Visiting the Watershed?

Water Shuttle tickets for Fri, Aug 30 – Sun, Sep 1 have SOLD OUT.
The Watershed is open from 11 AM – 5 PM through Mon, Sep 2 and is accessible via MBTA.
No ticket is required for entry to the Watershed!

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Advance tickets are now available for visits through September. Book now

Individual support accounts for more than 60% of the ICA’s annual operating budget. We couldn’t do what we do without your support.

The ICA strives to bring contemporary art and ideas to audiences of all ages in Boston—and we couldn’t do it without support from donors, support that accounts for more than 60% of the annual operating budget.

It is thanks to our contributors that the ICA is able to serve as a platform for thought-provoking conversations and ground-breaking exhibitions, such as this fall’s highly acclaimed Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957.

Black Mountain College, a small liberal school founded in 1933 outside Asheville, North Carolina, has had enormous influence on the post-war culture of the United States—and shares certain similarities to the ICA. Like the progressive college, the ICA has been resolute in its embrace of the art of its time, confident in the belief that a progressive plurality of the arts is essential to a thriving cultural and civic life. The ICA—like Black Mountain College—insists on the centrality of artistic experience in preparing students and audiences of all ages for full participation in our democratic society. Now, nearly a century after the founding of the college and of the ICA, experimentation, collaboration, risk, failure, and experiential learning—key tenets of both institutions—are central to conversations in education reform, workforce development, creative economies, and innovation.

Please consider a 100% tax-deductible donation to ensure that undertakings like Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957—as well as free programming such as talks and tours, Play Dates, and digital media courses for teens—are realized. 

Can’t get enough BMC? There’s more to explore – right here in New England!

The Gropius House

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius originally designed the Gropius House, a historic New England landmark, as his family home when he moved to Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gropius was a former collegue of Black Mountain College educator Josef Albers and they had a close connection. Gropius’s daughter Ati attended Black Mountain College; two of her artworks are included in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957.

The Gropius House was designed along Bauhaus principles, with an emphasis on efficiency and simplicity of design. Located at 68 Baker Bridge Road, Lincoln, MA, 01773.

The Josef Albers Fireplace at Harvard Law

The Harkness Graduate Center at Harvard Law was designed by the Architects Collaborative (TAC), a group headed by Walter Gropius. Using $40,000 received from an anonymous donor, Gropius brought several of his former Bauhaus colleagues on as collaborators in the project, including Josef Albers. The influential Black Mountain College teacher, who was strongly influenced by patterns and imagery he saw on trips to Mexico with his wife, Anni, as well as by her work in weaving, designed an abstract pattern for the brick module at the back of the Harkness Center’s commons fireplace. While at Harvard you can also see prints, weavings, and design objects by Josef and Anni Albers at the Harvard Art Museums.

Harkness Graduate Center was completed in 1950 and was first modern building on the campus. The main Harvard Law School campus consists of 19 buildings and is located at 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, on the northwest corner of Harvard Yard, bordered by Massachusetts Avenue and Everett Street. The Harvard Art Museums are a short walk away at 32 Quincy Street. 

Buckminster Fuller’s Grave

Located within beautiful Mount Auburn Cemetery lies the grave of Buckminster Fuller—architect, inventor, developer of geodesic domes, and Black Mountain College teacher. You can find it on Bellwort Path, a walking path on a hill between Spruce Street and Walnut Avenue. Fuller’s grave is marked with his name, engravings of a rose and a spherical object, and the phrase “Call me trimtab.” A trimtab is a miniature rudder attached to a boat’s primary rudder: it can be used to stablize a ship—or change it’s course. Fuller took this as a metaphor for the possibilities of influence of the “little individual.”

Robert Creeley’s Grave

Pay pilgrimage to another Black Mountain College virtuoso at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Poet, author, and Massachusetts native Robert Creeley was also laid to rest in this graceful cemetery. While at the college, Creeley wrote numerous important poems that illustrate his investments in syntax and in the events of everyday life as a source for poetry.

Mount Auburn Cemetery, an active cultural site and tourist attaction, was designed as the first rural cemetery in the United States and an experimental garden. Located at the Watertown-Cambridge line at 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

 

 

The progressive liberal arts college was a utopian experiment: interdisciplinary, communal, non-hierarchical, and unlike anything else in the United States.

