Public Programs
Upcoming

On the occasion of the exhibition Site and Insight: an Assemblage of Artists, P.S.1 offers a series of museum tours, each led by an emerging collector or a curator for a private collection. Site and Insight is curated by Agnes Gund, one of New York's most prominent collectors and patrons. Ms. Gund's curatorial selections are informed by her experience as a collector and thus reflect her unique relationship to art and to artists.

These museum tours invite young collectors or curators of collections to present their views on works in P.S.1's summer exhibitions and to provide insight into the processes behind collecting contemporary art. Led through the galleries by a collector, participants are introduced to the issues, questions, concerns, and inspiration which face a collector when viewing new work. The "collector's eye" will be a new lens through which to experience contemporary art at P.S.1.

All events take place at 3:30pm and are free.

Saturday, July 5th: Greg Allen (collector)
Friday, July 18th: Emily Braun (curator of the Leonard Lauder Collection)
Friday, August 1st: Agnes Gund (collector and Site and Insight curator)
Friday, August 15th: Anne Ellegood (curator of the Peter Norton Collection)
Saturday, August 30th: Bill Previdi (collector)

Public Programs
Archive

On the occasion of P.S.1's exhibition Chen Zhen: a Tribute, this performance event features percussionists from different musical traditions. The musicians translate Chen Zhen's drumming installation into music, creating new site-specific works. Led by innovative and renowned drummers Christine Bard and Jim Pugliese, a collective of 12 musicians gather around Chen Zhen's sculptural installation and transform it into an animated celebration of cultural exchange through music.

A major theme that runs through Chen Zhen's work is the importance of creating contexts where cross-cultural exchanges can occur. The central piece in the exhibition, Jue Chang - Fifty Strokes to Each (1999), consists of over 100 wooden chairs and bed-frames - gathered from around the world - covered with stretched animal skin. Intended as a vehicle for conflict resolution through collective activity, the installation merges the materials and rituals of disparate cultures to create a unified whole. Translating these sensitivities into music, this 3-part event includes Nii Tetteh Tettey and the Kusun Ensemble from Ghana, the Downtown Indie Drummers (Rick Brown, Laura Cromwell,  Alice Bierhorst, John Mettam), and the Post Minimalist Ensemble Drummers (Dominic Donato, Steve Paysen, Jim Pugliese, Christine Bard), who have worked with seminal composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Tracing the influence of West African drumming on the major 20th Century minimalist composers and the influence these composers have had on experimental downtown drummers, these collaborative performances activate Chen Zhen's installation with new exchanges and vocabularies.

2pm: Nii Tetteh Tettey and the Kusun Ensemble
3pm: Rick Brown, Laura Cromwell, Alice Bierhorst, John Mettam (Downtown Indie Drummers)
4pm: Dominic Donato, Steve Paysen, Jim Pugliese, Christine Bard (Post Minimalist Ensemble Drummers)

Christine Bard and Jim Pugliese will perform through the day with each group.

In conjunction with P.S.1's project "After Matisse/Picasso," this bi-weekly series of events features reader Yves Seban and composer David Bartel presenting one hour-readings of Gertrude Stein's literary works.

On Sunday March 9th, Seban reads Stein's "Tender Buttons," a seminal work written in 1913 that parallels the cubist experiments of the time by proposing a "cubist literature."

On Sunday March 22nd, Seban is joined by David Bartel for a reading and performance of "Three Portraits of Painters: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso," with Bartel re-mixing the reader's voice in real-time.

In April, further presentations will include open "read-ins" of a selection of Stein's texts. In P.S.1's cafe, Bartel and Seban moderate audience members and introduce multiple-voice readings, audio-samples, rhythms, and silences.

In May, Seban and Bartel are joined by Thuy Kieu on harpsichord for a premiere improvised performance of "The Making of Americans," Gertrude Stein's stunningly rhythmical and musical work about how to become an American.

Please check this page for updates.

Each discussion begins at 4:30pm.
Tickets are $10, $8 members, $5 students, and are available on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of each program at P.S.1.

