The Kitchen Archive holds an extensive collection of posters, ephemera, and historic audio and videotapes from events and performances spanning over the 50 years of its history. The development of The Kitchen's Finding Aid is currently in process and updated frequently. Please visit our ArchivesSpace to see more of our holdings. The Kitchen Archives is located in Brooklyn, New York and is open to visiting researchers by appointment.
The Kitchen ArchivesSpace
The Kitchen poster collection is now available online for the first time. Spanning over fifty years of experimental video, music, dance, and performance, the digitization of The Kitchen’s poster collection is part of an initiative to preserve our rich history and make our archives accessible. Beginning with Steina and Woody Vasulka's first video screenings in the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center and going on to include seminal works by Arthur Russell, Julius Eastman, Lucinda Childs, Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, Blondell Cummings, and many more, the poster collection is an abundant resource for the avant-garde movement of music, video, and performance in New York.
View The Poster Collection
Dec 20 - Dec 22, 1979
Jul 12 - Jul 24, 1977
Nov 30 - Feb 18, 1989
Nov 30 - Feb 25, 1990
Though a hallmark of the Downtown New York art scene, The Kitchen expands beyond the confines of geography, through presentations of international artists and traveling projects around the world. This Archive Spotlight—written by Emma Huerta, Curatorial Intern 2025-26—surfaces newly-digitized materials from Vistas Nuevas: Recent Video from Cuba, a group exhibition of Cuban video artists hosted at The Kitchen from May 12 to June 3, 2000. International relations between the United States and Cuba have been a notable political tension, and these difficulties especially ring true today as the U.S. government perpetuates a humanitarian crisis on the island. Despite the strong contention of cross-oceanic engagement between the two countries, the Vistas Nuevas exhibition initiated a cultural alliance. Vistas Nuevas spotlighted a culture that has monumental history in both filmmaking and activism situated within the context of the new technologies and new generation of artists that emerged at the turn of the millennium. Thus, a significant programmatic leg preceding the exhibition was a panel discussion between artists, curators, and critics on “The Politics and Economy of Access: Cuba,” which was part of that year's Art and Technology Symposia at The Kitchen. The exhibition itself arose from a mutualistic exchange with Art in General, frequent Kitchen collaborator, after they hosted a one-night screening of Cuban video work. Vistas Nuevas directly interacted with the Cuban arts landscape through its organization in tandem with the Fundacíon Ludwig de Cuba, a nonprofit organization based in Cuba that supports the island’s artists. This partnership subsequently facilitated a presentation of video works by The Kitchen at the VII Bienal de La Habana in 2000. Vistas Nuevas was a further site of curatorial exchange by engaging external curator Betti-Sue Hertz as co-organizer alongside The Kitchen’s team. Finally, the works in the exhibition themselves interrogate the nature of exchange—cultural, linguistic, geographical, etc. Tania Bruguera’s Cabeza abajo (Upside down) (1997) presents a guttural representation of the lives at stake during global crises. Raúl Cordero’s Mambo in Miami (1997) juxtaposes a bouncy Floridian soundtrack against a quotidian Cuban backdrop. Nearly three decades after its installation, Vistas Nuevas is exemplary of The Kitchen’s longstanding ethos of exchange across a multitude of crossroads—all the way from the archipelago of New York City to the shores of La Habana.
May 12 - Jun 3, 2000
Jan 1 - Jan 1, 1997
Jan 1 - Jan 1, 1997
What constitutes a portrait when resemblance is no longer its primary claim? This archive spotlight presented by spring 2026 Education Intern, Rey Cordero Elizondo, examines artists at The Kitchen who appropriated and deconstructed the conventions of the genre to unveil portraiture less as a mirror and more as a prism, one that reflects identity across time, encounter, and mediation. In 1992, Nan Goldin presented three short slideshows: one created in relationship to her book, The Other Side, one a series of self-portraits, and one comprising images of three of her closest friends. Goldin transformed portraiture into a collective and autobiographical narrative. These photographs, shown with music, revealed constructed layered portraits shaped by intimacy, gender performance, and the AIDS crisis. Joan Logue’s 30 second Portraits, a project composed of over 400 videos and featured at The Kitchen in 1998, employs flat lighting and tight framing to create an illusion of what she called "stripped-down video seeing." Rather than offering immediate access, her videos exposed artifice and highlighted the subjects' awareness of being filmed. The result was less about physical resemblance than about exposing the sitter's presence and granting the viewer time for contemplation. Similarly, Karen Finley’s Psychic Portraits are performative and speculative. In 2003, at The Kitchen, Finley explored trance as a vessel for emotion and freedom of imagination. The project included a series of one-on-one sittings where she conducted readings of “psychic emanations.” These portraits rendered something less visible than appearance, and depicted an interior state that emerged through encounter. These works uncovered portraiture as a malleable genre, an evolving structure beyond resemblance. Artists at The Kitchen repositioned portraiture as an ongoing negotiation between artist, subject, and viewer, where identity is constructed, mediated, and contested. They turned attention to the conditions that shape how subjects are seen and represented, and to how those frameworks can be reworked and transformed.