The teachers and students at Black Mountain College came to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains from around the United States and the world. Some stayed for years, others mere weeks. Their education was unlike anything else in the United States. They experimented with new ways of teaching and learning; they encouraged discussion and free inquiry; they felt that form in art had meaning; they were committed to the rigor of the studio and the laboratory; they practiced living and working together as a community; they shared the ideas and values of different cultures; they had faith in learning through experience and doing; they trusted in the new while remaining committed to ideas from the past; and they valued the idiosyncratic nature of the individual. But most of all, they believed in art, in its ability to expand one’s internal horizons, and in art as a way of living and being in the world. This utopian experiment came to an end in 1957, but not before it created the conditions for some of the 20th century’s most fertile ideas and most influential individual artists to emerge.

Try your hand at colorful code-making as students at Black Mountain College did.

Appropriate for: Creative minds age 6 + up

A rebus is a word puzzle. Pictures of things that sound the same as syllables or letters in the words are combined with words to create one-of-a-kind messages or stories. For example: Re +  bus.png.

The rebus message project is inspired by Lorna Blaine Halper’s letter to her parents from the ICA exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. In her letter, Halper uses familiar symbols and pictures she has drawn to keep in touch with her family. Deciphering Halper’s letter is not so easy! For more inspiration, take a peek at the rebus letter examples below created by artists visiting the ICA then create your own rebus messages. Or create rebus stories and poems!

Materials Needed

(Use what you have on hand already.)

  • Paper (unlined or lined papers of all kinds are fine!) including practice paper
  • Pencils and erasers
  • Drawing tools and coloring materials (crayons, color pencils, markers, pens, gel pens, etc.)
  • Envelopes and stamps (to mail your rebus message!)

Directions

  1. Using practice paper and a pencil, write out in words what you want your message to say.
  2. Then brainstorm the ways you can change some of the words in your message using symbols and pictures. (Hint: Words like “and” already have a symbol to represent them:  “&.”  Words like “the” or “at” can be written out in letters. There’s no “wrong” way to create a rebus message, you can decide!)
  3. Once your first copy is complete, work using another piece of paper to turn your message into a rebus! (You may also choose to write a letter, story, poem, or sign using the rebus style.)  For example, your parent might create this sign:

    bee.png  + brave and bee.png  + have!
     

  4. OPTIONAL: Use an envelope and a stamp to mail your letter if you choose. Invite the person to whom you send your rebus message to create a rebus response message and mail it to you.

Come and see the artworks that inspired the rebus letter project in the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, on view at the ICA through January 24, 2016.

Join us the last Saturday of every month (except December) for Play Dates, when kids activities from art-making to film screenings to dance demos fill the ICA. Admission is FREE for up to 2 adults per family when accompanied by children ages 12 and under. Youth 17 and under are always admitted free to the ICA. 

This project was created by ICA Family Programs Coordinator Kathleen Lomatoski, with support from Julia Cseko, Bianca Marrinucci, and Cathy McLaurin.

© 2015 Department of Education, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

 

With humor, charisma, devotion, and a keen sense of formal complexity and information design, Paul Laffoley’s work ran through all manner of theories of everything.

The great Boston artist Paul Laffoley died on on Monday, November 16. I’d seen his work over the years, and had always been an admirer. He loved some of the same 20th-century utopian, cross-discliplinary thinkers I do, and he made beautiful, strange, and complex works in response to their ideas. His mandala-like paintings, architectural models and plans, and assemblage-like sculptures are a welcome, deeply informed response to an increasingly formulaic approach to integrating theories and their authors into artworks. Poised between manifesto, illustration, architectural plan, devotional painting, cosmic model, and expressive tool, Laffoley’s works were part of a larger system of thought that drew from mathematics along with some of the most progressive ideas about being in the world. Though he had major retrospectives recently, and early encounters with some of the late 20th century’s most important thinkers (Frederick Kiesler, Andy Warhol, for instance), he produced his work both outside art centers, and outside of their strictures and camps. 

Upon my recent return to Boston, his work was on my mind. Former ICA Mannion Family Senior Curator Jenelle Porter left a Laffoley catalog (produced by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, organized by Luis Croquer) in the office I now occupy. She made sure I saw it, and we talked about our mutual interest in his visionary work. And my good friend and colleague Tina Kukielski had recently made Laffoley a central part of an exhibition she organized at James Cohan Gallery in New York.

On a very rainy, dark Saturday afternoon this fall I walked by Kent Fine Art on 11th Avenue in Chelsea, and remembered they were showing Laffoley. The bright, beautiful exhibition brought together work from the 1960s to the present, and included a range of painting and sculpture. With humor, charisma, devotion, and a keen sense of formal complexity and information design, the works ran through all manner of theories of everything. The show was overwhelming and calming by equal measure. I’m so happy I saw it. 