This program co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art and is made possible by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

On the occasion of P.S.1's current exhibitions, this five-part series of musical performances translates ideas addressed in the exhibitions into music: Video Acts' focus on the body is mirrored in Pamelia Kurtin's theremin performance (February 1) and Shelley Hirsch's animated vocal pieces (February 22); Yuka Honda represents the experiments of Japanese artists in New York; Tibetan monks perform ceremonial drumming to inaugurate Chen Zhen's sculpture Jue Chang -Fifty Strokes to Each; and Nicolas Mazet echoes the "After Matisse Picasso" installation of re-envisioned works by Picasso and Matisse by presenting a subtly altered appropriation of well-known chanson française classics (all on February 16). 
All events take place at P.S.1 and are free of charge.

Click on the artists' names for detailed information on each performance each event.

"Music for Winter Exhibitions" is made possible in part by The Recording Academy and the 45th Annual GRAMMY Awards and is organized by Anthony Huberman and Lokke Highstein.

In Real Time: a Live Audio/Video Performance

For this performance event, video artist Lukasz Lysakowski and electronic musicians o.blaat (aka Keiko Uenishi) and So Takahashi create an improvised audio and visual environment of abstract moving images and digital sound.

P.S.1's current exhibition of Chris Cunningham's work, which includes the artist’s videos for a Björk song and Aphex Twin tracks, highlights the dynamic relationship between video and song. Other artists have recently looked beyond these narrative compositions and have explored the possibilities for open-ended, simultaneous improvisations between video artists and musicians.

The performance emphasizes a reciprocal relationship between image and soundscape: the visual imagery being generated influences the musicians, while the sounds inspire improvised video compositions. The technology also yields a more direct relationship: audio signals from the musicians' laptop computers connect directly to Lysakowski's custom software program, which immediately translates the sounds into visual data. This system enables the music to play an important role in generating, in real-time, the video images. These constantly evolving variables allow for a dynamic, uncertain, and evolving audio/visual environment, and an alternative to the traditional narrative and linear structure of the music video.

o.blaat (aka Keiko Uenishi) and So Takahashi, both originally from Japan, are New York-based electronic musicians. Working mostly on laptop computers, their music reveals a sensibility for minimalist textures and creates moments of fragile bits and bytes and digital noise. Both have performed and exhibited internationally. Takahashi has released recordings on Carpark Records, and o.blaat will soon release on Tellus Records.

Reversible Monuments: Mexican Contemporary Poetry

The anthology Reversible Monuments represents the most comprehensive volume of Mexican poetry in English translation since the 1950s. It features poetry written by authors departing from many different traditions ranging from the oral to the narrative and from the lyrical to visually centered practices such as concrete poetry. Most of its contents have been translated into English by American poets, implying a double exchange: not only are poems being translated into another language, but they are translated into the poetic imagination of another writer. Participants read their translations as well as their own work.

Readers include:
Eliot Weinberger (American essayist. He will read some of his translations of the Mazatec poet Juan Gregorio Regino and will talk about American's fascination with the Mexican imagination).
Carmen Boullosa (Mexican poet and fiction writer. She'll read from a selection of her work).
Christian Viveros-Fauné (American poet and art critic. He will read some of his translations in the book and address exchanges between visual and poetic practices).
Mónica de la Torre (Coeditor of the anthology and a Mexican and American poet. She will read selections of her translations in the book, and poems by the experimental poet Gerardo Deniz, María Baranda, and Josué Ramírez).
Roberto Tejada (American art critic and poet. He will read from his translations and his own poetry written in the symbolic space between the Mexican and American cultures).
Heriberto Yépez (Mexican poet. He will do a multimedia performance with a video component and allowing a computer program to read his texts in different voices in a perfect English accent that he doesn't have).

By mimicking a 16th Century method of theatrical didacticism - the Theatrum Anatomicum - the Instituto de la Telenovela showcases the intricate connections between the fabrication of a Latin American television drama and these early procedures of wonder. The Instituto de la Telenovela is an organization established by a group of artists, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America and Eastern Europe that gathers information and informs the public about the international impact of Latin American Telenovelas.

On the occasion of the  exhibition "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994," a four-part series of musical performances takes place in the museum’s café space. This series points to the ways in which contemporary musicians in New York are working with African song, sound structures, instruments, and traditions. Each performance represents a "response" to the exhibition: the exhibition’s focus on contemporary African culture is extended to include a glimpse at what Africa means to emerging New York composers and musicians.

Schedule of performances:
February 23: Val Jeanty
March 16: Lukas Ligeti and Guests
April 6: DJ Mutamassik
April 27: Djo Bi Irrie Simon

Many Public Programs have been organized alongside The Short Century exhibition.  For information on the unique schedule of panel discussions, lectures, and musical performances, please click here.