Jan 12 - Jan 12, 1994
Jun 8 - Jun 8, 1982
Oct 30 - Nov 15, 2003
It is common, if not precedent, for an institutional exhibition or program to travel to other organizations. However, organizations themselves hardly ever travel to other venues. Early into its existence, The Kitchen uniquely maintained a touring program throughout New York City, across the country, and even internationally. These tours fortified The Kitchen’s overall mission by untethering Kitchen operations from a singular site and reimagining manifestations in various geographies. The Kitchen tours involved artists or staff visiting schools, art and film groups, galleries, museums, and other locations with the intention of extending the reach of the organization’s programs and resources. The most elaborate tours occurred in the 1980s, when The Kitchen toured a select roster of its affiliated artists throughout several European cities in 1980 and 1985-86. The Kitchen conducted its first tour across the United States and Canada in 1982. This Archive Spotlight highlights the latter, and particularly the idiosyncrasy of its inaugural event: performances on the Staten Island Ferry. The Kitchen North American Tour 1982 kicked off with premiere performances by its select artists on the boat as it cruised around the New York City archipelago. Performances included modern dance by Merce Cunningham Dance Company member Lisa Fox and a new restaging of the feedback work “Wolfman” (1964) by Robert Ashley. Additionally, there was a Kitchen-esque Video Viewing Room on board, featuring works by Brian Eno, Nam June Paik, and Twyla Tharp. The Kitchen thus embarked on an aquatic voyage and staged the latest happenings of the avant-garde in motion, all while maintaining the quintessential experimental nature of its performance and video presentations. As it operates from its temporary satellite location at Westbeth Artist Housing, The Kitchen today continues the ethos of its original touring program. Community endeavors drive the outreach of The Kitchen’s projects, and the “Without Walls” initiative extends its program to partner institutions. The tours in the 1980s and our current programs posit “The Kitchen” to be as malleable as the avant-garde work it celebrates. From its inauguration in 1971 to present-day, The Kitchen remains on the move. By 2025-2026 Curatorial Intern Emma Huerta.
Jun 1 - Jun 1, 1982
Jun 1 - Jun 30, 1982
Jun 1 - Jun 1, 1982
The point of intersection between race and technology has been the site for exploration by Kitchen collaborators for the past 20 years. This inquiry sustains relevancy over the years and manifests in many forms, influenced by the archive as well as BIPOC artists’ need for safe spaces to explore identity during times of political insecurity. Tracie Morris and Los Cybrids: *La Raza Techno-Crítica*’s work created in the same year (2003) explore the intersection between race and technology. Both Morris’s *Afrofuturistic* and Los Cybrids’s *Chicano, Chicana, Latino, Latina, Hispano, Hispana: TEch TV* examine the historical impact of technology on their respective communities. The works visually represent themes like surveillance, technology, modernization, futurism, and identity through performance and video art respectively. *Afrofuturistic* presents a genre-bending performance orchestrated by a Black woman envisioning the possibilities of the landscape of an Afrofuturist future, focusing on language and presentation. *TEch TV* is a video piece that mimics the format of a public program episode focusing on Latino advancements within technology and its interruption of the natural existence of humanity. Language and music intertwine in both videos, envisioning futuristic possibilities birthed from the merging of identity and technology. Dually, these inspire hope and provide an escape for people of color who are subjected to the harsh realities of technology’s real-world impact on their communities. This point of intersection resurfaces in The Kitchen’s 2022-23 L.A.B. Residency research project, *Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe*. This residency followed researchers and artists in their attempts to define what the Black Gooey Universe looks like, which encompasses an exploration of programming, technology, and identity. The gooey universe has manifested itself in The Kitchen’s past, before it became a fully fledged concept. The gooey universe transcends time to include all people of color. By Zinariya Ali, 2025 Kitchen Intern.
May 15 - May 24, 2003
Jan 1 - Jan 1, 2003
Jan 1 - Jan 1, 2020
All desire is the result of imitation. The mimetic theory of desire, originated by French anthropologist René Girard, refers to human desire as a product of a mimetic process in which people imitate models who endow objects with value. Mimetic theory moves through a four-stage process of desire, conflict, scapegoating, and cover-up. This Archival Spotlight by 2024 Curatorial and Archive Intern Christina Augustin brings together three programs in The Kitchen’s archive by artists Lynda Bengalis, Stanton Kaye, Miranda July, and Karen Finley, who, through varying methods of performance, work to break down the social constructions of desire as proposed by mimetic theory. Lynda Benglis and Stanton Kaye explore the resounding violence of gender hierarchy in imitative desire through short film *The Amazing Bow Wow* (1976) when human Babu cuts off the tongue of talking hermaphroditic dog Bow Wow in an aim for the sole affections of companion Rexina. Live-movie *Swan Tool* (2001) by Miranda July tackles desire as an innately isolating social construction when protagonist Lisa Cobb becomes unable to decide whether she wants to live or die, buries herself in her backyard, and then continues to live and work, keeping up appearances. Through monologues on womb envy, and the oppressive nature of motherhood, Karen Finley’s *The Constant State of Desire* (1986) explores social desire by positioning male desirability as a prerequisite for womanhood. In examining, self-objectification, perceived male intrasexual competition, and forced seclusion through the lenses of the second and third wave feminist movements, these Kitchen artists situate mimetic desire as arbiter of a gendered violence in which there is no life or death.
