Phrogz is an artist musical collective started by husband and wife collaborative team Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey.
Denise Markonish has spent the last twelve years working on large-scale projects and group shows at MASS MoCA.
ora Lawrence is Senior Curator at Storm King Art Center, where she founded a yearly exhibition program devoted to emerging and mid-career artists (Outlooks), and created a partnership between Storm King and The Shandaken Project that established Storm King’s first-ever artist residency.
Town Friday - David Wood of The Concord Museum!
Colombo/Yoes Barn at 108 Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
Free and open to the public
Town Friday / August 10, 2018
6pm: reception at The Mildred Complex(ity) on Main Street, Narrowsburg
6:30pm: talk at Krauss Recital Hall, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance on Main Street
Free and open to the public
During the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century, the female bodies of hysterics and mediums were understood as being untethered from the laws of physiology, capable of extraordinary physical and mental feats. Author Asti Hustvedt, an independent scholar who has written extensively on hysteria and literature, discusses some of the ways in which male scientists attempted to investigate these bewildering female bodies. /// For more information, click here.
Town Friday / August 3, 2018 / 6pm
The Mildred Complex(ity), Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
Free and open to the public
Award-winning journalist and author Nina Burleigh, the National Politics Correspondent at Newsweek Magazine, will read an excerpt from a current project on Trump and women. Money and Fear. NDAs. Tapes. Blackmail. Photos. Lawsuits. Lies. This is how power works on weak individuals who get close to power and see too much. (No recording, no photographs and no social media please. Visit also www.ninaburleigh.com.)
Town Friday / July 27, 2018 / 7pm
The Mildred Complex(ity), Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
Free and open to the public. (The talk will take place at the Department of Interstitchiaries, 25 Bridge Street, 2nd Floor Rear, Narrowsburg, NY.)
Barbara de Vries ( www.barbaradevries.net), the design director behind Calvin Klein's CK brand in the early nineties, will talk about the arc of her design career in parallel with the life and recent death of fashion. A first-hand witness to what she describes as the change "from the creative freedom of the seventies and eighties to the commercial nineties, to the birth of uber brands, the obsession with luxury, overconsumption and the mass nausea that followed in the face of the celebrity culture, pollution, carbon foot prints, abusive labor practices and other impacts on developing countries," she asks: how do we Un-Fashion?
No Social Saturday event this week.
Amy Yoes & Jorge Colombo: Established 1989
Town Friday / July 13, 2018 / 6pm
The Mildred Complex(ity), Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
Free and open to the public
Longtime friends of Mildred's Lane, multi-disciplinary artist Amy Yoes and illustrator/photographer Jorge Colombo, currently relocating themselves to the grey barn a few doors away from the Complex(ity), will talk about how their practices and interests intersect. (Picture above; visit also www.amyyoes.com / www.thejorgecolombo.com)
Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity)
TOWN Friday, July 6, 2018
Free and open to the public!
6:00 pm gathering at The Mildred Complex(ity)
6:30 pm at The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Krauss Recital Hall!
Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett
Mildred's Lane: Past, Present, and Future
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. For over two decades Dion has worked in the public realm in a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Some of his most recent large-scale public project include "The Amateur Ornithologist Clubhouse" a Captain Nemo-like interior constructed in a vast gas tank in Essen, Germany, and "Den" a large scale folly in Norway's mountainous landscape which feature a massive sculpture of a sleeping bear in a cave, resting on a hill of material culture from the Neolithic to the present. Dion has also produced large-scale permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the Montevideo Biannale in Uruguay, The Rose Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University and the Port of Los Angeles.
Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Dion initially studied in 1981-2 at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, which awarded him a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate in 2002. From 1983 to 1984 he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program (1984-1985). He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University in the UK (2014) and has an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Ph.D.) from The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015). Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001) The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award (2008). He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum, Miami (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); Tate Gallery, London (1999), and the British Museum of Natural History, London (2007). “Neukom Vivarium” (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion produced a major permanent commission, ‘OCEANOMANIA: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas’ for the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. In 2016 Dion and his curatorial collaborator Sarina Basta produced the large-scale exhibition, ExtraNaturel: Voyage initiatique dans la collection des Beaux-Arts de Paris, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
J. Morgan Puett is a trans-disciplinary, creative producer innovative in the realm of social engagement. Her projects continue to forge new ground, citing that being is profoundly a social and political practice. Puett's accomplishments are in areas of installation art, clothing and furniture design, architecture, film, writing and more – rearranging these intersections – applying conceptual tools of contemporary theory, research and practice. Her interests and projects range in history, biology, new economies, design, craft, and most importantly – collaboration. Morgan’s early work forged new territory by intervening into the fashion system with a series of storefront installations and clothing/dwelling projects in Manhattan in the eighties and nineties; then produced a long series of research installations in museums around the world about the histories of needle trade systems.