On the occasion of the exhibition Loop, the pertinent ideas of Samuel Beckett’s well-known play come to life in this day-long performance. Actors recite a short excerpt from the play in seamless repetition, highlighting an ambiguous relationship to time as a malleable phenomenon capable of being influenced, lengthened, paused, or repeated.

This hybrid panel/performance features leading electronic musicians discussing the relevance of the loop as a music-making strategy in contemporary techno music and the alternatives to the loop found in the "post-techno" aesthetic. Discussions will be interspersed with live laptop sound performances by the panelists. The dialogue will focus around musical debts to 60s minimalism, the fetishization of the error, alternate temporalities (stasis, eternal return), the loop’s technological determination in sound software and hardware, the context of the dancefloor, and the logic of repetition.

Panelists include: Philip Sherburne (The Wire, Newmu.net, XLR8R, CMJ New Music Monthly), Taylor Deupree (12k/LINE Records), Jason Williams aka Velocette (Parallel Records), Chris Sattinger aka Timeblind (Orthlorng Musork), and Todd Hyman (Carpark Records).

On the occasion of the Animations exhibition, Beth Zasloff, Karen Zasloff, Maya Puchkoff, and Henry Kandel present "A Story of Porridge," a performance with shadow images with an accompanying text and live music. Playing at the edges of lecture and puppet show, "A Story of Porridge" uses minimal means to create moments of transformation and surprise and refers to the relationship between the high-tech and the low-tech in animation.

John Klima has created Glasbead (2000), an online multi-user collaborative musical object. By connecting players around the world in a real-time audio and visual environment, Glasbead enables free-form performances as well as structured compositions over a network of sound file sharing in a way similar to Napster and Gnutella, and provides a purely visual interface for triggering multiple sound file playback. The performance at P.S.1 features both onsite musicians, with multiple Glasbead stations running simultaneously. Visitors can also play Glasbead, and are encouraged to bring their own sound samples on cd in .wav format.

Golan Levin’s Scribble (Solo version) (2000) is a color-music concert performed live on the Audiovisual Environment Suite, a set of interactive software systems which allow people to create and manipulate abstract animation and synthetic sound in real time. Scribble revives and updates a decades-old tradition of kinetic light performance, featuring tightly-coupled sounds and dynamic visuals which are at times carefully scored, and at other times loosely improvised.

John Klima (b. 1965) had his first solo exhibition in February, 2001 at Postmasters Gallery, New York. Glasbead was included in "New Media New Face," ICC, Tokyo, Japan (1999), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2000) and received an award at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans. His work Ecosystm was shown at "BitStreams" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001) and his latest work, EARTH, will be featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His work Glasbead is featured in P.S.1’s Animations.

Golan Levin studied at the MIT Media Lab before moving to New York to teach interactive design at Cooper Union and Parsons School of Design. His work has been featured in the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria (2001 and 2000), the Transmediale.01 festival in Berlin (2001), and the Tirana Biennale in Tirana, Albania (2001), among others. His work Dakadaka (a collaboration with Casey Reas) is featured in P.S.1’s Animations.

Performing Animated Sound is organized by Anthony Huberman.

For more information, please call Anthony Huberman at 718.784.2084 ext.24 or anthony@ps1.org.

Note: The last Animation Performance event, on Saturday, November 17^th, was unfortunately cancelled due to a last-minute cancellation. We apologize one again for any inconvenience this may have caused.

On the occasion of Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, over 20 writers and poets gather to read Brainard’s "I Remember" a text the artist wrote in 1970 which consists of 1,000 brief entries that begin with the words "I remember."

Readers include: Paul Auster, John Brainard, Tim Griffin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ann Lauterbach, David Lehman, Keith McDermott, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Robert Polito, Peter Schjeldahl, and many others.

On the occasion of the exhibition "Navin Rawanchaikul: I Love Taxi Cafe," P.S.1 and Channel 13/WNET present "Taxi Dreams," a documentary on New York taxi drivers.

The screening will begin with a reception.   Please visit http://www.pbs.org/wnet/taxidreams/ for more details on the film.

On the occasion of the exhibition "Buzz Club: News from Japan," leading Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai presents his older and newest projects. 

On the occasion of the exhibition Buzz Club: News from Japan, experts will lead workshops on the skills of Japanese youth culture.

