Past Events

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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.

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.