Here is an obituary, followed by his full biography, from Kent Fine Art. RIP one of Boston’s finest. 

The influential photographer on sex, love, loss, inspiration, and why she relies so heavily on the “family” she’s created.

“I’m not modest about it. I think in the 80s I created a sea change in photography. I gave people permission to show their own lives as valuable and as valid as all the other documentary of people they didn’t know. And I think I opened a door.”

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face, a 2013 documentary directed by Sabine Lidl, turns the camera on one of the most influential photographers of her generation, known for intimate, unflinching portraits and documentation of her friends that brought counterculture to life.

Following Goldin around Europe as she prepares work and meets with some of the friends she’s immortalized in bathtubs and squats, the film provides a window into Goldin’s sometimes chaotic life, her thoughts about her parents, love, sex, loss, inspiration, and why she relies so heavily on the “family”—artists, lovers, gay men—she’s built across continents and decades.

“It was never about marginalization,” she says. “We were the world.”

Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, featured in the film, was shown at the ICA in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s in 2012. The permanent collection includes ten of her photographs.

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face screens at the ICA Saturday, November 14 at 6:30 PM as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival. 

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John Cage and Pierre Boulez weren’t as different as some might think.

I will never forget the typically grey evening when, as a wide-eyed freshman composition student at the Cleveland Institute of Music, I walked into Harkness Chapel on the adjacent campus of Case Western Reserve University to hear a live interview with the reigning king of contemporary music, Pierre Boulez. I remember the raspy, soft tone of his voice and how we paid rapt attention, aware of both his connection back to the old world of the late 19th century and everything he had done to bring music to where it is today. Afterward, however, my classmates and I were disappointed with the master’s half-hearted response to a question on the state of American music. He mentioned a few things about Elliott Carter, then briefly touched on the experiments of John Cage, implying that they were eventually fruitless. A few years later, during the centennial celebrations of John Cage, I began to read the correspondence between Cage and Boulez, and understand the complexity behind Boulez’s comment. This concert, presented by the ICA in collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and exploring music written by each of these composers during their extensive correspondence, brings that period to life.

To many of us entranced in contemporary and 20th-century music, the fact that John Cage and Pierre Boulez extensively corresponded tends to come as a shock. In the second half of the 20th century, when my teachers were in school, Boulez was the dominant voice in contemporary music, leader of the camp of composers who stood for a nearly mathematical approach to the control of composition that stemmed from the 12-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg. Boulez founded IRCAM in Paris, the largest center for the study of electro-acoustic music in the world, as well as the premiere contemporary music ensemble, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In most American academic institutions, if a young composer was not writing in the highly structured, complex method of serialism spearheaded by Boulez, they would generally have little luck earning an academic job or finding performances among an inner circle controlled by these polemicists. To other composers of that generation who wished to pursue fresh directions, the voice of John Cage was liberating. His use of chance and indeterminacy removed the ego from music that had caused these issues in the mainstream camp. Cage’s experimentation with other art forms, along with his desire to push what was possible in art and music, allowed a younger generation to feel free to write whatever they desired. Eventually, composers associated with Cage, such as Terry Riley, would begin to experiment in another direction, and Minimalist music would emerge, “saving” the discordant music of much of the 20th century.       

At least that is what many people of that generation would have you believe. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of freedom in the heavily controlled music of Boulez, and a relentless amount of control in the chance and indeterminate compositions of John Cage. Realizing this, their fruitful relationship begins to make more sense. Between 1949 and 1954 the composers were in extensive contact and were excited about each other’s new ideas. Both had been incorporating ways of confining music to strict hierarchies, and in addition to their own work, much of their correspondence dealt with informing each other of the experiments in the musical avant-garde in their respective countries.

Boulez was a proponent of total serial composition, a method of composition by which every perimeter of sound production (pitch, rhythm, articulation etc.) is set into a predetermined series that dictates which events must come before others. A simple example would be if a six-pitch series were A, D, C, B, E, G; one would have to employ each of these pitches in order, either as a melodic linear material, or as a harmony, before repeating the series. The process becomes much more complex when you apply modifying operations to the series, or use series of different lengths to control rhythm vs. pitch, etc.  

