The Kitchen Announces 2024 Spring Gala To Honor Lynn Hershman Leeson, Bernard I. Lumpkin & Carmine D. Boccuzzi, and Max Roach, May 22

With Honorary Co-Chairs Fab 5 Freddy, Agnieszka Kurant, Antwaun Sargent, Mickalene Thomas, and Michael Zilkha

The Kitchen is proud to announce its 2024 Spring Gala, honoring the pioneering artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, visionary art patrons Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi, and trailblazing composer Max Roach (in memoriam). The evening will feature performances by Justin Allen, an interdisciplinary artist whose recent works experiment with dance, sound, video, and writing. More performances will be announced soon, along with an after-party that will include DJs, drinks, and dancing. In addition to honorary co-chairs Fab 5 Freddy, Agnieszka Kurant, Antwaun Sargent, Mickalene Thomas, and Michael Zilkha, the gala co-chairs include Sarah Arison, Nora Clancy, and Wade Guyton. The 2024 Spring Gala will take place on May 22, 2024, at Guastavino’s in New York. Ticketing information is available here.

The Spring Gala—the organization’s largest event of the year—celebrates art world luminaries who are beacons of their communities. These individuals' work has endured through their commitment to avant-garde practice, embracing intergenerational collaboration, and pursuing radical innovation. The 2024 honorees shape and carry forward the progressive mission of The Kitchen—Lynn Hershman Leeson as a feminist, futurist, and genre-defining new media artist, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi as patrons of the next generation of Black artists, and Max Roach as an experimental-music virtuoso who instilled revolutionary politics into his compositions.

Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been widely recognized for her innovative work in visual art, social practice, and film that explores the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Hershman Leeson has shared her work and ideas at The Kitchen for over three decades. In 1990, she participated in New Works, First Runs, presenting Desire Inc—her social experiment and short film compiling broadcasted “seduction ads” on public television. In 1999, she hosted TV Dinner No. 3, performing a retrospective of her own work and staging an installation of her multimedia sculpture America’s Finest—an “interactive rifle” that investigated the shifting perspective of victim and aggressor in military technology. Most recently, she was a contributor to the 2019 Editions Portfolio. The Kitchen recognizes and remains inspired by her multifaceted practice and wild imagination, as expressed through her revolutionary sculptures Breathing Machines, durational performance Roberta Breitmore, site-specific installation Floating Museum, photo series Phantom Limb, and feature films Strange Culture, Teknolust, and Conceiving Ada, First Person Plural, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Logic Paralyzes the Heart, for which she was honored with a special mention from the Golden Lion jury at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi are custodians of Black art: past, present, and future. As the stewards of the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection (@younggiftedblackart on Instagram), they provide a platform for both established and emerging artists of African descent in all mediums. The couple’s engagement as patrons and collectors is part of a broader mission of institutional advocacy and philanthropic support. They advise public and private entities on collecting, patronage and arts education. Through board service and other leadership roles at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Whitney, MoMA, and Yale, Lumpkin and Boccuzzi are helping to ensure that Black representation happens at all institutional levels. The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection is the subject of the bestselling book Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists edited by Antwaun Sargent and published by DAP in 2020. In keeping with their focus on art and education, the couple have partnered with university art galleries and college museums on a nationwide travelling exhibition (now in its 5th year) that brings the work of Black artists to diverse audiences across the country.

Max Roach, a master percussionist and composer, was a pioneer in the development of contemporary American music. As a bandleader, Roach played with renowned musicians including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Bud Powell, and remains one of the most versatile and inventive percussionists of the modern jazz era. He contributed to the definition of the sound known as bop and celebrated diverse percussion traditions from around the world. A staunch advocate for civil rights, Roach's social consciousness permeated his music; his sound was inseparable from his commitment to justice and equality. Roach first performed at The Kitchen in 1983 for the program Estate Fresh, a collaboration between himself, Fab 5 Freddy, and DJ Spy. In 1984, Roach returned to participate in the Downtown/Uptown Television Festival, presenting work by independent television producers and video artists. On this centennial year of his birth, The Kitchen commemorates him both as a brilliant musician and a champion of social change—a singular artist who will influence generations to come.

The Spring Gala is a microcosm of The Kitchen’s multiplicity, creating space to celebrate its recent season and bring together its profound, diverse community. From its temporary space at Westbeth Artists Housing, The Kitchen remains adaptable—committed to making its rich archive accessible to the public to ensure that artistic legacies are conserved, and developing programs that platform artists who are attuned to the world as it shifts and shapes. The Gala Benefit Committee includes Chris Ahearn & Marla Mayer, Sarah Arison, Storm Ascher, James Keith Brown & Eric Diefenbach, Suzy Coue-Wilson & Edward Wilson, Judith L. Church & Edward K. Schlieben, Nora Clancy & Arjun Bhattacherjee, Eileen & Michael Cohen, Christie's, Gagosian, Barrie Glabman, Agnes Gund, Douglas & Monica Hand, Hauser & Wirth, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Jacqueline Humphries, Miyoung Lee, Simone Leigh/Matthew Marks, Glenn Ligon, Bernard I. Lumpkin & Carmine D. Boccuzzi, Julie Mehretu, Holly Peterson, Everette Taylor, Hannah Traore, and David Zwirner.

About The Kitchen Founded in 1971 as an artist-driven collective, The Kitchen today reaffirms and expands upon its originating vision as a dynamic cultural institution that centers artists, prioritizes people, and puts process first. Programming in a kunsthalle model that brings together live performances, exhibition-making, and public programming under one roof, The Kitchen empowers its audiences and communities to think creatively and radically about what it means to shape a multivalent and sustainable future in art. The Kitchen seeks to cultivate and hold space for wild thought, risky play, and innovative and experimental making, encouraging artists and cultural workers alike to defy boundaries and sending them into the world to remake art history and catalyze creative change.

Among the artists who have presented significant work at The Kitchen are Muhal Richard Abrams, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, Kevin Beasley, Beastie Boys, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Leslie Hewitt, Darius James, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Devin Kenny, Simone Leigh, Ralph Lemon, George Lewis, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Michelson, Tere O’Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Sondra Perry, Vernon Reid, Arthur Russell, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Spiegel, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Cecil Taylor, Urban Bush Women, Danh Vō, Lawrence Weiner, Anicka Yi, and many more.

Website: https://thekitchen.org/on-view/gala2024/ Instagram: instagram.com/TheKitchen_NYC Facebook: facebook.com/TheKitchenNYC Press Contact: Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, ALMA Communications hannah@almacommunications.co