Past Events

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.