As Cage began to study Zen Buddhism, it led to experiments in indeterminacy and chance. In writing Music of Changes, Cage reached musical decisions by consulting the I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” an ancient Chinese divination text, and applying these results to charts of sounds, durations, tempi, densities, and dynamics. The music is freely written, without any metric system to divide the music into separate numbers of measures. It was at this point that the two composers reached unprecedented disagreements. Boulez agreed that an element of freedom needed to be introduced into strict systems of composition, and he countered Cage’s interest in chance and indeterminacy with what he called “aleatoric music.” In this type of composition a particular element is left to the performers’ control, for example in the aleatoric piece Jeux Venetiens by Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, the conductor chooses, in an improvisatory manner, which groups of predetermined, fully notated music are played, often producing a dense sound mass. In contrast, much of Cage’s later chance music requires the composer to plot out the work in the same way that he himself wrote Music of Changes. Thus, a performer will receive a type of chart, and will be required to roll dice and conduct other chance operations in order to produce a personal score used to realize the work. Essentially, it seems that Boulez found this total lack of control disagreeable and the friendship between the two cooled. However, the discordance between them, just as their musical differences, has been overdramatized by history.

As such, this concert at the ICA is a representation of the de-polarization of the contemporary music community, as a program like this would have seemed impossible in previous generations.

—Jesse Limbacher is a composer, performer, and presenter based in Boston. He is currently interning at the ICA.

 

Help recreate a run-down church in Braddock, Pennsylvania, as a “work of art, a center for creativity, and a place for new beginnings.” 

Since 2007, our friend Swoon, the artist and activist who last showed at the ICA in 2012, has been working to reinvent a rundown church in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, as a “work of art, a center for creativity, and a place for new beginnings.” 

Swoon, whose work often dovetails with social and humanitarian projects, fell in love with the church, slated for demolition that year, while working on an art installation in the former steel town (also poignantly depicted in the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier).

Working with the local community, the artist collective Transformazium, and more than 70 artists, Swoon founded the Braddock Tiles print project, which plans to provide the church with a much-needed new roof by creating 20,000 ceramic tiles—by hand. To do so, they’ll build a working ceramics studio in the church and hire and train local young people to create the tiles. Ultimately the church will open as a community center and Braddock Tiles will will function as a local business making and selling interior and decorative tiles and partnering with artists to release signature editions. 

One of the foremost street and activist artists working today, Swoon is deeply engaged with social, humanitarian, and community-building efforts in both art and life. Past projects include sailing SWOON boats created from reclaimed materials with groups of artists and friends during the 2009 Venice Biennale and collaborating on sustainable building in Haiti in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Support the Braddock Tiles Kickstarter—ending Nov. 12—and get a Braddock tile, a limited-edition artwork, or a tour of Swoon’s studio, or provide one of the kilns that will make the business possible.

 

 

“Upon arrival in a city, one should proceed directly to the national art museum.”

In September I had the opportunity to travel to Switzerland as the courier accompanying Marlene Dumas’s German Witch, 2000, back to Boston after its six-month jaunt in Europe. I would be in Basel for a couple of days to pack and crate the work, but I decided to use the occasion to spend some time in Zürich, as well as to travel to the 56th Venice Biennale.

Zürich

I have always advocated that upon arrival in a city, one should proceed directly to the national art museum. As someone who spends much of my time in museums, I feel these spaces represent an environment both national and extranational; behavioral codes are universal, the vocabulary is set and independent of language. No matter the country, for me, museums are a safe space where history and the present reveal themselves, speaking eloquently and plainly. Needless to say, after my redeye flight into Zürich, the Kunsthaus was my first stop.

The museum’s collection—surprising, impeccably displayed, thorough, and brought to vivid life through wonderfully inventive didactics—was beyond reproach, but the architecture and décor were, without a doubt, the takeaways for me. Carpets laden with gridded patterns, inlaid wood accents of many variations, textured balustrades, marble colonnades, and plush velvet armchairs on which to sit all provided pleasing accompaniments to the stunning collection of masterworks on display.

In sharp contrast to the regal and decidedly old-world aesthetics of the museum, a small exhibition of works by queer icon John Waters in the basement of the museum was a pleasant surprise. To come across such an inherently American and ironic body of work put in dialogue with, and immediately adjacent to, a gallery of elegant and iconic walking Giacomettis, brought a wry smile to my face.

