Social Saturday, August 5     

An Evening With ESTAR(SER)

Social Saturday with Petra Lange Berndt has been cancelled due to family illness.

The Arlington Heights Suite
(A staged reading)
 
Social Saturday, July 22, 2017

The Arlington Heights Suite is a series of collages started by artist Pablo Helguera in 2007, using found text and textbook images.  Now reaching more than a thousand works, this is one of his most extensive ongoing projects. “The Arlington Heights suite is like a very long lecture or dialogue”, Helguera writes, “similar to an inner monologue that one is having in a dream. Only recently l thought that a logical and eventual outcome of these series would be a play. These are the first steps toward piecing it together, with the hopes that this long configuration of images and words might yield new meanings.” Pablo Helguera will conduct a staged reading of “The Arlington Heights Suite” with performers Brian Linden and Candace Thompson, along with special guests from Mildred’s Lane. 

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living in New York. His work involves performance, drawing, installation, theater and other literary strategies. He is often considered a pioneering figure in the field of socially engaged art. His work has been featured at many international biennials including Manifesta, Havana and Liverpool Biennial, and Performa. He has received the Guggenheim and Creative Capital Fellowships as well as the first International Award of Participatory Art in Bologna, Italy. His current projects include a two-person exhibition with artist Suzanne Lacy at the UC Santa Barbara Museum and the 8th Floor in NYC and a mid-career survey of his work at the Jumex Museum in Mexico City. He is the author of many books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and The Parable Conference (2014).

Candace Thompson is a performer and interdisciplinary media maker fascinated with the feedback loops generated by place, culture, identity, climate, economics, and daily human interaction. She makes video, audio, web projects, and ritualistic installations– both IRL and online—that examine and challenge the truths we purportedly hold to be self-evident. Perhaps they aren’t so self-evident after all. She has performed in Pablo Helguera's The Juvenal Players, On the Future of Art, and The Parable Conference.

Brian Linden is happy to visit Mildred’s Lane and collaborate with Pablo and Candace again after their work together in The Parable Conference at BAM, The Juvenal Players at The Kitchen, On the Future of Art at the Guggenheim Museum, and The Arlington Heights Suite at the Hunter Easter Harlem Gallery. He is an actor based in New York City and has appeared onstage there and in San Francisco and London and at Shakespeare festivals in Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. He is a member of Burning Coal Theatre Company. He portrayed a fallen Trump Tower on Conan. He loves Victoria.

Digestion Choreography:
Rosemary Liss is a chef and artist from Baltimore, MD. She has a Bachelor's in Studio Art from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, but her work has grown increasingly comestible after two years working for a fermentation company and a summer interning at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen. Rosemary spent the spent the last year looking for grounding in other places: making sauerkraut in a container city, cooking soft dinners and catching wild Alaskan salmon. Her practice unfolds each day as she continues to reevaluate what it means to be in her body. Sometimes this recalibration takes the form of deep breathing, a tea infusion, a painting or a meal. No matter the physical manifestation, the resulting experience provides a feeling of autonomy and the hope that self-care really does ripple outwards to alleviate the constant flux between chaos and stagnation.

Limited seating
Request your invitation here

5:00 Tour(by reservation only)

6:00 Swarming around spirits

6:30 Presentations

7:30 Digestion Choreography: Rosemary Liss

Pablo Helguera Collage;
Oh if I could have a whole century

Transcendental History: 
Either Providence or Atoms!

“We review the past with the common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses,” Henry Thoreau wrote in 1851. The difference between knowledge gained by experience and knowledge gained by other means is at the heart of the transcendentalist worldview. This presentation of images and the spoken word is meant to function as a propadeutic, to bring the audience to a condition wherein a consideration of what a transcendental history might be can be attempted.

David Wood has been curator of the Concord Museum since 1985. He has curated some fifty exhibitions at the Concord Museum, including Early Spring, a collaboration with biologist Richard Primack on the subject of climate change. He is co-curator with Christine Nelson, Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, The Morgan Library & Museum, of the current exhibition This Ever New Self: Thoreau and his Journal.

David is the author of An Observant Eye; The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum, as well as numerous articles on the historic craft community of Concord, Massachusetts, including silversmith Samuel Bartlett (1752-1821) and cabinetmaker William Munroe (1778-1861).  

