York City—its home since its founding in 1953—for six historic final performances at the Armory, culminating a two-year farewell Legacy Tour that brought the Company to more than 50 destinations worldwide. For this last engagement, the Company will perform a series of Events created especially for the occasion across three stages in the Armory’s dramatic Drill Hall. The Company has mounted these signature site-specific choreographic collages in unusual locations around the world throughout its nearly 60-year history, including two previous engagements in the Armory’s Drill Hall, a 1983 performance and the 2009 public memorial for the legendary dancer and choreographer. The Park Avenue Armory Events will feature the last-ever music commission by the MCDC Music Committee and a specially commissioned décor by visual artist Daniel Arsham, who will fill the Drill Hall with massive suspended “clouds” comprised of thousands of individual colored spheres. This momentous engagement marks the final opportunity for audiences to experience first-hand the work of Merce Cunningham as performed by the Company he personally trained and to celebrate Cunningham’s lifetime of creative achievement with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company before it disbands.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Streb's Kiss the Air!

    December 14, 2011 - December 22, 2011

    New York’s own “action heroes,” STREB Extreme Action stretch the limitations of the human body. Choreographer and MacArthur “genius” award recipient Elizabeth Streb will take over the Armory’s expansive Wade Thompson Drill Hall with Kiss the Air!, a performance of new large-scale works that incorporate ziplines, ladders, trampolines, hoops, and bungee cords. Among the works will be Ascension, which encompasses a 21-foot turning ladder on which nine dancers attempt to balance. Human Fountain features sixteen performers leaping from a three-story scaffold to create the effect of a human Bellagio Fountain. Also included are Falling Sideways, which uses stuntmen’s Air Ramps to hurl the dancers past the audience, and Kiss The Air! in which dancers in bungees fly over the audience—and a pool of water. Part aerial dance, part daredevil act, Elizabeth Streb’s work defies the natural laws of motion and gravity to create a visual and auditory tour de force.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Shen Wei Dance Arts

    November 30, 2011 - December 4, 2011

    Following his year-long creative exploration as a Park Avenue Armory artist-in-residence, Artistic Director Shen Wei and his company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, will perform Undivided Divided, a bold new work that heralds the next direction for the ensemble. Created during the company’s residence at the Armory, this site-specific world premiere will combine handcrafted scenic elements with an expansive digital projection in a performance that makes dynamic use of the boundless possibilities available in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The evening-length program will also include the restaging of two of Shen Wei’s most celebrated works: Rite of Spring (2003), a study of deliberate versus reflexive movement set to Igor Stravinsky’s intricate music; and Folding (2000), which combines highly stylized movement with the ethereal melodies of John Tavener and traditional Tibetan Buddhist chants. The evening will culminate with Undivided Divided, which will take over the entire Drill Hall.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Romance of the Sister Arts

    November 15, 2011

    Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer will explore the relationship between music, painting and the decorative arts. The Aesthetic Movement was fascinated with synaesthesia-the relationship between sight and sound. “All art,” wrote Walter Pater in 1877, “constantly aspires to the condition of music.” Music is a powerful theme in the works of British painters Frederic Leighton and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was also central to the work of the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, who titled his canvases “Symphony in White” and “Nocturne in Blue and Gold.” This lecture explores, with visual and musical examples, the nature of this relationship, and looks beyond the fine arts to the elaborate decoration of music rooms in London and New York. The lecture concludes with an analysis of one of the most successful musical events of 1880–81 in both cities: Gilbert and Sullivan’s “original Aesthetic operetta,” Patience, which is a sparkling, affectionate satire of the Aesthetic Movement’s pretensions.

    Tim Barringer was born and educated in England, and is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on British and American art and was co-curator of the award-winning exhibition American Sublime, organized by Tate Britain in London and seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and he co-edited Art and the British Empire and Frederic Leighton. Recent exhibition catalogues include Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Colonel Roosevelt

    November 7, 2011

    Of all our great Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt,” he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Had Roosevelt won his historic “Bull Moose” campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Once the war began, Roosevelt went on to laud the men of the Seventh Regiment for their bravery as early volunteers to the front. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.