Arsenale and Giardini

Many others have penned excellent and accurate reviews of the 2015 Biennale (see Benjamin Buchloh, Jessica Morgan, and Claire Bishop’s takes on the exhibition in this month’s Artforum, for example), and I wholeheartedly echo the general consensus. Challenging, terse at times, unforgiving, and unrelenting in message, while simultaneously prescient, unexpected, and aesthetically agnostic, Okwui Enwezor’s presentations at the Arsenale and Giardini make an unequivocal statement that put the complex network of labor, capitol, translation (both of the visual and language-based varieties), marginalization, and immigration into sharp focus. A few standouts for me at the Arsenale included Eduardo Basualdo’s poetic manipulations of modest objects; Thea Djordjadze’s arrangement of sculptural and furniture-based elements, which briefly gave me a glimpse of what it would be like to live inside a Braun calculator; and Ayoung Kim’s strange didactic theatre relaying a fictive history of the 1970s oil crisis and its legacy. Perhaps the work which most eloquently captured the narrative arc of Enwezor’s Biennale was Meriç Algün Ringborg’s installation Souvenirs for the Landlocked, 2015. Within an ostensibly domestic environment, the artist arranged a series of kitschy tourist souvenirs that, in their representation of the landscapes or objects which typify a certain location, belie the actual origins of their manufacturing.

At Enwezor’s exhibit within the Giardini, which was perhaps more aesthetically considered, if not any less politically pressing, Elena Damiani’s copper and granite sculptures were a fitting contrast to a large-scale Robert Smithson sculpture in the following room. A trio of works seemed to capture the conceptual framework which undergirded the structure of the entire installation: a reinstallation of Marcel Broodthaers’s The Winter Garden II, 1974 provided the most rewarding and wittily ironic commentary on the imperfect and problematic nature of the museum exhibition; Glenn Ligon’s room-size polyptych Come Out, 2014, was striking, succinct, and ominous, poetically capturing the prevailing mood, and finally, a installation of Hans Haacke’s seminal works distilled the Biennale down to its essence, serving as a lodestar to the aspirational power that museums, and in fact art at large, hope to exert within democratic societies.

The National Pavilions

At the national pavilions the work was pleasantly varied and expectedly uneven. Much has been said of Hito Steyerl’s work Factory of the Sun, 2015 at the German pavilion, and the installation is truly deserving of praise—it brings together wit, politics, and poetry while nipping at the heels of what appears as a yet-to-be-crystallized aesthetic of the 21st century. Pepo Salazar’s multi-room installation at the Spanish pavilion captured the tragedy of fame, notably personified by the downward trajectory of “Cheeto-queen“ Britney Spears. Sarah Lucas’s unapologetically yellow and comical presentation of sculptures both turgid and flaccid at the British pavilion was a welcome departure from the all-too-serious tone of much of the Biennale (the accompanying pamphlet containing Lucas’s incredibly funny and witty statements is not to be missed).

Punta della Dogana

In addition to the Arsenale and Giardini, the only other exhibition that I would recommend visiting was Danh Vō’s arrangement of works at the Pinault Collection, housed at Punta della Dogana. An exhibition clearly aimed at art-world insiders and fellow artists, Slip of the Tongue convened a cadre of notable artists whose work, when presented in the context of Tadao Ando’s renovated Venetian warehouse and in dialogue with one another, truly showcased the possibilities for artist-curated exhibitions. The accompanying booklet, with its mix of both historical and personal information, provided thoughtful (and necessary!) interpretation for Vō’s inspiring presentation.

Basel

Back in Basel, the Kunsthaus was closed for renovations. However, at the Kunsthalle Basel, Maryam Jafri’s video detailing the nebulous trajectory of fetish wear and Andra Ursuta’s poignant room of perverse and morbid miniature Washington Monuments were excellent presentations—politically biting, aesthetically provocative exhibitions that proved that the Swiss have a healthy appetite for American satire.

Museum fur Gegenwartskunst

At the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, an installation of a monitor showcasing Andrea Fraser’s A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, 2005, reminded me that windows are not only to be looked through; perhaps something akin to this would suit the ICA’s Founders Gallery?

Fondation Beyeler

With my duties at the Fondation Beyeler complete I was able to spend some time admiring their impressive collection. A room of Ellsworth Kelleys, basking in natural light from the floor-to-ceiling windows opposite them were a delight, as were Philippe Parreno’s vibrating Water Lilies, 2012.

Schaulager

The last stop on my tour of museums was the Schaulager, housed in a building designed by hometown favorites Herzog and de Meuron. Although photography is verboten, I was able to capture a few surreptitious shots of a remarkable installation by Robert Gober. Other impressive yet sadly unphotographable installations (come on museums/collectors, it’s 2015!) included a full run of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle series, Katharina Fritsch’s monumental, jet-black Rat King, 1993, and the stellar “view-in-the-dark” installation Mother and Son. My Mother’s Album, 1993, by Ilya Kabakov.

