Farewell, Victory Hall/Drawing Rooms on Grand Street

The sign outside Drawing Rooms' former site

Note: Originally I had planned to post this in June, but life intervened, so better late than never, no?

One aspect of Jersey City that particularly has interested since moving here over two decades ago is the small but vibrant arts communities that has managed to thrive in the shadow of New York City's far larger global art-industrial-complex world just across the Hudson. Jersey City's downtown, part of which was once dubbed the Powerhouse Arts District, once was full of warehouses and lofts where artists could and did live and work quite affordably, particularly compared to Manhattan and even Brooklyn. Many of the older buildings have been razed for new towers, which began rising in the lead up to the 2007-9 financial crisis, and once again began rising in 2011-12, or they were repurposed for rich condo buyers, as the downtown has steadily gentrified, scattering artists to nearby districts and cities, like Newark. A few organizations and a good number of artists have managed to hang on.

One, Victory Hall Inc., began hosting a series of programs in 2011 under the rubric of Drawing Rooms, a contemporary arts center in what was a former convent next to the campus of St. Peter's Preparatory High School, near the Paulus Hook neighborhood of Jersey City. Drawing Rooms hosted a range of shows of "two and three-dimensional works"--drawings, paintings, mix-media works, sculptures of various kinds--as well as performances by emerging and mid-career artists based in the metro area Its focus on local artists, especially those from Jersey City, Hudson County and northern New Jersey, has been heartening. Some have gone on to shows a bigger galleries in New York and elsewhere, but Drawing Rooms never lost the intimacy of its exhibition spaces, the informality and friendliness of the staff, or the affordability of works on display, for those interested in buying it. All of these set it apart even from most smaller galleries in the City.

What I learned once I started dropping by Drawings Rooms's shows, which run regularly throughout the year, was that its parent organization, Victory Hall, comprises more than Drawing Rooms, however; its other programs include Rainbow Thursdays Artists, art classes for local developmentally disabled adults; Artist Workspaces, hosted in Drawing Rooms and other sites in Jersey City; Victory Hall Press, which published original catalogues of work by Victory Hall-affiliated artists; Victory Arts Public Projects, which have included partnering efforts with other local organizations; and The Art Project, shows and gallery tours organized for four new condo developments, in conjunction with Shuster Development, in downtown Jersey City: Art House, The Oakman, Hamilton House and Gallery at 109 Columbus. (I have to say that while I understand how politics and economics have changed the equation for not-for-profit arts organizations, pushing all but the wealthiest to the brink, it still pains me a bit to witness the very institutions squeezed out or suffocated by gentrification partnering with gentrifiers in order to stay alive and keep a foothold in the very spaces and places they alone once brought to life. Neoliberal capitalism is something else, and this pattern has repeated itself over and over, I know.)

As of June 15, however, Drawing Rooms will no longer occupy its ex-convent home; it had previously announced that it would be moving to the Topps Building/Mana Campus in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City. (The Mana Campus is part of Mana Contemporary, the contemporary arts powerhouse in Chicago and Miami. In preparation for its move, Drawing Rooms held a two-day final celebration and fundraiser, titled "Somewhere Over the Rainbow & Prospero's Grand St. Masque," which included an art sale, so I headed over during the second day's Brunch session to spend a little time with the artworks and artists, including James Pustorino, the Executive Director, and Anne Trauben, Exhibitions Director/Curator, who work I featured on here back in 2013, when I read poems based on them as part of a Halloween event. For the Masque, Drawing Rooms had taken its aesthetic design from Edgar Allan Poe's famous 1842 story "The Masque of the Red Death," and decorated the rooms in the colors delineated in the tale, with two additional ones, yellow for an eighth room, and red for the hallway, signifying not death and morbidity, but a rainbow's promise and ephemerality.

It was encouraging to see how many people were there that Sunday, and to later learn that a number of the artworks did sell. Below are some photos from the event; you can find the names and titles on the Masque link above. if you are in Jersey City and want to see some of the artists whose work has been featured at Drawing Rooms, Drawing Rooms' new exhibits, "Now Ya See It, Now Ya Don't" and will open this upcoming weekend at the new gallery in the Topps Building, and there will also be an Artists' Studio Tour, including Art Project exhibits at the Art Project sites listed above.