    For this lecture, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris will discuss the final volume of his award-winning three-part biography of Theodore Roosevelt, covering the last ten years of Roosevelt’s life.
    Edmund Morris     was born and educated in Kenya and went to college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980. Its sequel, Theodore Rex, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2002. In between these two books, Morris became President Reagan’s authorized biographer and published the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. More recently, he has written Beethoven: The Universal Composer. He is now at work on a biography of Thomas Edison.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    A World on Fire

    October 11, 2011

    As America descended into Civil War, British loyalties were torn between support for the North-and its antislavery stance-and the South, which portrayed itself abroad as a small nation bravely fighting for independence and upon which the mills of England were dependent for raw cotton. More than 50,000 Britons volunteered for the Confederacy as soldiers, sailors, doctors, nurses, guerrillas, and spies. Hundreds more made their mark as observers, reporters, diplomats and - vitally for the South - blockade runners. This conflict also afflicted New York City, which was similarly heavily divided on the topic and economically dependent upon the South. It is a pertinent topic today as we watch civil unrest spread through much of the world.

    Speaking on her new bestselling book A World on Fire, author and historian Amanda Foreman will provide fresh accounts of Civil War battles and, more importantly, she will discuss how the war spread to Britain and was fought just as continuously there as it was in America. In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America will be examined by Foreman.

    Amanda Foreman is the author of the international bestseller Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1999), which won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography. The book inspired a documentary, a radio play starring Dame Judi Dench, and a film, The Duchess, released in 2008, starring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes. Foreman was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in both America and England. She received her doctorate in 18th-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998. She is currently a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Royal Shakespeare Company

    July 6, 2011 - August 14, 2011

    This rare United States appearance by the Royal Shakespeare Company, coming to New York for an unprecedented six-week residency, is a theater experience not to be missed. Co-presented by Lincoln Center Festival and Park Avenue Armory, in association with The Ohio State University, the critically acclaimed ensemble performs five of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays on a full-scale replica of its Royal Shakespeare Theatre recreated in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Produtions include The Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and King Lear.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    The Transfinite

    May 20, 2011 - June 11, 2011

    Following critically acclaimed installations by Ernesto Neto and Christian Boltanski, Ryoji Ikeda has been selected by the Armory for its third annual visual art commission in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Ikeda creates a visual and sonic environment where visitors are submerged in an extreme illustration of projected and synchronized data. His work uses scale, light, shade, volume, shadow, electronic sounds, and rhythm to flood the senses. In choreographing vast amounts of digital information, Ikeda conjures up a transformative environment in which visitors confront data on a scale that defies comprehension, experiencing the infinite.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Tune-In Festival

    February 16, 2011 - February 20, 2011

    Grammy Award-winning eighth blackbird curates and performs at the Armory’s five-day music festival, bringing together some of today’s leading new music groups, including red fish blue fish, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Sympho, and Newspeak. Within the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the audience becomes part of the musical experience. Works by Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, John Cage, Louis Andriessen, Kurt Schwitters, David T. Little, Stefan Weisman, and Matt Marks will be performed. Closing the festival is the New York—and indoor—premiere of John Luther Adams’ percussion-only Inuksuit, which features 72 performers moving throughout the expansive hall during the performance. The festival also includes the world premiere of ARCO, a new work commissioned by the Armory, co-composed by Paul Haas, Paul Fowler, and Bora Yoon, and performed by Sympho.

    eighth blackbird’s program is inspired by Stravinsky’s provocative statement, “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.”  At the heart of the festival are two concerts that challenge Stravinsky’s statement by taking radical positions: for the negative (powerFUL), and for the affirmative (powerLESS).  The concluding event (Inuksuit) provides musical (or spiritual) balm after the fray.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Leonardo’s Last Supper

    December 3, 2010 - January 6, 2011

    Visionary artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway brings new insight into one of the world’s most celebrated masterpieces in his multimedia reverie of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Set within a full-scale replica of the dome of Refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie in Milan, the home of the original painting, a meticulously detailed facsimile of The Last Supper is brought to life through Greenaway’s ingenious manipulation of light, sound, and theatrical illusion. Visitors navigate a series of vivid audio-visual environments that provoke new ways of seeing this iconic work.

