CENTRAL BOOKING
21 Ludlow Street, NYC (Offline Space)
ICONS IN ASH, DEATH IN ART group show, curated by Maddy Rosenberg and Heide Hatry
Book Party with Conversations, Readings, Spoken Word performances and Music:
Friday, February 24, 6-8pm
Conversations and Readings by: Linda Weintraub, Sigrid Sarda, Jennifer Elster, Heide Hatry.
Spoken Word Performances and Music by: Danielle Blau and Nora Fox, Jane LeCroy, Dusty Wright, Robert Brashear, Aimee Hermann and David Lawton.
Exhibition: through Sunday, February 26
Artists include: Roberta Allen, Dianne Bowen, Theresa Byrnes, Kathline Carr, Jennifer Elster, Max Gimblett, Heide Hatry, Richard Humann, Gregg LeFevre, Julia Kissina, Kate Millett, Jim Peters, Herbert Pföstl, Michelle Ross, Sigrid Sarda, Carolee Schneemann, Aldo Tambellini, Linda Weintraub and Brenda Zlamany
Bios of from artist in the show and authors from Icons in Ash:
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art, including TO LIFE! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press). Weintraub's previous books include In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society. Weintraub served as the Director of the Bard College museum where she curated over sixty exhibitions. She was the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College and is currently on the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Art program at the University of Hartford. Her current book project is Ecological Materialism: Art-is-an Environmental Health Clinic. Weintraub received her MFA degree from Rutgers University. She maintains a homestead on an eleven acre property where she practices permaculture. These principles guide her studio practice, which includes communal art projects entitled Grandmother Earth: Beyond Death.
Heide Hatry is a New York based German artist, often described as neo-conceptualist, whose work transforms, transcends, or transgresses the customary relationship of artist to both audience and art. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, and the human exploitation of the natural world. She studied and taught art at various schools in Germany while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. She has curated numerous exhibitions, has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world, has created nearly two hundred artist's books and edited more than two dozen printed books and art catalogues. Skin (2005), Heads and Tales (2009), and Not a Rose (2012) both document her own art and amount to collaborative conceptual artist's books involving some of the most interesting thinkers and authors in the world.
Bios from artists in the show:
Sigrid Sarda is best known for her life-size human figures made of wax in the tradition of the reliquary. Originally a self-taught painter, after the death of her father, Sarda then taught herself the 17th Century techniques of the ceroplast. Sarda exhibits internationally, is on file at the Mutter Museum, and has works in many private collections worldwide. Currently she maintains an open residency at the Gordon Museum of Pathology, lectures at the New York Academy of Medicine, and makes television appearances related to the wax works.
Jennifer Elster is an American experimentalist, thinker, artist, filmmaker, writer, photographer and performer. Elster, obsessed with the truth, explores boundaries in all mediums and has collaborated with such artists as David Bowie and Yoko Ono.
Elster spent years of deep, and, at times, bizarre excavation into the recesses of her mind and the minds of her subjects, analyzing the depths of human nature. Using words, paper, canvases, photographs, audio, video and performance art, Elster explores ways to deal with the severity of reality. This past year Elster exhibited her first public art show The Retrospective of an Extroverted Recluse. Culled from a large body of work amassed over Elster's life the show revealed the arc in Elster's thinking throughout and up until her most recent work WARFARE which spoke directly and foresaw the current climate in America.
Currently, Elster has been performing and hosting art happenings in the underground studio The Development in New York City to further bring awareness to our current world crisis and fight for human rights.
Bios of from other performers:
Robert Brashear:
Robert Brashear is a pastor and singer-songwriter resuming his career after 30 years. He performs solo and with his “floating musical collective,” the Home (Away) Band. In the last year he has performed in all 5 boroughs, Governor's Island and from Portland to Pittsburgh, Louisville to Asheville and Dublin to Berlin. He has collaborated with a wide variety of artists of different genres and has performed in the One Day Festival of the Work Center of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards and will appear in September in the Copenhagen Transformation Festival 2017.
Aimee Herman and David Lawton are the music and poetry collective HYDROGEN JUNKBOX, guided by the spirit of Brant Lyon. We aim to stir, rumble, and rouse!
Jane LeCroy is a NYC based poet, singer and performance artist who fronts the avant-pop band, The Icebergs, and the psychedelic experimental music project, Ω▽Ohmslice. She has toured with: the SF based all women's poetry troupe, Sister Spit. Jane is a poet-in-the-schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her chapbook, Names, published by the art-book house Booklyn in the award winning ABC chapbook series, was purchased by the Library of Congress along with her braid! Three Rooms Press published, Signature Play, a multimedia book of lyrical poems, nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Icebergs just released their debut album, Eldorado.
Dusty Wright is a singer-songwriter, content creator and curator from New York City. He is the co-founder and owner of the smart culture website CultureCatch.com, contributor to the Huffington Post, former DJ at David Lynch's Transcendental Music Radio, and the former editor of Creem and Prince's New Power Generation magazines. He's also written and/or produced documentaries, indie films, webcasts, fiction, and podcasts. He's released five solo albums and one with his folk-rock quartet GIANTfingers. His new album Caterwauling Towards the Light (2017) is dedicated to his deceased father Joseph and younger brother David. He is in pre-production on a VR (virtual reality) music video for his song "Fly" to bring awareness to suicide prevention and fighting depression. His music is available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Bandcamp, etc.
Danielle Blau’s Rhyme and Reason: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Art of Living the Big Questions is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Her collection mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published in 2013 with an introduction by poet D.A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the 2015 multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau can be found in such publications as The Atlantic online, The Baffler, Black Clock, The Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume Poetry, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Wolf, the Argos Books poetry anthology Why I Am Not a Painter, and Plume Anthology of Poetry. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of NYU with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series, and teaches at Hunter College.
Nora Fox is a NYC-based performing artist who recently performed and wrote for #BARS, a theater-in-verse workshop created by Hamilton's Daveed Diggs and HBO Def Jam Poetry's Rafael Casal in New York's historical Public Theater. Equally at home in theatre, film, music, and dance, Fox began performing at the Tony Award-winning Goodspeed Opera House and the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, and by the age of 12 had dropped out of middle school to move to New York for a gig in Broadway's The Sound of Music. Today, with a degree in Literary Arts from Brown University, Fox has acted, directed, and choreographed for film, toured and recorded as a singer and multi-instrumentalist / tap-dancing percussionist, performing across the United States, Canada, South America, and Europe. She is currently working on her first album, drawing from traditions of soul, opera, folk, and pop, which is due to release this year.
