You are required to attend at least one of the following Meet the Artists events at Macaulay this semester. Find more details and RSVP at http://macaulay.cuny.edu/academics/seminar1/
September 30 The Langston Hughes Show with Dave M
This hour-long theater piece takes you on an odyssey spanning five decades of Hughes’s work, introducing the audience to Hughes’s notable Harlem characters, such as Madam Alberta K Johnson. Hughes’s urban surrealist collection Montage of A Dream Deferred is explored too. Hughes’s work lends itself so well to dramatic interpretation because he frequently wrote poems in character. The show explores Hughes’s penchant for using both humor and pathos, and his unending love for Harlem, with its foibles and fantasies, its beauty and brutality, is underscored throughout. Hughes’s classics such as I’ve Known Rivers, Mother to Son, Theme for English B and I, Too are rendered alongside lesser-known but equally powerful poems such as Merry Go Round, and Advice and the short-stories “Thank You Ma’am” and “There Ought to Be a Law.”
Dave M has worked professionally in the dramatic community for nearly two decades. Nearly a decade ago he was inspired to put together a one-person show of Hughes’s work, which he has performed in colleges such as SUNY Farmingdale, Marist, and William and Mary. Dave M has also played roles such as Othello, Petruchio, and Gabe in August Wilson’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play Home. He is the author of a recent book of poems called The Dream Detective.
October 6 David Ellis
David Ellis’ work interprets music and sound. His paintings are often recorded in a form of digital time-lapse animation. Ellis stages events when exhibiting his motion paintings, inviting musicians, performers, and sound artists to interpret the work live. He works directly on the walls of spaces that remain open to the public during installation and shares the making of the work with viewers. Ellis further explores sound with kinetic installations that produce analogue sequences in rhythm. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as at P.S. 1/MoMA, NY; ICA Philadelphia; The Mori Museum, Tokyo; Urbis Museum, Manchester England.
October 18 The Langston Hughes Show with Dave M
[see description above]
October 20 Michael Gutierrez
Miguel Gutierrez, a dance and music artist based in New York, has been called “one of our most provocative and necessary artistic voices” by Eva Yaa Asantewaa of Dance Magazine. He makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work, characterized by the immersive quality of the attentive state that it imposes on the audience, centers around enduring philosophical questions about desire, longing and the search for meaning.
His work includes: enter the seen (2002), I succumb (2003), dAMNATION rOAD (2004), Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies (2005), myendlesslove (2006), Everyone (2007), Nothing, No Thing (2008), Last Meadow (2009), HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE (2010), I SAY THE WORD, a collaboration with visual artist Jenny Holzer at ICA Boston (2010), and he instigated the performance/protest/meditation freedom of information (2001, 2008 & 2009).
His work has been presented at several festivals and venues nationally and internationally, most recently the American Realness Festival in NY, and the Festival D’Automne in Paris. Others include Antipodes Festival in Brest, France, TBA/PICA in Portland, Oregon, Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Austria.
He has received support from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller MAP Fund NYFA, NEA and NPN. In 2010 he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and United States Artists. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) awards. WHEN YOU RISE UP, a book of his performance texts, is available from 53rd State Press. He also invented DEEP AEROBICS, an absurdist workout for the radical in all of us. www.miguelgutierrez.org
November 11 Courting Risk: Blackout
At the intersection of poetry and performance art, “Courting Risk: Blackout” engages both the artists and the audience in the co-creation of writing, sound and visual art in a multimedia setting. Participants are asked to bring an open mind and wear comfortable clothing.
Natasha Marin is a poet and conceptual artist, whose recent work involves creating dynamic sites of genuine exchange and encounter. She trusts her intuition and desire to connect others, creating sacred moments with the assistance of strangers. And, she is a “tea person” the way some people describe themselves as “cat people” or “dog people.” Her written work has been published widely and translated into other languages and media including video, audio and site-specific installations. Find her latest project on the web at www.mikokuro.com.
Artist and writer Khadijah Queen is the author of two poetry collections: Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic Books 2008) and Black Peculiar, a genre-bending project which won the 2010 Noemi Press Book Award. Her poetry, three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appears or is forthcoming in jubilat, Eleven Eleven, Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton Mifflin 2010), and many other journals and anthologies. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, she has performed and exhibited nationally. http://khadijahqueen.com/home.html
November 4 Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). (Wikipedia) The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in New York. Please note, this event will be held at The City College of New York, Shepard Hall, Room SH 250 (Second floor)