    Leonardo’s Last Supper is part of Greenaway’s ongoing series Ten Classic Paintings Revisited, in which the artist creates a dialogue “between 8,000 years of art and 112 years of cinema.” The Armory’s presentation marks the first time that one of Greenaway’s critically acclaimed artistic installations is mounted in the United States.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Inventing the Modern World

    November 15, 2010

    During the 19th and early 20th centuries, world’s fairs were the showcases for introducing advancements in the modern world. Universal in scope, they displayed decorative arts, paintings, and sculpture alongside scientific advancements and agricultural products. Above all, they democratized design unlike any previous forum. Their wide influence is witnessed by the Seventh Regiment’s presentation of the 1879 New Armory Fair, an event that followed members’ attendance at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition. Lecturer Jason T. Busch will broadly investigate the objects shown at world’s fairs from London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 to the New York World’s Fair in 1939. These fairs and the exhibitions demonstrated how innovative design could positively affect modern living.

    Jason T. Busch is Curatorial Chair for Collections and The Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. He was formerly Associate Curator of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. He is currently co-organizing with Catherine Futter the catalogue-exhibition Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at World’s Fairs, 1851-1939, which will be shown in 2012 at Carnegie Museum of Art and at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Appetite City

    September 28, 2010

    This lecture by William Grimes will explore the rich culinary history of New York, from the simple chophouses and oyster bars of the early 19th century to today’s world of celebrity chefs. Food and restaurants reflected the larger changes transforming the city — physical growth, the economy, complex social rituals, and changing ethnic makeup — but also the genius of those culinary visionaries who changed the way New Yorkers ate. Central to the rise of social dining was Delmonico’s, the restaurant of choice for the business and social elite and the exclusive caterer to New York’s silk-stocking Seventh Regiment at the Armory. Photographs, menus, and other memorabilia, including 19th century originals from the Armory’s archives, will highlight this delectable journey.
    William Grimes, the author of Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (2009), was the restaurant critic of The New York Times from 1999 to 2004 and now writes obituaries for the paper. He has also written Straight Up or On the Rocks (2001) and My Fine Feathered Friend (2002) and was the co-author of The New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants (2004).

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    No Man's Land

    May 14, 2010 - June 13, 2010

    Filling the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, No Man’s Land is Christian Boltanski’s most ambitious project in the United States to date. This monumental work explores the signature motifs of the artist’s forty-year career—individuality, anonymity, life, and death—in an immersive landscape that is both powerful and infernal. Incorporating 30 tons of discarded clothing, a 60-foot crane, and the sound of human heartbeats, the installation offers an unforgettable and deeply moving experience by one of today’s most important artists. Curated by Tom Eccles.

    As part of the installation at the Armory, visitors will be invited to record their own heartbeat and offer it to the artist as he continues to expand his Archives du coeur, a collection of human heartbeats from around the world.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Stifters Dinge

    December 16, 2009 - December 20, 2009

    In this astonishing work, German composer and director Heiner Goebbels takes as his inspiration the writings of the 19th-century Romantic author Adalbert Stifter, who predicted many of the ecological challenges that face us today. However, Stifter is only the starting point for this extraordinary meditation on how to enter the unknown and the unfamiliar: five pianos as in-motion sculptural works with no performers, the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Malcolm X, and William S. Burroughs, songs from Papua New Guinea, haunting projected imagery, and wind and mist are all combined in a unique, fantastical environment.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Boss Tweed

    November 17, 2009

    William Magear Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall and New York’s Democratic Party after the Civil War, wielded enormous influence over New York politics, but his corruption overshadowed the rest: bribing the state legislature, fixing elections, skimming money from city contractors, and diverting public funds on a massive scale. Was Tweed all bad? Under his leadership, immigrants were brought into the political mainstream, the city built some of its finest landmarks, and support for the neediest residents was increased. This discussion will cover the meteoric rise and highly public fall of Tweed and his Ring. Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who was instrumental in bringing down the Tweed Ring, and James H. Ingersoll, Tweed’s partner in crime, were both prominent members of the Seventh Regiment.

