There are just a few hours left to purchase your ticket to the much anticipated Second Annual Cabaret with performances from Academy Residents, Fellows, and distinguished artists. The Cabaret will take place Tuesday 26 October, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on New York's Lower East Side. The event is being curated by Trustee Laurie Anderson, RAAR'06, and includes live performances, a reading, and videos curated by Trustee Laurie Simmons, RAAR'05.
Performances by:
Laurie Anderson, RAAR'06
Lisa Bielawa, FAAR’10
Don Byron, FAAR’10
Molissa Fenley, FAAR’08
John Kelly, FAAR’07
Nico Muhly
David Sanford, FAAR’03, and the Pittsburgh Collective
A reading by:
Rosanna Warren, RAAR’01
Videos by:
Kate Gilmore, FAAR’08
Marie Lorenz, FAAR’09
Carrie Mae Weems, FAAR’06
Karen Yasinsky, 2011 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize winner
Here are some of the performers' photographs and bios:
Don Byron, FAAR’10, has been a singular voice in an astounding range of musical contexts for almost two decades, exploring widely divergent traditions while continually striving for what he calls “a sound above genre.” As clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, arranger, and social critic, he redefines every genre of music he plays, be it classical, salsa, hip-hop, funk, rhythm & blues, klezmer, or any jazz style from swing and bop to cutting-edge downtown improvisation. He has been consistently voted best clarinetist by critics and readers alike in leading international music journals since being named “Jazz Artist of the Year." For more information about Don Byron, click here.
Lisa Bielawa, FAAR’10, was born into a musical family, played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. Ms Bielawa began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992, and in 1997 co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. The New York Times describes her music as,“ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” and Time Out New York praised her “prodigious gift for mingling persuasive melodicism with organic experimentation.” She won the Frederic A. Julliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize in 2010.
Recent highlights include performances of Ms. Bielawa’s chamber music in New York at the Weill Recital Hall, City Winery, Merkin Concert Hall and Trinity Church. Her work, "Chance Encounter," a piece comprising songs and arias constructed of speech overheard in transient public spaces, has been performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, on the banks of the Tiber River, as part of the opening of the celebrated new MAXXI Museum in Rome, and in Venice. The world premiere recording of Lisa Bielawa’s "Chance Encounter" will be released on Orange Mountain Music during the coming year, and another album, The Lay of the Love, will be released as the inaugural disc of Premiere Commission Recordings, a new label based in New York. For more information, please click here.
Molissa Fenley, FAAR’08, has choreographed over 70 works in her 33-year long career. As a soloist working in collaboration with visual artists and composers and with her company, Molissa Fenley and Dancers, founded in 1977, she has performed throughout the United States, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Fenley's work has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the Dia Art Foundation, Jacob's Pillow, Lincoln Center, the New National Theater of Tokyo, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop and many others. Both Cenotaph and State of Darkness were awarded a Bessie for Choreography in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Fenley has also created many works on other ballet and contemporary dance companies, most recently for the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She is on the dance faculty at Mills College, in residence in the spring semesters, and often teaches choreography at the Experimental Theater Wing of NYU. Recent awards include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an award from the American Masterpieces Initiative from the NEA. For more information on Molissa Fenley, click here.
Kate Gilmore, FAAR’08, lives and works in New York City. Her recent exhibitions include: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Greater New York: 5 year Review, PS1/MoMA Queens, New York; The Kitchen, New York, New York, Vassar College, Poughkepsie, New York, and Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiania. Bryant Park (Public Art Fund), New York, New York, Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Gilmore’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including: The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Time Magazine, Washington Post, They Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Flash Art, Brooklyn Rail, Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, Art in America, Modern Painters, ArtUs, Time Out/NewYork, Artnews, Art Papers, San Francisco Chronicle, and Artforum. Gilmore received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and her Bachelor’s degree from Bates College. She has been the recipient of several international awards and honors, such as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York, New York, New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, New York, New York, and the the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency, Brooklyn, New York. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
John Kelly, FAAR’07, is a performance and visual artist whose creative work runs the gamut from mixed media dance theatre works, to vocal concerts, to exhibitions. His work explores the character of creative genius as it occurs in the gradations between the ephemeral and the tangible. Performance venues include The Kitchen, PS 1, the Warhol Museum, the Whitney Biennial, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Exhibitions include Alexander Gray Associates, the MIT List Visual Art Center, and Philadelphia’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Acting credits include the Broadway production of James Joyce’s "The Dead;" the starring role in "The Clerk’s Tale" directed James Franco. An autobiography, John Kelly, was published by the 2wice Arts Foundation. Awards and Fellowships include 2 Bessie Awards, 2 Obie Awards, an Alpert Award, the 2010 Ethyl Eichelberger Award, 2 NEA American Masterpieces Awards, and an Eliot Norton Award. Fellowships include NYFA, Art Matters, Inc., The Guggenheim Foundation, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, The Civitella Ranieri Center, and the American Academy in Rome. He is currently a Armory Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. Upcoming productions: ‘The Escape Artist’ at Performance Space in April of 2011; a revival of ‘Pass The Blutwurst, Bitte’ (Egon Schiele) at La MaMa this December; and a solo exhibition ‘Schiele~Kelly’ at La Galleria La MaMa, opening November 26th. For additional information, click here.