The sandwich board out front

Some of the artwork (I can't remember which color
designated this room)

Artworks by (l-r) an unknown artist,
Cathy Diamond, Gregory Stone, and Brian Hallas

Patrons and supporters of Victory Hall
& Drawing Rooms

More artwork, at left by Robyn Feld
and Andrew B. Cohen, two at
right by god@daddy borja

Conversations amid the art 

 Works in the Yellow Room (I think), by Barbara Lubliner
(fourth from left), an unknown artist,
and  Joan Mellon (at far right), 

Works by Anne Trauben (left) and Joan Mellon (right) 

Conversations in one of the galleries 

The Black Room

Some of the art in it 

Viewing the art up close

The now former home of Drawing Rooms

Poems: Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen in 1957 with a collection
of his painted books, taken on the rooftop
of photographer Harry Redl's apartment
house in San Francisco. (Photo: Harry Redl,
via FoundSF.com)

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was an exact contemporary of Robert Hayden, whose poem "Monet's Waterlilies" I posted yesterday, yet a very different poet in aesthetic approach and vision. A poet and novelist, Patchen also played with the visual aspect of his poems, sometimes painting or drawing them and collaging in musical verses drawn from the American popular and jazz traditions, and during the 13 years of his life, when he was mostly bedridden, he extended and refined his experimentation, which had included concrete poetry, painted book covers, and silk-screen texts, to created his famous "Painted Poems." Patchen's visually vibrant works invite the reader to multiple possibilities for poetic reading and interpretation, while also functioning overtly as works of visual art.

I had seen some of his Painted Poems before, but I was delighted when I happened upon via Professor Vaughn B. Anderson's former undergraduate comparative literature online course site, "Painting with Words: Exploring Poetry and Image," which he taught in 2013 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He included the Patchen poems in his "Visual Poetry" module, and they are that and more. Out of the dozen that he posted I have selected four, all of which remind me of William Blake's illustrated poems, but updated for the 20th century and, considering the moment of post-Pop Art and post-modernism, the 21st. To quote Patchen, "I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend."

The Academy of American Poets website describes these works as

free verse poems with whimsical imagery using pieces of Japanese paper and common construction paper, glue, tempera, watercolors, casein, crayons, ink, pencils, cloth dyes, cloth string, and coffee and tea (used as dyes). The idea for the painted poems, Patchen’s wife Miriam has said, emerged from his fascination with sheets he received from John Tate, a botanist. The sheets, once used in France to press botanical specimens, became the backdrop to the painted poems, which were bound and published in the collections Hallelujah Anyway and But Even So. Emitting both joy and grief, the painted poems depict the ways of the world—its cruelty included—with mature resignation and playful humor. His last work, Wonderings, contains reprints of his silkscreen pages along with abstract and figurative drawings. Patchen died in 1972, a year after Wonderings was published.

To put it another way, FoundSF says of these works that, "They are celebrations of everyday playfulness as well as realizations of the sadnesses, humor and limitations of the body and mind. Also they are personal protests, insights into the institutionalized notions, both spiritual and political, that corrupt community and creativity."

XYZ

Poem: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
(Kelsey Street Press)

It was only a matter of time before I posted a poem by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (1947-) during this month's ekphrastic/art poem cavalcade; she published a marvelous new and selected volume entitled I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press) in 2006, and has collaborated extensively with her husband, the highly lauded painter and sculpture Richard Tuttle (1941-) over the years. In fact I am a huge fan of her work, and this post marks the third time I have featured a poem by Berssenbrugge, and the other two also could be said to deal with aspects of art and poetry.

This poem, however, explicitly explores the work of two poets Berssenbrugge knows, Kiki Smith (1954-), perhaps best known for her sculptures, figurines and prints, which have explored human bodies and our excreta, feminism, and the AIDS pandemic, among other themes, and Bruce Nauman (1941-), the conceptual artist whose work crosses a range of media, including the televisual.

"I Love Artists" is one of many favorites in the 2006 collection, and I was reminded of it again when I happened upon it on the Painters and Poets blog, which for a number of years focused on the very topic I am posting about this month, poetry and visual art. The organizers of that blog created a real treasure, and stopped blogging last year, but the archives are still up at the link above, so be sure to check it out. They also offer their distinctive takes on Jorie Graham's "San Sepolchro" and other poems I've posted about here.