Oct 18 - Oct 20, 1976
Dec 5 - Dec 5, 2001
Dec 3 - Dec 6, 1986
This Archival Spotlight by 2023-24 Curatorial and Archive Intern Olivia McKayla Ross reflects on programs in The Kitchen’s archive where artists utilize their practice to make sense of technologies of war and asymmetrical power. The timeline of America’s technological advancement is the timeline of our military history—from the ARPANET of the early '70s to modern GPS navigation, to even everyday items like superglue and saxophones. We are “saved” in a “wireless cloud” whose terms of use we do not read, and technological violence, which is real, becomes abstracted. With giant construction machines and pyrotechnics, the Bay Area-based Survival Research Laboratories’ 1988 performance of *The Misfortunes of Desire* (Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having) in Shea Stadium walloped it’s audience with a robot battle with a violent scale Americans usually only see on the news. Lea Bertucci’s *Mass of Dissolution* (2019) utilized percussionists for beats resembling helicopter wings, marching soldiers, drum corps fragments, and the sounds of industrial equipment towards a prayer against the empty savagery of military-industrial power. As part of *Artists Call*, a nationwide mobilization of artists and intellectuals organizing out of New York City in 1984, The Kitchen platformed Central American documentary art and anti-propaganda, such as Agrarian Reform TV (from Nicaragua), Guatemalan Personal Testimonies, Sandinista TV and more, citing "If we can simply witness the destruction of another culture, we are sacrificing our own right to make culture." Lastly, sound art pioneer Christina Kubisch’s work *New York Electrical Walk*, loaned to the Kitchen as part of a 2006 sound art exhibition *Invisible Geographies*, turned the quiet flow of electromagnetic power into sonics through transduction, revealing a massive surveillance infrastructure that sits on top of the city. These Kitchen artists refuse the magician’s act by reintroducing audiences to the invisiblized technologies of cameras, sound systems, and robotics, disrupting abstraction by foregrounding the martial context these technologies are used to support––the martial context we live, work, and play inside of.
Jan 24 - Jan 19, 2019
May 17 - May 17, 1988
Jan 17 - Jan 28, 1984
Sep 9 - Oct 14, 2006
Dean Moss’s presence as both performer and dance curator (1999-2004) at The Kitchen has made him a sustained collaborator within the organization’s community. This duality between artist and curator prompted Moss to push the limits of dance and choreography in an experimental and interdisciplinary vision and space. This Archival Spotlight by 2023-24 Archival and Curatorial Intern Emiko Inoue brings together three programs co-directed and performed by Moss at The Kitchen, varying in contents and themes, that each interrogate and demonstrate the elements of “objecthood.” *figures on a field* (2005) is a program co-directed by Moss and visual artist Laylah Ali that questions how racial stereotypes on behaviors can be critiqued by restaging gestures and moves in a deviated setting far from social norms. Here, Moss introduces a museum docent figure who subjectively interprets the performers gestures and moves, and in doing so, forces the viewers to be conscious of their experience as the audience of an audience. Such repetition delegates and degrades the assumed authority of witnessing the performance. *Nameless Forest* (2011) is another collaborative work by Moss with Korean sculptor Sungmyung Chun that interrogates the figuration of a community through the individual and the collective’s participation in ritual rites. This program furtherly foregrounds the identity of an audience: the audience’s participation is taken inside the stage, either to be part of the performance or to be asked to answer questions by performers. By using the historical persona of the 19th century white abolitionist John Brown, *johnbrown* (2014) is one of Moss’s crucial performances which experimentally actualizes the racial issues into the present era. johnbrown is a work that creatively reimagines the narrative history of race––for instance, by projecting a video of an imaginative dialogue between John Brown and Fredrick Douglass. At one point, these visionary creations are disrupted by a distinct character, who mimics a contemporary singer that talks to the audience. All of these programs construct “objecthood” in a unique way, which coincides with the ripening moment in the early to mid 2000s when dance performances became frequently presented at museums and collecting institutions. In contrast to these tendencies, Moss’s programs at The Kitchen are concerned with how the authority to objectively view a performance can be critiqued, and how a non-museum, alternative space allows room to redefine “objecthood” in the context of performance.
May 5 - May 14, 2005
May 19 - May 28, 2011
Oct 16 - Oct 25, 2014
