Jan 28, 2015

Over the course of two November nights in 1994, The Kitchen hosted before and after ambient. Curated by Ben Neill, the event was also the inaugural event for the series, Electronic Café. Electronic Café was a program in which many artists stationed at various studios and workshops in Los Angeles (including the Electronic Café’s headquarters in Santa Monica), Paris, London, Denmark, Asia, and South America collaborated via video conferencing, then a revolutionary technology. Before and after ambient filled the theater and gallery spaces (the first and second floors) of The Kitchen with simultaneous live performances by various experimental music artists, including artists performing and video conferencing from Santa Monica and London. This event, through its simultaneous shows, global i... Read On

Dec 18, 2014

1986. The year the United Nations declared as the first International Year of Peace. The year that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was first observed as a federal holiday. The year President Ronald Reagan instituted sanctions against Libya, South Africa began severe censorship of their press, Oprah premiered her first national broadcast, and Elie Wiesel accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. The year that musical group Zazou-Bikaye premiered in the US at The Kitchen with what UK music magazine Sounds described as mind-bending “textures married to an Afro-electro beat.” While a performance and a UN declaration may not appear immediately connected, a concert from a collective led by two African men (one white and one black) from two separate countries (one north and one sub-Saharan, the latter one s... Read On

Dec 10, 2014

The Kitchen is deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of its first director, Robert Stearns, who died last Wednesday at the age of 67. Once recalling his arrival on the New York arts scene in 1970, Stearns described staying in the loft of a friend who was departing from his job at a local gallery. Stearns asked the simple question, “What do you do running an art gallery?”: “Well, you answer the phone and you take care of the photographs and you talk with clients.” I said, “I could do that.” He said, “Well, OK, I’ll call [the gallerist] tomorrow morning and tell her that I’m going to leave and then you call about an hour later and say that you’re looking for a job.” So that’s how I met Paula Cooper.* Soon, Stearns was spending time with local artists Jennifer Bartlett... Read On

Dec 2, 2014

Please make your contribution here today to make innovative programs possible at The Kitchen during the year ahead. And view artists' projects below that your support made possible in 2014! Allowing artists to take chances has been The Kitchen’s mission going back to its beginnings in 1971, giving early shows to Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Jonas, Christian Marclay, Laurie Anderson, and so many others. And yet this aspiration today requires that we do more than give artists a gallery or theater in which to work. In fact, to help artists, dancers, and musicians to realize their visions to the fullest, The Kitchen regularly provides residency time, allowing artists to engage new threads in their development without the pressure of presenting finished pr... Read On

Nov 5, 2014

Obie-award winning director and playwright Richard Maxwell will present a new work this spring at The Kitchen. Maxwell and The New York City players have previously shown The End of Reality (2006) and Natural Hero (2012) at The Kitchen (for the company’s full production history please visit http://www.nycplayers.org). While anticipating Maxwell’s new work, we took a moment to look back at past critical reception of his works and saw themes that are particularly resonant with recent current events. In fact, one wonders, when looking at historical reviews from The Kitchen Archive, whether the artist’s productions—who is often described as taking up the banality of Americana, given his writing’s stinted language and his staging’s minimalist violence which appears more like contact improv... Read On