Current:

This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal

Museum exhibition presents Thoreau's journal as a monument to the examined life

Limited seating
Request your invitation here

5:00 Tour (by reservation only)
6:00 Swarming around spirits
6:30 Presentations
7:30 Digestion Choreography 

See the ongoing projects produced in MILDRED ARCHAEOLOGY II Session (June 26- July 16) wrapping up this week. This project is a collaboration in discovering the hidden histories of the site we call Mildred’s Lane; and, the historic farmhouse that we now title The Mildred’s Lane Transhistorical Society and Museum; a small, vernacular 1830-1840s homestead with a 1790s hearth in the ground room, a previous structure. 

During this session we uncovered histories connecting to the 1755 Connecticut Settlers; the Lillie family, amongst others, came to Cushetunk, on the Delaware River.  This first settlement was within the limits of the 18th-century Connecticut Charter, west of the province of New York; (Northhampton County, now divided, and known as Wayne County, Pennsylvania.)

In MILDRED ARCHAEOLOGY II, (ongoing since 1998,) we have made progress digging up the 20th-century dump behind the museum. The everyday jewels of our work will be installed and on show through September at The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space in Narrowsburg, NY. 

Please make a contribution to help protect and SAVE The Mildred House at;

THE MILDRED’S LANE TRANSHISTORICAL SOCIETY AND MUSEUM FUND 

Thank you to the people, institutions and their contributions to this unusual vernacular architecture project session at Mildred’s Lane: The Damascus Historical Society, The Wayne County Historical Society, University of Florida, Columbia University, School of Visual Arts New York City, University of Virginia McIntire Department of Art, Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett, Zoe Crossland, Tracy Molis, Coco Fusco, Aurelio Fusco, Cecilia and Tom Coacci, Andrea Lekberg, Cheryl Edwards, Caroline Woolard, Leigh Claire La Berge, Megan O'Connell, Leander Johnson, Lesley Herzberg, David Wood, Hope Ginsburg, Josh Quarles, Deborah Davidovits, Kevin Mahoney, Duy Hoàng, Amanda Wheat, Zoe Frederick, Michelle K. Rogers, Will Staub, and Sandy Williams and many others. 

Calendar
Upcoming Session: TAXIDERMY, July 16 - July 29
TOWN Friday, July 21, 6-8pm; Joanna Ebenstein and company
Social Saturday, July 22; Pablo Helguera and company
Town Friday, July 27, Robert Marbury

Caroline Woolard
Leigh Claire La Berge

Limited seating
Request an invitation here

Capitoline Wolves (2016-2018)

Imperial Forms and the Afterlife of Empire
Social Saturday, ­­July 8, 2017
 

Caroline Woolard is an artist and organizer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, and political economy. After co-founding and co-directing resource sharing networks OurGoods.organd TradeSchool.coop from 2008-2014, Woolard is now focused on her work with BFAMFAPhD.com to raise awareness about the impact of rent, debt, and precarity on culture and on the Study Center for Group Work for collaborative methods developed by artists. Recent group exhibitions include:Crossing Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Maker Biennial, The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and Artist as Social Agent, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Woolard’s work will be featured in Art21’s New York Close Up documentary series over the next three years.  
More info: http://carolinewoolard.com

Leigh Claire La Berge professes at the intersection of arts, literature, visual culture and political economy. She is currently Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at BMCC CUNY. Her book Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s was recently published by Oxford University Press. Read Michelle Chihara's wonderful essay "What We Talk About When We Talk About Finance" in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which not only reviews the book, but asks what the relationship between the humanities and finance should be. Her co-edited volume Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014) was released last year in the New American Canon series. In 2012, La Berge co-curated an exhibition on art and debt, "To Have and To Owe" with Laurel Ptak at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC. Her new book on labor and social practice art, Wages Against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification is under contract with Duke University Press.
More info: https://leighclaire-laberge.squarespace.com/

Revolution Declassified
Social Saturday, ­­June 24, 2017

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and the Andrew Banks Endowed Professor of Art at the University of Florida. She is a recipient of a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and The Liverpool Biennial. Her works have also been shown at the The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and KW Institute of Contemporary Art. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. 

Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995); The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Her latest book Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cubawas issued in English by Tate Publications in 2015 and in Spanish by Turner Libros. 

Limited seating
Request an invitation here

City is Nature /
wHY Grounds Recent Works.
 
Social Saturday, ­­June 24, 2017
 
Mark Thomann is the director of wHY grounds, an imaginative landscape and urban design studio that collaborates with architects, urban planners, and artists worldwide to cultivate and program future ecologies and open space.  The goal is to connect people and lifestyles to a vision of healthy and resilient cities and environments through the seamless integration of building, landscape and urban environments. The workshop enables art, function, nature and structure to beautifully coexist.   
 