J. Morgan Puett was born in Hahira, Georgia in 1957. She received her BFA in painting and sculpture (1981), and MFA in sculpture and experimental filmmaking in (1984); both from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Puett has received the PEW Charitable Trust in Philadelphia (2005), the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2005), the Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship (2009), the United States Artists Simon Fellow Award (2011), The John and Marva Warnock Award (2014). Most recently, Puett has received honors including The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award and The Pollock- Krasner Foundation Award, both in (2016). Puett has created major exhibitions worldwide; at the Serpentine Gallery/Victoria and Albert Museum (2001), Spoleto USA Charleston (2002), Bronx's Wave Hill NYC (2002), Mass MoCA (2004), Sullivan Galleries in Chicago (2008 & 2014), The Queens Museum NYC (2010), Museum of Modern Art NYC (MoMA 2012), 1st Tbilisi Triennial Contemporary Art Center of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia (2012), DOX Prague (2013), and has been curating collaborative projects at Mildred's Lane for the past decade.
Puett's Storefront practices include public spaces of Mildred's Lane; The Mildred Complex(ity) in nearby Narrowsburg, and a Guide to the Field opening in Mountaindale, NY this coming autumn 2018. Puett currently is living, working, learning and teaching in Pennsylvania at Mildred’s Lane which she co-directs with Mark Dion.
We would like to thank The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance for partnering with us in TOWN Fridays by sharing the Krauss Recital Hall upstairs!
Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity)
TOWN Friday
6:00 pm gathering at The Mildred Complex(ity)
6:30 pm at The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Krauss Recital Hall!
Alastair Gordon
THE ROAD TO INVERCOE
War, Memory & the Landscape of Extinction
"In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness."
- Samuel Beckett
Alastair Gordon is an award-winning critic and author who has written regularly about the built environment for the is an award-winning critic and author who has written regularly about the built environment for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. His critically acclaimed books include Naked Airport, Weekend Utopia, Spaced Out, Unfolded and Wandering Forms. His essays have been published in numerous publications including Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Le Monde, Architectural Record, New York Observer, Interiors, House & Garden, Metropolis, and Dwell. He was Contributing Editor for architecture/design at WSJ., the Wall Street Journal Magazine (2008-2015), and wrote the popular "Wall-to-Wall" blog on the Journal's website. He launched a critical thinking/writing program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2016-2017; served as Distinguished Fellow at the Miami Beach Urban Studios (FIU, 2014-2017); and was the inaugural speaker/visiting scholar for the Vincent Scully Memorial Seminar at the University of Miami School of Architecture in 2018. He currently serves as architecture critic for the Miami Herald and is Editorial Director of Gordon de Vries Studio, an imprint that publishes books about the human environment.
"Gordon's eye for the convergence of art, architecture and commerce is unerring."
- Publishers Weekly
TOWN Friday at The Mildred Complex(ity)
Session: WILDING, WASTING, WORKSTYLING
DARIA DOROSH
June 22, 6:00 pm
The Mildred Complex(ity), 37b Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
Take Back Your Body
Daria Dorosh will speak about the current commodification of the body, how to take it back, and why it matters now more than ever. The status of the body will be considered in the context of big data, virtual systems, and artificial intelligence.
Our five senses will play a key role in this exploration, and the discussion will be followed by an informal hands-on 'treat for the senses' for attendees.
Among the special guests who will offer and talk with attendees about their creations for the senses in sound, scent, sight, touch, and taste will be:
Laura Silverman, Founding Naturalist, The Outside Institute theoutsideinstitute.org Laura will serve magical refreshments.
Marc Switko, artist and gong master will demonstrate his work in sound frequency for healing.
Jenise Parris will show her botanical line of therapeutic natural skin products.
Daria Dorosh, Ph.D. is an artist, educator, co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery, NY, and adjunct faculty at SMARTlab, University College Dublin, Ireland. “Take Back Your Body” was her keynote for VSMM2017, a conference on Virtual Systems and Multi-Media at UCD. She has given numerous presentations on the intersection of art, fashion, and technology.
Dorosh studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, NY. She taught fashion design at FIT and fine art at Parsons School of Design, NY. Her Fashion Lab in Process, LLC, is a research platform to identify new economic models for artists.
Throughout the coming weeks, The Mildred Complex(ity) project space becomes a library of curiosities featuring an unfolding collection of rarely seen ephemera and artifacts from the annual swarmings and events at Mildred's Lane over the last twenty years. Organized from the archives this week are a selection of drawings, photographs, objects, and other material culture for public perusal.