With our German Witch safe and secured in her pink travel outfit, we were back on the plane to Boston!

Thoughts on Faye Driscoll’s aesthetically promiscuous, collaborative, radical, uncategorizable work.

Wow Mom Wow (2007) spotlighted talking butts and lovers wrestling, while I sat wide-eyed in the audience on a date. In 837 Venice Boulevard (2008), we all sat on an imagined beach with Faye, perverted preteen dreaming, in a world created through the gestures of a threesome. There Is So Much Mad in Me (2010) left me feeling hurt and wounded, on the receiving end of the vibrancy of anger’s movement. You’re Me (2012) was exhausting, playful, and frantic. Watching Faye and Jesse Zaritt perform this physically demanding duet—feathers and baby powder flying—made me feel as though I could watch Faye’s choreographed faces for hours. Her expressions moved down her body, a gorgeous, evil, and maniacal worm face that melted in every inch of flesh and fabric.

Faye Driscoll’s work has been at the forefront of a shift in the genres we use to describe live or time-based arts in particular. Or rather, Faye’s work comes out of an intermedia history that never wanted neat disciplinary boundaries to begin with. While her training is in dance, she also choreographs plays, directs theatrical events, and stages sensations between word, sound, and language. Having collaborated with Young Jean Lee, Taylor Mac, and Cynthia Hopkins, among others, Faye is familiar with the bleeding out of form. Pushing on postmodern dance’s clean affective palate, she paints a tightly choreographed explosion, with herself, a gentler Lars Von Trier, in the director’s chair.

We might call Faye’s performances time-based work, body art, sculpture, contra dance, and emotional labor. Her work is contemporary performance with a linguistic foothold in dance. Faye admits others have called Thank You for Coming: Attendance “a play,” a word that rings differently than “theater.” Her practice is both collaborative and “toppy,” with dancers confidently moving one another’s bodies, like structures and building blocks, like erector sets or Legos, or something far softer. They assemble a human beanbag mountain where one body, arm, or earlobe gets stacked upon another. Holding its shape, the tower is piled to the ceiling, a pillar made only of lipstick, tinsel, and the silver blanket capes that marathon runners wear.

During a talk Faye gave in 2014 at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, I wrote out a list of thoughts in response to her work in my notebook: “dishes in my sink,” “broken down buildings,” “it’s funny how you sneak virtuosity in there.” Another list might be:  Jennifer Monson, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Yvonne Rainer, Karen Finley, Reza Abdoh, Vito Acconci, Marlon Riggs, Vaginal Davis, Beverly Hills 90210, Tevas. Sculpting with the audience’s bodies, she manifests props that explode in a tightly woven hot mess. Faye’s work is aesthetically promiscuous; she pulls from a variety of media and influences, creating television on the dance floor. The audience is not incidental in her work, but neither are they called out. There is something implicit and subtle in the way her performances make you feel a mix of radical emotions.

Entering Thank You for Coming: Attendance, I take my shoes off and adorn my body with the accessories handed to me. My chest rings with the dancers’ feet pounding out a rhythm on the platform floor. My body has become a percussive site, and all my tears and belly laughs rise to the surface. Faye’s pieces form an accumulation of aesthetic prompts, and I find myself responding over time, like the stacking of muscles on a dancer’s body.

It is 2004 when I first meet Faye in San Francisco’s Delores Park, sitting in the sun. We are in our early twenties. In the winter of 2006, she stages a short film with Hedia Maron called Lez Side Story where she plays a gym teacher with neatly combed and greased hair parted in the middle. Instead of the Sharks and the Jets, the Fruits battle the Lezzies. Later on, perhaps in 2007, Faye installs a video in the bathroom of New York’s PS122 and whispers to you on the toilet: come closer. Something is made between spectator and artist, even while it is Faye’s voice that comes through again and again. So, to borrow her words, “what we build together is this kind of canopy,” a canopy under which we gather to look at the stars together, before we rage and break apart.

 

Katherine Brewer Ball is Visiting Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department at Wesleyan University, where she previously held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. Brewer Ball earned her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her interests include performance, visual culture, black and brown aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Brewer Ball is currently working on a book project, The Only Way Out is In: The Queer & Minoritarian Performance of Escape, and conducting research for a new project on GLBT archives, performance, rage, and refusal. In addition to teaching, Brewer Ball works as a writer and curator.