In the poem below, Berssenbrugge references Smith's drawing "Blues Stars on Blue Trees," a 2006 work, using ink and silver leaf, on Nepal paper, and Bruce Nauman's video piece, "Mapping the Studio 1 (Fat Chance John Cage)," from 1981, which appeared at Dia Center for the Arts back in 2001-2. It was, I can say as someone who went to see it, extremely dull, but, in the way that Andy Warhol's extended cinema could also be, quite fascinating as an idea and in practice. (It lacked the minute-to-minute excitements and spark of other extended works like Christian Marclay's The Clock.)

One thing to consider when reading Berssenbrugge is how she plays with the poetic persona in her poems, and how she shifts from observation and description to more abstract thought, sometimes within a single sentence, thereby shifting the reader's perception of what you are reading in the process. (I should note here that I have had to wrap her long lines, since they go a bit haywire on Blogger, especially when I use the formatting command <pre> which allows me to present poems very close to how they originally appeared.)

In the third stanza, she mentions "Bruce," the mice that were at the center of his video project, and very soon thereafter, we get the line, "I realize my seeing is influenced by him, for example, when we change form and become light reaching into corners of the room." We have left the human plane altogether, in a sense, and are now something more spectral, presence and immanence themselves, reaching into the spaces that we cannot but which is exactly where our minds, like the video, can take us. That is, the spaces poems and films open up for us.

As the poem concludes: "Creation is endless." But poetry it is rarely so simple or simplistic. Good poetry, that is. The poem charts a journey that I urge readers to take. And then please do take a look at Smith's and Nauman's images, for good measure.

I LOVE ARTISTS



by Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge



1.



I go to her house and talk with her as she draws me or

    knits, so it’s not one-on-one exactly, blue tattooed stars

    on her feet.

I pull the knitted garment over my head to my ankles.

Even if a detail resists all significance or function,

    it’s not useless, precisely.

I describe what could happen, what a person probably or

    possibly does in a situation.

Nothing prevents what happens from according with

    what’s probably, necessary.


2.


Telling was engendered in my body and fell upon me,

    like a battle skimming across combatants, a bird hovering.

Beautiful friends stopped dressing; there was war.

I’d weep, then suddenly feel joy and sing loud words

    from another language, not knowing my song’s end.

I saw through an event and its light shone through me.

Before, indifference was: black nothingness, that

    indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved;

    and white nothingness, calm surface of floating,

    unconnected determinations.

Imagine something, which distinguishes itself, yet

    that from which it distinguishes does not distinguish

    itself from it.

Lightning distinguishes itself from black sky, but trails

    behind, as if distinguishing itself from what espouses it.

When ground rises to the surface, her form decomposes in

    this mirror in which determination and the indeterminate

    combine.

Did you know, finally, there was not communication between

    her and myself?

Communication was in time and space that were coming anyway.

I may suffer if I can’t tell the agony of a poisoned rat,

    as if I were biting.



3.



Bruce leaving for the night makes space for his cat to enter.

Mouse (left) exits door and returns

Moth and mouse on sculpture exit (left), noise.

It’s an exterior relation, like a conducting wire,

    light fragment by fragment.

I realize my seeing is influenced by him, for example,

    when we change form and become light reaching into corners

    of the room.

Even now, we’re slipping into shadows of possessions that

    day by day absorb our energy.

I left my camera on to map unfinished work with shimmering

    paths of my cat (now disappeared), mice and moths (now dead).

There’s space in a cat walking across the room, like pages

   in a flip-book.

The gaps create a reservoir in which I diffuse my embarrassment

    at emotion for animals.

I posted frames each week, then packed them into suitcases,

    the white cat and her shadow, a black cat.

I named her Watteau, who imbues with the transitory friendship

    we saw as enduring space in a forest.



4.



A level of meaning can be the same as a place.

Then you move to your destination or person along that plane.

Arriving doesn’t occur from one point to the next.

It’s the difference in potential, a throw of dice, which

   necessarily wins, since charm as of her handcrafted gift

   affirms chance.

I laugh when things coming together by chance seem planned.

You move to abandon time brackets, water you slip into, what

    could bring a sliding sound of the perimeter of a stone?

You retain “early” and “walking” as him in space.

When a man becomes an animal, with no resemblance between

    them, it feels tender.

