The Kitchen Announces Its Winter/Spring 2026 Season
Via Sonic, Liveness, and Immersive Exhibitions, Kitchen Artists this Season Defy Boundaries and Imagine New Ways of Being
The Kitchen today announces its Winter/Spring 2026 season. The organization continues to champion artists who reframe how audiences experience performance and visual culture—foregrounding process, collaboration, and experimentation as essential forms of inquiry. From its loft at Westbeth, The Kitchen will welcome new and returning artists for a season featuring exhibitions and performances where the questions shaping the avant-garde become the foundation for the cultural possibilities of tomorrow.
As Executive Director and Chief Curator, Legacy Russell says, “The Kitchen this season deepens in its global dialogue and its critical analysis of systems and frameworks at a local, national, and international scale.”
The season opens with At the Louvre (January 15–24), a special week-long sound installation developed in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre and New York Review Books. Originating from a 2024 multilingual poetry project leading to an anthology published by the museum, New York Review Books and Seghers, the project gathers 102 poets from around the world who were invited to write about the museum—95 of whom recorded their poems in their own language and are included in the sound installation at The Kitchen. Presented as an immersive sonic environment filling The Kitchen’s loft at Westbeth, At the Louvre becomes a resonant dialogue across languages and centuries, inviting listeners to encounter the Louvre and the many iterations of art-making, as a chorus of many voices.
Alongside programing, The Kitchen’s long running discussion series, Language. Art. Body. (L.A.B.), is back! Focusing on young people, this January and February The Kitchen will host (L.A.B.): Teen Art Research Residency. A cohort of teens will participate in four workshops hosted at The Kitchen’s loft space to discuss, create, and learn about experimental art. Using The Kitchen’s archive as a point of inspiration, teens will dive into the ‘attention economy’ and the ways artists use performance and video to experiment with attention as a currency. Thoughtful discussions, close readings of texts, videos, and performances, and artmaking will provide teens with a robust knowledge of experimental art and contribute new perspectives to The Kitchen. Workshops will be led by Manager of Education and Interpretive Media, Bridget Johnson, and 2025–2026 Curatorial Fellow, Rosed Serrano.
Next, DAYS: Internal Audit (March 5–7)—a surreal workplace musical by the band DAYS (Ned Riseley and Ethan Philbrick)—transforms The Kitchen’s loft into a post-wellness corporate landscape where a company called “The Kitchen” explores themes of intimacy and alienation. Performed by Riseley and Philbrick alongside an ensemble of actors, Internal Audit splits musical theater into its constitutive parts. Songs score actions, actions overwhelm songs, and professional banality is rendered mystical and uncanny. Featuring performances by Ned Riseley, Ethan Philbrick, Erin Markey, Zoë Chao, James Cusati-Moyer, Francesca D'Uva, Susana Cordón, and Madeline Wise. Directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, lighting design by Kristen Paige, and choreography by Tess Dworman.
Artist, choreographer, writer, and 2023 Dance and Process alum Jonathan González continues the season with Swerve Fatigue, a project comprising a three-week residency (March 23–April 11) and public rehearsals April 10 and 11. At The Kitchen at Westbeth, González continues research and development of his new ensemble work that investigates “swerving” as a collective movement strategy—an act of resistance and adaptation within conditions of acceleration and crisis. Set within an ecology of shifting sound and light, the ensemble embodies forms of entanglement and responsiveness, testing the boundaries between individual and collective becoming. Performers include Ananda Naima González, India Lena González, Marguerite Hemmings, Kingsley Ibeneche, and AJ Wilmore, with sound design by Alexis de la Rosa and GENG PTP.
Closing the season, Tromarama founded in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena presents their first U.S. institutional exhibition: Upon a Machine (April 23–June 13). Known for their inventive engagement with hyperreality and the porous boundaries between the virtual and the physical, Tromarama creates multimedia environments that combine video, installation, and algorithm-driven programming. For their exhibition at The Kitchen, the artists will train a custom-built AI system on their personal archives of books and music, transforming intimate cultural references into a generative environment of images, sounds, and texts. The resulting installation oscillates between play and critique, inviting audiences to reflect on how moments of leisure can be absorbed into systems of productivity and how generative technologies reshape personal memory, authorship, and creative agency. Performances and live activations of the work will extend this inquiry, using sound and projection to animate the installation in real time.
Funding Credits
The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, The New York Community Trust, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and in part by public funds from the Manhattan Borough President, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
The Kitchen acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York.
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 Jones, 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: thekitchen.org Instagram: @TheKitchen_NYC Press contact for The Kitchen: Gilberto Rosa-Duran, gilberto@thekitchen.org and Gregory Werbowsky, gregory.werbowsky@purplepr.com and thekitchen@purple.com