Readings
August 30, 2017, 7pm
This concluding program in a series of readings organized by Artists Space as part of the eclectic multi-venue exhibition Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno features poetry and performance by Anne Waldman (accompanied by Devin Brahja Waldman), Miguel Gutierrez, Kevin Killian, and Angel Nafis, alongside the screening of a video work by Joan Jonas.
Co-hosted by 80WSE Gallery, the readings will be presented on a roof terrace of NYU's Kimmel Center for University Life, which floats, evocatively, in the breeze and treetops of Washington Square Park.
Adjacent to the readings, roller skaters will be handing out poems to passers-by in Washington Square Park from 4 p.m., in a restaging of John Giorno's Street Works performance from 1969.
For more information visit ilovejohngiorno.nyc
Miguel Gutierrez lives in Brooklyn and makes performances, music and poetry. He is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist. His most recent work, a queer trilogy called Age & Beauty, was presented whole or in part at Centre National de Danse and Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Philly Live Arts, New York Live Arts, Live Arts Bard, AMERICAN REALNESS and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2010 United States Artist Award, a 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Art Award, a Lambent Fellowship from the Tides Foundation, and two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts.
Joan Jonas (born 1936 in New York, NY) is a pioneer of video and performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas’ work invests texts from the past with the politics of the present. Among her many honors are awards from Anonymous Was A Woman (1998); the Rockefeller Foundation (1990); American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for Video (1989); Guggenheim Foundation (1976); and the National Endowment for the Arts (1974).
Kevin Killian has written three novels, a book of memoirs, three books of stories, and four books of poetry. For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written 45 plays, and the anthology he compiled with David Brazil— The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985 (Kenning Editions, 2010)—is the standard book on the subject. Recent projects include Tagged (Gravity and Trajectory, 2012), Killian’s nude photographs of poets, artists, and writers, and Writers Who Love too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017), co-edited with Dodie Bellamy.
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/New School Poetics, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, MUZZLE Magazine, The Rumpus, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman, and with poet Morgan Parker she runs the Black Feminist poetry duo The Other Black Girl Collective. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, literary arts curator, and cultural activist. She is associated with the experimental trajectories of the New American Poetry and was a co-founder of The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in-the Bowery. Her recent and forthcoming poetry collections include Trickster Feminism (Penguin, 2018), Extinction Aria (Pied Oxen, 2017), Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press 2016), and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House 2014), an anthology of lectures from The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, the poetics program she founded with Allen Ginsberg in 1974.
Devin Brahja Waldman is a New York saxophonist, drummer, synthesizer player, improviser and composer. He has performed with Patti Smith, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, Daniel Carter and Sam Shalabi. He has accompanied his aunt, the poet Anne Waldman, since the age of ten. He plays in Heroes Are Gang Leaders (founded by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis) and leads a NYC/Montreal-based band known as Brahja Waldman. With Anne Waldman and his cousin Ambrose Bye, Waldman co-directs the music and poetry label Fast Speaking Music.