When a story is disrupted by analyzing too much, elements

    can be used by a witch’s need for disharmony.

Creation is endless.

Your need would be as if you were a white animal pulling

    yourself into a tree in winter, and your tears draw a

    line on the snow.

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from I Love Artists: New and Selected

Poems, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Here are the two art works:

Kiki Smith, "Blue Stars on Blue Tree," 2006, work on paper, ink and silver leaf on Nepalese paper, Pace Gallery

Bruce Nauman, "Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)," 2001, video, Dia Foundation, New York.

Poem: Monica Youn

Monica Youn

I should start today's post by saying I'd initially imagined, as I often do, that these entries would be brief and that the poems would speak for themselves. In a few cases, that's how things have unfolded. In others, like yesterday's...well, one paragraph leads to another, followed by another, and then I've written far more than I intended to. I hope none of it is boring, and that, for readers who might not be familiar with the poem and poet, the commentary is at least somewhat interesting and perhaps even a little insightful. But I am going to strive for brevity or I'll struggle to finish these posts.

Today's poem takes the idea of writing about art and ekphrasis in yet another direction. Instead of focusing on a particular art work or artist, Monica Youn's "Drawing for Absolute Beginners" starts from a more basic principle: drawing--that is, learning to draw--for absolute beginners. Whether in art school or browsing bookstore shelves, you can come across courses and books geared toward "absolute beginners" that presuppose no familiarity with picking up a pen or pencil and sketchbook t all, a state utterly foreign to someone like me who began drawing at 18 months old.

But there are absolute beginners in almost everything out there, and with drawing, a quick Net search showed one such course at The Cooper Union, as well as Andrew Loomis's various instructional series, which include the line quoted as an epitaph in Youn's poem. Yet Youn's poem is about more than drawing per se than, I would venture, exploring how we assemble meaning out of various strands of experience, information, knowledge we encounter, the lines and hatchmarks and shadings of art and life, and how, almost like beginners, we have to interpret what we hope to understand. That also is one definition of how we "read" a poem. We can approach it, as I once suggested in a micro-essay entitled "The X-Ray of the Poem," in a variety of ways, and perhaps we should.

The basic template, however, is that initial instruction beginning "Take any desired height...." And then we proceed from the top of the head to the feet or, as Youn's numbering suggests, from the bottom up. Each eighth is a clue, a glimpse, an answer, with some, like section (or stanza) #7 replete with subsets. What answers to we draw up by the time we're done? Desire is here, tenderness and brutality, relationships of various kinds, loss, and yet, by #1, we hear, overhear, someone saying they want to leave the friend, the beloved, the person with whom they have connected, exactly as they found them. So much has been drawn, indirectly and with a great deal of mystery, but the addressee has not been erased. The relationship between the speaker and the addressee has deepened considerably, though.

Monica Youn is a poet and lawyer who grew up in Houston, the daughter of Korean immigrants, and was a Rhodes Scholar.  She has published three award-winning books of poetry, Barter (2003), in which the poem below appears; Ignatz (2010); and most recently, BLACKACRE (2016), which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also book on one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions of the last 30 years, entitled Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United (2011). She currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University, and is a member of the curatorial group The Racial Imaginary Institute and chairs the Lewis Center Committee on Race and Arts.

DRAWING FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

by Monica Youn

Take any desired height, or place points for
top of head and heels. Divide into eights. . . .




8.  Head tilted back between the headboard slats. Eyes glass boxes
     filling up with light. Later, drained to a blue-gray, the color of
     good government.
 
7.  Thus, we see that commodification is a function of local necessity.
     a.  As Angelenos collect percolating shade in shallow pans, to
          leach the arsenic out of the light.
     b.  “And then I buried it.”
          “Where, exactly? And when?”
          “In the chest. Insertion point at the base of the throat. You
          were still asleep.”
          “But what is it, exactly? I mean, I can’t figure out its precise
          extent. I mean, I can feel it there sometimes, like stitches, or
          sometimes like a flanged or branching bone.”
 
6.  Cross-hatchings of street noise and the Minotaur with his boy’s
     body. Narrowing. Rib cage the verge of a canoe. Armpit a whiff of
     pencil lead.
 
5.  “If you want to fuck me with that bottle, Mr. Arbuckle, best take
     the foil off first.”
 