    A writer and attorney in Washington, D.C., Kenneth D. Ackerman is the author of The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday 1869 (1988); Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of James A. Garfield (2003); Boss Tweed: the Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (2005), and Young J. Edgar Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (2007).

    Professor Kenneth T. Jackson has taught at Columbia University for more than forty years. A former president of the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the Historical Society, he is the author of more than a dozen books including The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995) and Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1987).

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Indian Connection

    September 17, 2009

    This lecture tracked the rise in admiration for the art and design of South Asia among British and American designers, architects and theorists during the 19th century. Once considered merely another exotic style, Indian art was recognized by Owen Jones in The Grammar of Ornament as exemplary — its simplified geometric patterns contrasting with the “ugliness” of Victorian design. For William Morris, the hand-made qualities of Indian design added a moral and political edge. American designer Lockwood de Forest (a member of the Seventh Regiment) found in Indian carving and textile design the perfect style of ornament for Gilded Age New York. The rich interior design of the Armory’s Veterans Room by Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists is a stunning example of the impact of Asian influences on American design, including the fascination for India.

    Born and educated in England, Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on British and American art and was co-curator of the award-winning exhibition American Sublime, organized by Tate Britain in London and seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and he co-edited Art and the British Empire and Frederic Leighton. Recent exhibition catalogues include Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Boris Godunov

    July 22, 2009 - July 26, 2009

    Irreverently mirroring the opaque maneuverings of today’s Russian power brokers, this riveting production from the Chekhov International Theatre Festival offers audiences an edgy, modern-day staging of Alexander Pushkin’s Shakespeare-inspired drama about the corrupt and murderous politics of Tsarist Russia.

    Directed by the provocative Declan Donnellan, this searing exposé of the bitter power struggle that ensued after the death of Ivan the Terrible is an unapologetic and topical look at the malevolent lust for absolute control, brought to life by a brilliant cast including Russian stage and screen actor Evgeny Mironov.

    Staged at the Park Avenue Armory, Donnellan’s updated production of Pushkin’s drama comments on the fight for political control in late 16th- and early 17th-century Russia, painting an equally unflattering picture of Moscow’s contemporary political players.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Les Éphémères

    July 7, 2009 - July 19, 2009

    From the matriarch of exploratory French theater comes a truly visionary play that, at its root, asks life’s ultimate question: What would you do if the end of the world were imminent?

    With Les Éphémères, based not on text but on the ordinary circumstances of our everyday lives, the brilliant and widely influential director Ariane Mnouchkine once again delves into the core of our sensibilities. Mnouchkine’s theater collective, Théâtre du Soleil, explores personal stories of pain and compassion in episodes that reflect our common experiences to find meaning in the mundane.

    Mnouchkine recreates her famed Cartoucherie performance space in the historic Park Avenue Armory, a theatrical surround self-described as an “autopsy room” for this remarkable work.  Presented in two parts that can be viewed individually or in a full cycle, Les Éphémères is a tour-de-force that transcends theater and pulls back the curtain on our own lives to reveal the familiar memories that haunt us and the hope that we share.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    anthropodino

    May 14, 2009 - June 14, 2009

    Park Avenue Armory launched its first commissioned art installation with anthropodino, a large-scale, interactive sculpture by world-renowned artist, Ernesto Neto. Using hundreds of yards of translucent material, Neto suspends a gigantic canopy from the drill hall’s latticework truss, spanning 120 feet wide and 180 feet long. Magnificent, aromatic “fabric stalactites” descend 60 feet to embrace a vast labyrinth of passageways and rooms.