Ms. Lorenz, FAAR’08, received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 1995 and an M.F.A. from Yale in 2002. She has received grants from Artists Space, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Harpo Foundation, and the Alice Kimball English Travel Fellowship. Her work has been shown at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California and at Artists Space, in New York. She has completed solo projects at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England and Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, and at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York. In 2008 she was awarded the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize for the American Academy in Rome. She began her project ‘The Tide and Current Taxi,’ a performance in the New York Harbor in 2005 which is still in progress. Ms. Lorenz was appointed assistant professor in painting/printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 2009.
Nico Muhly attended Columbia University and the Juilliard School, graduating in 2004. His music has been premiered by the choirs of Cambridge's Clare College and New York’s Saint Thomas Church, and by the Boston Pops, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony. His film credits include the score for Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008), and he has worked with choreographer Benjamin Millepied to create new pieces for the American Ballet Theater, the Paris Opéra ballet, and the Nederlands Ballet. He has also lent his skills as conductor, performer and arranger to such musicians as Sam Amidon, Antony and the Johnsons, Björk, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Philip Glass, Grizzly Bear, Valgeir Sigursson, and Jónsi from Sigur Rós. Leading up to the release of his first album, Speaks Volumes(2007), Muhly was invited to present concerts of his chamber music at both Carnegie Hall and the Whitney Museum. Since then, Muhly has released a second album, Mothertongue(2008), and worked with Valgeir and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel to premiere "Green Aria: A ScentOpera" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Recently, his vocal works have been premiered by Jessica Rivera and David Daniels, and 2010 will see the premiere of a new orchestral song cycle for tenor Mark Padmore and violinist Pekka Kuusisto. Muhly’s first full-scale opera, with a libretto by Craig Lucas, has been co-commissioned by the English National Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and Licoln Center Theater Commissions Program.
David Sanford, FAAR’03, is a composer/bandleader. His works have been performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra under Marin Alsop, the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Speculum Musicae, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players, cellist Matt Haimovitz, jazz musicians George Garzone, Bob Mintzer, Hugh Ragin, and Steven Bernstein, and he was the subject of a Composer Portrait concert at Miller Theatre. He has received awards and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, Chamber Music America, the Koussevitzky Foundation, FONT, BMI and ASCAP, and is Associate Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College.
The Pittsburgh Collective is a twenty-piece big band comprised of top-level jazz, classical and new music virtuosi. Described with such praise as “a very original, innovative jazz orchestra,” “death star magnitude,” “full-throttle wailing from all sections”, “reaches out of the speakers and grabs you by the scruff of your neck,” and “a powerhouse of some of the most incredible musicians and jazz aficionados you have ever or never heard,” the band extends the Third Stream tradition of Ellington, Kenton, Gunther Schuller, George Russell and Charles Mingus, straddling jazz and classical idioms with a plurality and intensity reflective of the 21st century. Members of the band come from the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, Brass Roots, the Manhattan Brass, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Boston Musica Viva, the New Millennium Ensemble, Urban Sun, and the bands of Ran Blake, Hugh Ragin, Gunther Schuller, Fred Hersch, and ICE, as well as leading their own groups for which they compose and arrange.
Past performances include concerts at Skidmore College, the Festival of New Trumpet Music, the International Association for Jazz Education Conference in New York City, and Miller Theatre at Columbia University for a Composer Portrait concert. In 2004 they were awarded a Koussevitzky Commission for a concerto with cellist Matt Haimovitz, and the resulting work, Scherzo Grosso, was recorded on the group’s first CD, Live at the Knitting Factory (Oxingale) released in January of 2007 (critic Alexander Helfand of Jazziz featured it among his top discs of that year in the magazine's Critics' Choice issue). The Pittsburgh Collective was formed in 2003.
Rosanna Warren is the author of one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981), and four collections of poems: Each Leaf Shines Separate (Norton, 1984), Stained Glass (Norton, 1993), Departure (Norton, 2003), and Ghost in a Red Hat (forthcoming from Norton, March 2011). Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, a book of literary criticism, appeared from Norton in 2008. She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides’ Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1992). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Lila Wallace Readers’ Digest Fund, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others. Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets’ Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 – 2005, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches Comparative Literature at Boston University.
Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems, FAAR’06, has investigated yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the visual consequences of power throughout her world-renowned career. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for more than twenty-five years. Weems was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography, the Visual Arts Grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, and is a recipient of the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in American culture. Earlier this year in 2008, she received the Skowhegan Medal in Photography and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Most recently, she is the subject of Compassion, part of the ART21 series on Contemporary Artists. The artist lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband Jeffrey Hoone, and is currently at work on two major solo exhibitions.
Karen Yasinsky is an artist working primarily with animation and drawing. Her video installations and drawings have been shown in many venues internationally including the Mori Art Musuem, Tokyo, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art, NY, UCLA Hammer Museum, L.A., Kunst Werke, Berlin, the Sculpture Center, NY and at the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio. Her animations have been screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals including Museum of Modern Art, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the New York Film Festival. Her work can be found in several books including No. 1: First works by 363 Artists, Armpit of the Mole and >>fast forward: Media Art Sammlung Goetz. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Foundation grant and teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Film/Media Studies and MICA. In 2010/2011 she will be a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She is also a founding board member of the Gunk Foundation, a private foundation for public art.
Cabaret doors open at 7:00pm.
Film and video begin at 7:00pm.
Live performances begin at 8:00pm.
Catered by Katz’s Delicatessen.
Wine provided by Beso de Vino.
Fountain Service and the Green Beast provided by Pernod Absinthe.
Upstairs Lounge Area and Stage Carpets courtesy of Madeline Weinrib Atelier.