4.  osculation:
     a.  The act of kissing. A kiss.
     b.  Math. A point where two branches of a curve have a common
          tangent and extend in both directions of the tangent.
     c.  To the ankles. Or to the knees. Or just unzipped enough.
 
3.  Charmeuse chemise. A shuddering fall. Miss Adelaide Hall on
     the chaise longue singing I ain’t much caring / Just where I will
     end. Then jerked upright, skirt hiked to the knee, that bridge
     stretching out under every skip-step. Slaphappy scat-puppet of
     the fixed smile, the meanwhile, Ain’t got nobody to love now.
 
2.  The bone begging bowl. The foot that pushed it away.
 
1.  “I want to leave you exactly as I found you.”

Monica Youn, “Drawing for Absolute Beginners” from Barter. Copyright © 2003 by Monica Youn. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org

A Few Comics

From time to time to amuse myself I draw comics, I guess you could call them. They're really visual gags. I've posted a few in the past, and here are three new ones. My apologies if any of the text isn't clear, but my usual handwriting can veer between post-calligraphy and hieroglyphics.

Please click on the image to see a larger version, and enjoy!

Hail the Combover

The Mustache Reigns

Cheshire Tillerson

All copyright © John Keene, 2018.

Brooklyn Museum's "Art off the Wall: Decoding Basquiat" Reading Tonight

King Holiday
(Photo © Randy Pressman)

Tonight, I'll be reading poetry with some of my favorite writers, Erica Doyle, Christopher Stackhouse, and Harmony Holiday, along with the 10-piece band King Holiday, as part of the Brooklyn Museum's "Art off the Wall: 'Decoding Basquiat'" event. This reading and musical performance accompany the Brooklyn Museum's Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks exhibition, which runs until August 23, 2015. The events begin at 6:30 pm and run for three hours.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

UPDATED: Here are a few images from the reading, which took place in the Brooklyn Museum's vast and rather loud atrium. Upstairs things grew so crowded that we were told people waiting to see the show and hear the band, King Holiday, would probably not get in. Poet Harmony Holiday unfortunately could not join us, but Chris, Erica and I did our thing, and it was encouraging to see some familiar faces on what turned out to be a very busy night for poetry in New York City.

The crowd before we began 

Erica, reading her
poem about gentrification

Chris reading from his
"In Parts" series

Basquiat: The Unknown
Notebooks catalogue

Some Photos from the Ace Hotel Show

One Night Only: Selections from the Ace Hotel Artists in Residence Program show is still up and running through January 31. Though I wasn't feeling so great earlier in the day, C and I made it out on an arctic night to the opening in the Ace's small but accommodating main floor gallery, which was packed. There were other artworks on display in an display case in the hotel's entryway.

One of the co-organizers, Ben Sisto, was present to greet everyone, and as the work on exhibit showed, everyone took a different approach to their overnight residency, though drawing and painting on paper were the most common approaches. I wasn't sure which of my drawings they'd select, but Ben's was a  good and political choice.

This made the second straight January that I have had work in an exhibit, which was truly heartening, and I really hope to accomplish more artistic projects throughout 2015. Many thanks to those friends who dropped by (including one who arrived before the vernissage began and one, I learned, whow as misdirected by someone to the wrong space in the hotel!--my apologies). Some images from the show (you can click on any to enlarge them).

My "Untitled ('I can't breathe')" at center; 
L-R, top row:: Lizzi Bougatsos, me,
Jason Polan; bottom row: FCKNLZ, 
Stefan Marx, Colin Self.

L-R, top row: Stefan Marx, Colin Self;
bottom row: Philip Birch, JD Samson

Curator and organizer Ben Sisto

Top to bottom: Patrick Higgins (excerpt),
Denise Kupferschmidt, Will Owen

A work by Confection, Ltd.

I believe this was by
NOWORK

The crowd (it grew increasingly packed)

Towards the end
of the evening

One Night Only: Ace Hotel Residency Show, January 2015

If you're in New York City, do drop by the Ace Hotel New York, where I think that at least one of the pieces I worked on during my residency there will be on display from January 8-31, 2015.