TOWN Friday, July 28, 2017
Free and Open to the Public
37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY 6:00-8:00
Taxidermy, even modern taxidermy, harkens to history and a time past, taking on the qualities of an agnostic relic. Robert Marbury will explore this idea in an illustrated discussion, looking not only at the reasons behind this, including the use of taxidermy as a natural history tool, but also delving into its implications for artists and artworks embracing this medium.
Robert Marbury is best known as a co-founder and director of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, the first international arts group dedicated to mixed-medium sculpture using taxidermy materials. Robert’s artistic methodology fuses research and humor to develop narratives that manifest in fiber, fur, and photography, as well as the occasional promotional product.
Marbury is the author of Taxidermy Art: A Rogue's Guide to the Work, the Culture, and How to Do It Yourself and lectures widely. Based in Baltimore, Robert and his wife Alix have started Wonder Commons, which seeks to activate creativity through participatory happenings, art, and making things.
Calendar:
Attention Lab: The Order of the Third Bird
Session, July 31 – August 6
LAST Social Saturday, August 5; ESTAR(SER)
Free and Open to the Public
Location: Krause Recital Hall upstairs at
The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance
Afternoon program! 4:00 - 6:30
Reception at the Mildred Complex(ity) 6:30 - 8:00
A Night Dedicated to the Delights and Moral Ambiguities of Taxidermy
Presented by Joanna Ebenstein, Creator of Morbid Anatomy
Hasluck Taxidermy, 1901
Evan Michelson with "The Saddest Object in the World;"
Michael Barraco with "Bird as Vessel: Taxidermy and the Imagination"
JD Powe with an anthropomorphic taxidermy show and tell
And a screening of Ronni Thomas’ short film Walter Potter: The Man that Married Kittens
Moderated and introduced by Joanna Ebenstein
Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was co-founder and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Anatomical Venus, editor of the forthcoming Death: A Graveside Companion (October 2017), and co-author of Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy. She regularly works with such institutions as The Wellcome Collection and Amsterdam's Vrolik Museum, and her writing and photography have been published and exhibited internationally. Her work explores the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, and the objective and subjective.
Evan Michelson is a collector, writer, curator, lecturer and dealer of rare, beautiful and mysterious antiques. She is co-owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities, the landmark curiosity shop located in New York City’s East Village for more than two decades. She was also the co-star of the reality show “Oddities,” which aired between 2010 - 2013 on Discovery Science. Evan was a founding board member of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, and she continues to hold the position of Morbid Anatomy Scholar-in-Residence. Evan specializes in the acquisition of uncanny artifacts, and those objects that span the divide between the useful and the inexplicable, the comforting and the unsettling, the utilitarian and the sacred. Evan has lectured at the Fashion Institute of Technology, The Coney Island Museum, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Yale University, Harvard University and the Sinister Creature Convention. She has been profiled by The New Yorker, Entrepreneur Magazine and The New York Times. She can occasionally be found rhythmically banging metal in the streets as part of an ongoing industrial project spanning more than three decades.
Michael Barraco is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work is concerned with the post-natural histories of organisms, the interclusion of natural and man-made infrastructure, the intersections of art and science, and how the existential concerns of the individual manifest themselves in the Anthropocene. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as The University of New Mexico, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in New York; SOMA, Mexico City; White Rabbit Arts Festival, Nova Scotia; Emergency Arts, Las Vegas; Momenta Art, Brooklyn; and Flux Factory, Queens. Barraco currently runs the education department at HVCCA in New York’s Hudson Valley.
JD Powe, Technology entrepreneur, earned a BA in the History of Science from Harvard University and was fortunate enough to study evolutionary biology with the late Stephen Jay Gould and ornithology under the late Dr. Raymond A. Paynter Jr. His life-long fascination with evolutionary biology and natural history led to an extensive private collection of antique taxidermy specimens, including works by some of the Victorian era's most acclaimed animal preservers. Most recently, JD was invited to curate the taxidermy exhibit at Brooklyn's Morbid Anatomy Museum. The 4-month exhibition, Taxidermy: Art, Science & Immortality, drew enthusiasts and curiosity-seekers from around the globe hoping to see extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and remarkable oddities such as an extraordinary 4-tusked walrus dated to 1915. The exhibit's greatest attraction was arguably Walter Potter's The Kitten's Wedding, a world-renown anthropomorphic tableau featuring 19 kittens dressed in full Victorian wedding regalia attending a posh ceremony (c. 1890). For the exhibit, this work was displayed alongside would-be wedding guests including boxing squirrels, sadistic frogs, a multi-level factory of paper-making mice and a notorious drunken monkey. The Museum was forced to shutter its doors shortly after the exhibit ended, but Powe continues to share his zeal for both the artistic and scientific aspects of Victorian taxidermy via independent speaking engagements and an upcoming book project on taxidermy pets.