5:00 Tour (by reservation only)
6:00 Cocktails
6:30 Lecture
7:30 Digestion Choreography
 
Also, see the NEW PROJECT at MILDRED’S LANE
 
SpringHouseIceHouse Session, June 12-25, is wrapping up this week of phase one; a collaboration to design-and-build a small, vernacular SpringHouseIceHouse featuring solar energy, a spring-fed well, and local and site-sourced building material. This project will harness the attributes of sun, water, and earth; intentionally connecting permaculture principles to a longstanding need for sustainable and efficient food storage. We have begun the foundations of this creative exercise in adaptive reuse that conflates the historical vernacular, off-the-shelf technologies and emergent, low-tech methodologies.
 
Please come meet the team and see the beginnings of this unusual vernacular architecture project at Mildred’s Lane.
 
Special thanks to Paul Bartow, Cameron Klavsen, Stan Pipkin, Alex Schecter, Gina Siepel, with fellows Elizabeth Pittard, Michelle Kelly Rogers, Shelley Spector, Will Staub, Jeff Tan, Sandy Williams, School of Visual Arts, New York City and University of Virginia McIntire Department of Art. 
 
Limited seating
Request an Invitation

Saturday, June 17

Elaine Giguere at the Narrowsburg Union

JAMES PROSEK
Names and Nature, Word and World

Limited seating

Read James Prosek’s article in the New York Times.

Social Saturday, June 10, 2017

James Prosek will talk about how he uses taxidermy in his art to engage ideas about hybridity, mythology and the general friction between the real and imagined. One of Prosek's research interests involves how and why we name and order nature; how we make sense of nature through language – what changes in the mind when we join words to the world. Collecting specimens, preserving them, (i.e. through killing an organism, preparing the tissue in alcohol and stuffing the skin with cotton, as in the case of birds,) is the first step in naming a creature. According to many codes of zoological nomenclature, you must still collect an individual for it to be named a new species.

5:00 Tour (by reservation only)
6:00 Cocktails by Laura Silverman
6:30 Lecture by James Prosek
7:30 Digestion Choreography with Athena Kokoronis
9:00 Fire Project #6 by Amy Yoes and Company

Music throughout the evening by Stovetop 
With Jason Merrill, Vibes, Nick Desouza, and Gabby Borges

Limited seating
Request your invitation here

James Prosek is showing his work at 
The Mildred Complex(ity) 
37b Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY,

May 27 through July 2, 2017
Summer Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 12:00 – 6:00

There will be a reception for the Artist, free and open to the public on
Friday, June 9th, 6:00-8:00

James Prosek is an artist, writer and naturalist who has exhibited his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art among others. He is the author of eleven books including Eels, which was a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice. Prosek has written for the New York Times and National Geographic among other publications and is a co-founder of the conservation group World Trout with Patagonia clothing company. His documentary on the 17th-century angler Izaak Walton won a Peabody Award. He is working on a book with Bloomsbury Publishers about how and why we name and order nature.

Contributing Creative Practitioner Bios

Athena Kokoronis, a long- time involvement at Mildred's Lane, is an artist who incorporates food, cloth, dance and fungi into her collaborative art practice. Her current work, Domestic Performance Agency takes the simultaneous form of an artist-run space, a persona, and an ongoing performance. The Domestic Performance Agency is a hub in Brooklyn; A home-economics hub that looks to motherhood and artisthood in pursuit to create economy based on domestic labor, love, desire, and performance. www.domesticperformanceagency.com

Laura Silverman is a writer, cook, naturalist, forager and wildcrafter who lives in Sullivan County, NY. She believes that fun with flora and fauna is transformative. On her blog, Glutton for Life, and as a contributor to Edible magazine, The River Reporter and WJFF Radio Catskill, she encourages people to experience the healing powers of nature by venturing into the wild and eating mindfully from farm, forest and field. 

Amy Yoes and Company: Fire Project #6
The Fire Projects are structures built in the landscape, architectural follies constructed out of scavenged materials. Amy Yoes choreographs their burning by calibrating the burn rates of the wood, cardboard, and paper. These are ephemeral pieces, with a very condensed lifespan; yet the cycle is carried forward, through the drawing charcoal collected from the smoldering ruins.
Amy Yoes was born in 1959 and grew up in Houston, Texas. She has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and, since 1998, in New York. She works in a multi-faceted way, alternately employing installation, photography, video, painting, and sculpture. An interest in decorative language and architectural space permeates all of her work. She responds to formal topologies of ornament and style that have reverberated through time, informing our mutually constructed visual and cultural memory.