The Ace Hotel Artist-in-Residency

For Eric Garner

It is now almost a week since I spent an evening (too brief!) and morning as Artist in Residence at the Ace Hotel New York, in Manhattan, courtesy of the Ace and of Word Bookstores in Jersey City and Brooklyn. It was, to sum it up in one word, extraordinary. This residency, which I hadn't heard of before, has been taking place since earlier this year (I believe), and courtesy of Jenn Northington of Word, and Ben Sisto, of Ace, I entered the mix, so I gladly and heartily thank them again for the honor.

Since I've never held an artist-in-residency (visiting professorships don't really count, I think, nor do residencies to artists' colonies, like Yaddo, right?), in any of the artistic genres, this was truly a first for me, and though nervous, I was determined to make use of the time, space and resources, to tackle a few projects. One vow I made was to keep the TV off (except for Homeland and The Comeback, which I ended up watching on my iPad, so I didn't violate that); the other was that I'd only work on school-related projects that were absolutely necessary, so I did read my fiction workshop's final submissions.

The desk area, with some of their
and my materials (cf. the guestbook at center)

Some of the art materials
I had to work with

But I spent the rest of the time drawing, something that I do regularly but not in this sort of concentrated manner. I primarily wanted to draw out my visualizations of textual conceptual/performance scores I'd written up earlier, to see what they might look like if I mapped them, almost like choreographic charts. In addition, I worked a bit on the Emotional Exercises project, tinkering with the card design, and trying to think more carefully about the categories of exercises the cards might contain. I also wanted to let my mind draw from my inner well of creativity, and the murders of, horrendous grand jury verdicts concerning, and ongoing protests on behalf of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, among many other black victims of state violence, provided me with more than enough to think about.

As part of the residency, I had to take two Ace Hotel photo booth strips (I haven't done this in years, and it was fun); make use of some of the materials the hotel provided (paper, pens, a drafting board, etc.); leave some materials I'd worked on; write a message in the residency guest book (mine was a Venn diagram that included a drawing focusing on hypergentrification and artmaking, and of course a thanks to the Ace and Word); and not trash the room or engage in destructive hijinks (no problem there). I also received two drink tickets to the hotel's downstairs bar, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room, which was packed when C and I arrived, and later, around 11, when I took a short break and had a beer, and a gift card to a nearby restaurant, which I didn't use.

C and others I know had been to the Ace for meals and events, but I had only passed the hotel in the past, so it was exciting to have a reason to spend some time there. The room options vary, from bunk beds to loft suites, and the affiliated stores and cafe are pretty high end, as most Manhattan businesses appear to be heading these days (is there anything left for middle class people?). My clean, comfortable (small? mid-sized?) room, which looked out on what I think was steadily gentrifying Broadway was outfitted in vibrant hipster fashion, with modern and retro furniture and artifacts in equal measure.

There was a turntable with a selection of LPs, an industrial looking radio, and a refrigerator that might either vintage or vintage-style, but amply stocked, with $11 water (and up!) and more. The bathroom was small but immaculate, and included a Kennedy half dollar-sized square of black soap, supposedly great for one's complexion, as well as anything else you might want and could have forgotten. (Unfortunately, neither in the bathroom or at the front desk, nor at any neighboring businesses could I find the exact USB scanner cable I'd left at home!) To top it off, the main internal wall was covered with New York Times foolscaps from the 1930s; mine featured a strangely high number of images of Adolf Hitler's and other top Nazis' faces! (Obviously newspapers from that era would be likely to feature this murderous gang, but, uh, to know they're looking at you while you're working and sleeping...hmm....)

That's you know who....

Y'knowwhatI'msaying...?

Nazi portraits, page-long accounts of the Great Depression, and reports of the death of the King of the Belgians (yes, he was staring from the wall too!) notwithstanding--which is to say, ironically enough--I had a wonderful, very productive time. Here is the Ace Hotel's Facebook page on my residency. I do hope to perform (or find someone to do so) some of these scores this upcoming summer or at some point in the future, and publicly share the Emotional Exercises cards sooner rather than later. Weather, health and time will determine when and where, I suppose, but in the interim, I can look at these dream maps, as they were, to get a sense of what might be possible.

This upcoming week's Artist in Residence is Deji Bryce Olukotun, the author of Nigerians in Space (Unnamed Press, 2014). Word to Ace and Word, and I'll looking out for what he comes up with.

Some of the score visualizations:

Some of the other drawings:

"I can't breathe" in New York City

Add caption

The desk when I'd begun
packing up