The Kitchen Launches New Website Designed by Pacific

Reimagining The Organization's Digital Presence in a Pivotal Moment

OBLIMEMBER, a Triptych of Films by Christelle Oyiri, Premieres in the Video Viewing Room on the Site Today

Montez Press Radio to Broadcast Radio Shows with The Kitchen’s Community, Revealing the Opportunities the Redesign Opens for New Collaborations Beyond the Organization’s Physical Space

The Kitchen has debuted a state-of-the-art new website, an engaging and active platform reflective of the organization’s experimentalism, artist-centricity, and flexibility. Designed by Pacific (Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull) and foregrounding live recordings, video, and archival storytelling, the website creates a more accessible and engaging experience for visitors while building on the organization’s consideration of its presence beyond walls—sharing its offerings with national and international audiences. Celebrating The Kitchen as a hub of wild creativity and generating a multitude of new possibilities for collaboration with artists, the site balances the organization’s founding ethos of artist collectivity with the structural support of an institution further established by its 50+ year history. In tandem with the launch, The Kitchen presents Christelle Oyiri’s film triptych OBLIMEMBER in the revamped Video Viewing Room.

In Summer 2022, The Kitchen moved to Westbeth Artists Housing while transformative renovations on its storied Chelsea home began, expanding the institution’s understanding and vision of experimentation and what it means to foster the next generation of the avant-garde. Simultaneously, The Kitchen announced their collaboration with Pacific to similarly transform their online home. The relaunched website prioritizes The Kitchen as a site of 24-hour access and online programming, collapsing the boundary between the organization’s digital and in-person presences. The result is a site that is both boldly experimental and uniquely accessible, and always on.

The new website’s homepage will feature a rotating selection of video materials from the organization’s archive. Here, the main navigation organizes The Kitchen’s present and past into four engaging categories: On View (where visitors can get information on all upcoming programs and events at The Kitchen, teased by evocative images), On Screen (where online programming can be streamed live and revisited after the fact), On File (an accessible space to engage The Kitchen’s archive, organized here into spotlit programs; by art form; and by chronology to enable viewers numerous pathways into the organization’s extensive history), and On Mind (The Kitchen’s online magazine, featuring commissioned essays, conversations, diaries, and texts from the archive).

Legacy Russell, The Kitchen’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, says, “The Kitchen’s website is a reflection of the future vision of art—participatory, engaged, accessible, experimental.”

In the On Screen section, website visitors can watch interdisciplinary artist, DJ, and producer Christelle Oyiri’s just-shared films Collective Amnesia: In memory of Logobi (2018–2022), HYPERFATE (2022), and GROTESQUE: They make beautiful things about ugly people (2023), together making up OLIMEMBER. Oyiri’s work combines film, sound, performance, and sculpture to contemplate the deliberate erasure of narratives outside of a dominant canon and to explore themes of colonial alienation. Her research-based practice focuses on the temporalities, tonalities, textures, and visual vernaculars of music, art, and popular and youth cultures within and outside the African diaspora. The works here reflect on Oyiri’s own methodology of archiving, and engage the collective memory of forgotten mythologies—both ancient or ultra-contemporary. Christelle Oyiri: OBLIMEMBER is organized by Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, who has written a new text accompanying the presentation. Collective Amnesia: In memory of Logobi (2018–2022) will be available to view through the end of the calendar year, HYPERFATE (2022) will be on view through May 11, 2023, and GROTESQUE: They make beautiful things about ugly people (2023) will be on view through July 31, 2023.

A morphing visual and discursive space, the website carries the Kitchen’s emphasis on site-as-medium into the digital. Experimental broadcasting and performance platform Montez Press Radio, which has been in residence since Fall 2022—exploring questions of narrative in relation to place through a series of offsite productions—will be among the first to explore the new potential offered by the relaunched site. Montez Press Radio will stream two ongoing radio series co-presented with The Kitchen titled Off the Page (an interview series inviting guests to engage experimental legacies and histories of 'avant-garde' production, work, labor, thought and collaboration across decades within and beyond The Kitchen’s community) and Sobremesa: Archiving Performance (exploring what it means to archive movement and time-based work) on Montez Press Radio and The Kitchen’s website in June, July, and September 2023. Off the Page launched on April 18 with The Kitchen’s Archivist, Alex Waterman, and artist Richard Lowenberg, and both series will continue to unfold through September. As with Montez Press Radio’s residency-derived programming, The Kitchen envisions the website as another facet of support for their long-standing relationships with artists, offering an abundance of experimental opportunities to forge new connections.

About Pacific

Pacific is a New York-based multidisciplinary creative agency that works with clients to design thoughtful systems across print and digital mediums. Pacific utilizes its mix of creative disciplines to produce concept-driven brands, visual identities, printed matter, web design and exhibition design.

Under its eponymous publishing imprint, Pacific works closely with artists, galleries, institutions and art-focused organizations to design and produce artist books, catalogs, monographs, and historical facsimiles, as well as print ephemera surrounding exhibitions and programs.

Founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull, Pacific is a studio that thrives on dialogue, investigation and collaboration.

About Christelle Oyiri

Christelle Oyiri is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker of mixed origin–Ivorian, Guadeloupean, and Martinican–born in the Paris region, where she lives and works. She is also known as DJ and music producer CRYSTALMESS. Her work has been featured in several institutions, in France and abroad, such as Gladstone Gallery (New York), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), Tramway Glaslow, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Auto Italia (London), the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, the Musée Espace Arlaud (Lausanne), Ars Electronica (Austria) and HeK (Basel). She has recently completed a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris, in partnership with the Art Explora Foundation.

About The Kitchen

One of New York City’s oldest nonprofit alternative art centers, The Kitchen is dedicated to offering artists opportunities to create and present new work within, and across, the disciplines of dance, film, literature, music, theater, video, and visual art. The institution fosters a community of artists and audiences, offering artists the opportunity to create—and for audiences to engage with—work that pushes the boundaries of artistic disciplines and strengthens meaningful dialogues between the arts and larger culture.

The Kitchen was founded as an artist collective in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka, and was formalized as a 501c3 in 1973. It has, from its infancy, been a space where experimental artists share progressive ideas with like-minded colleagues. It was among the very first American institutions to embrace the emerging fields of video and performance, while presenting visionary new work in established disciplines such as dance, music, literature, and film. This unique combination generated an environment immediately conducive to groundbreaking and cross-disciplinary exploration, helping to launch the careers of many artists who have defined the global avant-garde.

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: thekitchen.org The Kitchen OnScreen: thekitchen.org/on-screen Instagram: instagram.com/TheKitchen_NYC Facebook: facebook.com/TheKitchenNYC

Press Contact: Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates: blake@blakezidell.com or 917.572.2493.