Ronni Thomas is a director/editor and was Filmmaker in Residence at the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York he considers himself a 'working class film-maker', seeing equal value in the sublime and the ordinary. Though his films typically deal with dark, eccentric and bizarre subject matters, he approaches each topic from a human and often light-hearted angle. In addition to writing and directing several award-winning short films (Radio Girl, Old Song and Dance), he co-Produced Hey Is Dee Dee Home featuring the late Dee Dee Ramone and Camera Gun, a short post 9/11 documentary featuring American Jihad Akil Collins (My Jihad). In 2011 he and Morbid Anatomy founder, Joanna Ebenstein, created The Midnight Archive; a web documentary series that would go on to critical acclaim and receive several awards including the 2013 Silver Telly for best web documentary series. In addition to making films, he is also the guest lecturer and programmer for the Raindance Film Festival in London. He has also written for The Morbid Anthology, United Academics, Huffington Post, The Journal of Social Sciences and Raindance Film Magazine. He lives a blissfully surreal life with his wife, 8-year-old son and exotic cat in Brooklyn New York.
Town Friday July 14, 2017
Free and Open to the Public
At The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space
37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
Lesley Herzberg
The Shakers created a community that was meant to represent "heaven on earth." They were somewhat insular but still knowledgeable about the outside world. They shared all that they had, and worked diligently so that all had enough. The founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee once said: "Hands to work and hearts to God", as work was a form of worship for the Shakers. The objects that helped them to accomplish this work are mostly of their own design, some are improvements made on existing inventions. This talk will examine the unique material culture of the Shakers and how it can tell us tales about their life, work, and worship.
Lesley Herzberg has been the curator at Hancock Shaker Village since 2009. She oversees most of the historic fabric of the village, including the buildings, artifacts, and the library collections. She organizes exhibitions here and at other sites, and works closely with the education department to interpret the site for visitors. Lesley is the author of The Shakers: History, Culture, and Craft (Shire Press, 2015) and A Promising Venture: Shaker Photographs from the WPA (Couper Press, 2012). She enjoys learning about the Shaker musical legacy, and often performs the songs and dances along with the interpreters. Outside of HSV, she can often be found on a Berkshire hiking trail with her family and an adventurous black lab.
This is an event during Mildred Archaeology II Session.
Special thanks to: Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett, Zoe Crossland, Tracy Molis, Coco Fusco, Cecilia and Tom Coacci, Andrea Lekberg, Cheryl Edwards, Caroline Woolard, Leigh Claire La Berge, Megan O'Connell, Leander Johnson, Leslie Herzberg, David Wood, Hope Ginsburg, Josh Quarles, and fellows Deborah Davidovits, Kevin Mahoney, Duy Hoàng, Amanda Wheat, Zoe Frederick, Michelle K. Rogers, Will Staub, Sandy Williams, University of Florida, Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts, New York City.
TOWN FRIDAY, June 23, 2017
A Swarming
at The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space
37b Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY 12764
6:00 – 8:00pm
We are 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 for a reception for the team 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 and School of Visual Arts, New York City and University of Virginia McIntire Department of Art.
SpringHouseIceHouse Session
June 12-24
Solar Entanglement
As a part of the Spring House/Ice House Session at Mildred’s Lane, Stan Pipkin will share a presentation exploring the entangled nature of solar as a cornerstone of the new energy commons. He will be testing this proposition against Elinor Ostrom's principles of the management of the Commons. It is not meant to be academic, nor strictly practical, but would touch on the aspirational trends in distributed energy, while being grounded in specific policy and behavioral models.
BIO
Since 2007, Stan Pipkin has co-managed and owned Lighthouse Solar in Austin. Starting out with only two employees, Lighthouse Solar Austin now employs over thirty people. Pipkin has been involved in the shaping of local and state policy to foster more favorable conditions for the growth of the business. While managing and growing all aspects of the integration business, he has worked closely with a number of industry innovators, including Lumos Solar on the development of applied solar products.
In addition to the solar business, Pipkin runs an architectural design practice, Pipkinc., which includes residential, commercial and civic projects. His interests in community development, sustainable building practices and policy work have found expressions in multiple forms. There is considerable overlap between integrated solar design and holistic architectural design services.
In 2000, Pipkin co-founded a research and design collective, Spurse, which has engaged in community design projects, material research and process consulting for institutions and organizations ranging from the Guggenheim Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, MassMoca, and The Land Institute. Their work has included exhibitions, workshops, lectures, participatory community design projects, product development and architectural design.
www.lighthousesolar.com
Town Friday, June 9
Cecilia and Tom Coacci talk about waste management in our community
