Past Events

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.