July 14
i-mode Cell Phone Animation led by Delaware

July 28
Dance Dance Revolution led by Kristin Lucas and Joe McKay

August 11
New York Wearables Cut and Paste Re-Cycle led by the artists

August 25
Sony Playstation Games led by P.S.1 Security Guards

This weekly series of events takes place in Gruppo A12’s Special Project gallery every Saturday. The events vary from performances to lectures, presentations, interviews, or readings. Some events last all day, while others begin a 3pm. Follow link for schedule

On the occasion of the exhibition "Buzz Club: News from Japan," this panel discussion on Japanese digital street culture features the curators of the exhibition, David d’Heilly and Kazue Kobata, and artists Exonemo, Tanaka Hideyuki, and Pierre Taki.

This event is co-organized with The Museum of Modern Art and the Asia Society and Museum, as part of a 3-part series, "New Asian Voices."

Artists from various studio programs or artist-in-residency programs discuss their work and experience. 

Featuring:
Andrea Ray (P.S.1 National and International Studio Program)
Senam Okudzeto (Whitney Museum Independent Study Program)
Nadine Robinson (Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence)
Mary Jane Dean (World Views at the World Trade Center)
Lisa Junghanss (International Studio and Curatorial Program)
Keiko Uenishi (Havestworks Digital Media Artist-in-Residence)

Moderated by Tom Finkelpearl, Deputy Director, P.S.1

The second Lecture Lounge, a one-day event during which the artists of the P.S.1 Studio Program, and special guests, will present on-going slide and video presentations, performances, temporary sound installations, and lectures at the Clocktower Gallery.

A live recording at P.S.1's Taxe Cafe with "Taxi Insider's" hosts and artist Navin Rawanchaikul, creater of "I© Taxi Cafe", a public art project taking place at P.S.1, Madison Square Park and in New York City cabs in Summer 2001.
Show you hack license or mention "Taxi Insider" at the door for free admission for the family.

Join Susan Lubowsky Talbott (exhibition curator), Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Story of Staggering Genius), Charles LeDray, Tim Rollins, and Beverly Semmes (artists in Almost Warm and Fuzzy), and other artists in a moderated discussion about Childhood, fiction, and contemporary art.

Clocktower Lecture-Lounge

A one-day event during which the artists of the P.S.1 Studio Program, and special guests, will present on-going slide and video presentations, performances, temporary sound installations, and lectures at the Clocktower Gallery.

Artists from the Winter 2000 cycle of the Special Projects Program meet the writers who contributed critical and/or creative texts on their work in a moderated discussion.

Artists: Sharon Hayes, Andrea Geyer, Michael Rakowitz
Writers: Brian Boucher, Kimberly Lamm
Moderated by: Monica de la Torre

Artists from "Some New Minds" John Pilson and James Yamada will discuss their work with independent curator Omar Lopez-Chahoud and exhibition curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. 
Moderated by Anthony Huberman.

"Outsider" folk artist Henry Darger wrote a 15,000 page illustrated text on an imaginary war between the Vivian Girls and the evil Glandelinians. 
Every half hour, a performer will guide visitors through the exhibition by reciting memorized excerpts from Darger's own text, acting as a museum docent.

On the occasion of his first exhibition in the U.S, the artist Georges Adeagbo from Benin, Africa, will have a public dialogue with Carlos Basualdo, curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts and member of the curatorial team for the upcoming Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany.

This exhibition presents some few examples of engaging artworks made around 1984 in Europe, the U.S., and other parts of the world. This project focuses on the diverse field of practices reflecting different overlapping narratives, some full blown in 1984, some merely beginning at that time.

80s artists:
Haim Steinbach, Peter Halley, Judith Barry, Doug Ashford, Krzysztof Wodiczko

Artists from the recent Greater New York exhibition:
Cecily Brown, Matthew Buckingham, Nadine Robinson

Curators/writers:
Dan Cameron, Rosalind Krauss, Bettina Funcke, Allison Pearlman

Moderated by:
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, P.S.1 Senior Curator and curator of Around 1984.

With artist/musicians:
Elliott Sharp (exhibition curator)
DJ I-Sound
Ben Rubin
Ikue Mori
Stephen Vitiello
Zeena Parkins

Artists: Julian Laverdiere, Ricci Albenda, Inka Essenhigh
Writers: Tim Griffin, Susan Swenson
Moderator: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev