Past Events

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.