Past Events

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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).

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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

    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).

  • 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.