    Inspired by Ernesto Neto’s anthropodino, Shen Wei Dance Arts, (directed by Shen Wei, choreographer for Opening Ceremony, Beijing Olympics 2008), created a site-specific response within the immersive sculpture with live music by Tom Chiu (Flux Quartet) and guests.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    They Screamed Their Delight

    December 9, 2008

    It is unsurprising that, early in its history, the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory hosted “monster” concerts featuring the music of Wagner. The late Gilded Age was the heyday of Wagnerism in America. Anton Seidl, the raven-haired high priest of New York’s Wagner cult, led summer con-certs at Coney Island 14 times a week; Wagner Nights sold out the 3,000-seat seaside Music Pavilion. When Tristan was given at the Met, a religious silence followed the final curtain, after which women in the audience “stood on their chairs and screamed their delight for what seemed hours” (The Musical Courier). In fact, Wagnerism in America was a progressive, even subversive, women’s movement. Joseph Horowitz will share a recording and inquire: How was the Liebestod experienced in 1890?

    Joseph Horowitz’s eight books include his award-winning Wagner Nights: An American History. His Classical Music in America (2005), which also revisits Gilded Age New York in detail, was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. His most recent book is Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts.  A former Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, he has long served as an artistic advisor to various American orchestras. In 2001 he co-founded Post-Classical Ensemble of Washington, D.C., for which he serves as Artistic Director. He has curated many festivals and events celebrating Dvorak in New York (1892-95), including two concerts in October 2008 for the New York Philharmonic. 

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Stanford White, Architect

    November 12, 2008

    By the time of his death at fifty-three, Stanford White had transformed himself into the most celebrated architect in America. He was also one of its most prolific designers, a tastemaker of such stature that Harper’s Weekly declared he should be appointed Commissioner of Public Beauty. White’s passion for beauty was accompanied by an evolving taste. Early designs such as his collaboration on the Armory’s Veterans’ Room embraced the generous and inventive attributes of the Aesthetic Movement, while the work of his maturity reveals the same powerful imagination applied to a more traditional classical idiom. In spite of the diversity of architectural imagery in White’s portfolio, evidence of the hand and eye of the designer emerge with remarkable consistency, allowing us to develop a profile of the taste of Stanford White.

    This lecture coincides with the publication of Stanford White, Architect (Rizzoli, 2008) by Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White. Their previous collaboration, McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks, published in 2003, documents the institutional and commercial designs of America’s most famous architectural office. Mr. White’s first book, The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, is the definitive monograph of their residential commissions. As a practicing architect and a great-grandson of Stanford White, Sam White brings a unique perspective to his discussion of the work of that firm.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The American Sublime and the Civil War

    October 23, 2008

    Landscape painting ranks among the supreme achievements of American culture in the half century before the Civil War. We tend to associate landscape painting with the picturesque virtues of the countryside, an escape from the political and economic problems of the city and the nation. Yet, as this lecture reveals, landscape painters responded to the threat, and onset, of Civil War with powerful and troubled compositions which register the nation’s trauma. Among the artists to be discussed will be Frederic Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade and Winslow Homer. The lecture closes with a re-examination of the role of landscape in the decades of reconstruction after the Civil War, when the Armory was built.

    Born and educated in England, Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on British and American art and was co-curator of the award-winning exhibition American Sublime, organized by Tate Britain in London, and seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and co-edited collections Art and the British Empire and Frederic Leighton. Recent exhibition catalogues include Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Die Soldaten

    July 5, 2008 - July 12, 2008

    Lincoln Center Festival 2008, in association with Park Avenue Armory presented an epic production of Bernd Zimmerman's opera Die Soldaten in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where movable seating on railway tracks enabled the audience to experience extremes of intimacy and overwhelming all-enveloping sound. Originally produced at the Ruhrtriennale, Die Soldaten is a deeply engrossing and unsettling piece by a 20th-century composer scarred by World War II, which exposes the consequences of war and an innocent young woman’s slide into desperation and despair. The opera was performed for five nights to a sold-out audience of almost 1,000.

  • Wade Thompson Drill Hall

    Greeting Card

    September 17, 2007 - September 24, 2007

    With the Art Production Fund, Park Avenue Armory presented its first contemporary art exhibit. Artist Aaron Young’s Greeting Card was described by New York Times writer Roberta Smith as “stunning”-a showcase of the Armory as a unique art venue. Seven hundred audience members stood on the balconies above as motorcycles throttled and spun below creating columns of thick smoke and causing a sense of “Coliseum” spectacle that was simultaneously thrilling and disturbing. The work was open to the public for one week after the performance free of charge.