Join the University of Houston School of Theatre & Dance on Saturday, February 6, 2016 at 7:00 pm for a free performance of Nathan the Wise.

Jerusalem, 1192. The Third Crusade is over. An uneasy stalemate masquerading as peace exists between the Muslim forces of Saladin and the Christian Crusaders. Caught in the middle of this conflict are the Jews, particularly Nathan. He is a merchant with wisdom, wit and wealth, but is he shrewd enough to guide all sides to a new world where reason rules?

“The University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, which excels at creating unusual performance events, has announced the lineup for its third annual festival of experimental art. CounterCurrent 16 will offer 11 provocative events April 12-17 at various venues, with festival headquarters at the MATCH, 3400 Main. All the performances are free, although some have limited seating, so require reservations.” - The Houston Chronicle

Jonah Bokaer has cultivated a new form of choreography with a structure that relies on visual art and design. His aim is to transform notions of how the public views and understands dance. Bokaer has been active as a choreographer since 2002. He has created over 55 works in a wide range of mediums, such as film, opera, applications, and installation, in a variety of venues, ranging from stages, to museums and galleries. He works internationally, exhibiting and touring worldwide.

Bokaer has created works within museum spaces that live between choreography, visual art, and moving images. This approach to art making has been acknowledged by museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, PS1 MoMA, The New Museum, The Museum of Arts & Design, MASS MoCA, Miami MOCA, MAC Marseille, IVAM Valencia, Palazzo Delle Arti Napoli, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, SCAD Museum of Art, Ludwig Museum of Budapest, MUDAM Luxembourg, along with many others.
A few of Bokaer’s frequent collaborators are Daniel Arsham (2007-Present), Anne Carson, Richard Chai, Merce Cunningham, Anthony McCall, Abbott Miller, Tino Sehgal, Robert Wilson (2007-Present), along with other leading innovators in mediums such as performance, visual art, literature, and design.

Recent awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Choreography (USA 2015), the Prix Nouveau Talent Chorégraphie (Paris 2011), the Jerome Robbins Special Prize Fellowship in Choreography from the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy, 2011), and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011)

Learn more about United States Artsits here.

Students, faculty and staff practice in preparation for the Nov. 21 performance of “The Symphonic Body UCLA” in Royce Hall. They were chosen to perform in the piece because they were identified by others as inspirational individuals. Watch the video by John Vande Wege below.

In Ann Carlson’s world, gesture — even the most mundane movement — is synonymous with dance. For almost a year, Carlson has been at UCLA observing and “collecting” the gestures of more than 100 students and employees at work across the campus. This is part of her process towards creating “The Symphonic Body UCLA,” a performance built entirely from these gestures.

Read more about this innovative performance project culminating Saturday, November 21, in two performances in Royce Hall, at UCLA here.

Francesco Vezzoli and David Hallberg, Fortuna Desperata 2015, A Performa Commission; photo by Francesco Vezzoli, courtesy of L’Uomo Vogue, Conde Nast Italia.

Performa 15 opens this Sunday, November 1st, with a special performance titled Fortuna Desperata presented by Francesco Vezzoli and David Halberg at New York City historical landmark St. Bart’s Church. Looking back to the origins of ballet in the royal courts of the Renaissance, Vezzoli and Hallberg undertake an archaeology of movement in this revolutionary performance that brings the past into dialogue with the present.

Animating New York with a diverse series of ground-breaking performances taking place at cultural landmarks and locations including Times Square, The Museum of Modern Art, Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, and Pioneer Works, among many others, Performa 15 sparks new ways of looking at the city.

Join us for three exciting weeks of live art, talks and seminars, artists’ classes and experiments, and an array of invigorating events all around town and at our biennial headquarters, the Performa Hub (47 Walker Street, open everyday from noon to 8pm), designed by the winner of our first ever architectural Hub Competition, Christoph a. Kumpusch and his office Forward slash (/) ARCHITEKTUR.

November 4 - Opening Night + Launch Party
MATCH - Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston, 3400 Main St, Houston, Texas 77002
Part of the Joe’s Pub Series

7:00 Pre-show reception - MATCH Gallery
8:00 performance by Bridget Everett - MATCH Box 3
9:00 Lott Entertainment Presents Launch Party - MATCH Gallery

It’s our first show in our first season and the start of the first ever Joe’s Pub Series outside of New York, and we invite you to attend!

Come celebrate the kickoff of Lott Entertainment Presents and the Joe’s Pub Series in Houston at MATCH with New York’s hottest cabaret performers, Bridget Everett. Named the “most exciting performer in New York City” by The Village Voice, Bridget is a mainstay at Joe’s Pub at the Public in New York where she performs regularly to sold out audiences.

Hot off the heels of her new Comedy Central special Gynecological Wonder, her guest appearance in the Oddball Comedy Tour with Aziz Ansari and Amy Schumer and a jaw-dropping appearance in this summer’s blockbuster Trainwreck, New York’s downtown darling will hit the Houston stage and armed with a bottle (or two) of chardonnay as well as the songs and stories that have been captivating sold-out audiences at Joe’s Pub.

The show runs November 4-7, but we would love to celebrate with you at our opening night + launch party on November 4. Tickets are $100 for individuals or $500 for a table of four which includes a bottle of bubbly.

- Tickets to Opening Night on November 4 (includes entry to the pre-show reception and the Launch Party after the show with complimentary food and drinks): http://www.lottentertainmentpresents.com/#!special-events/ielhp
- $50 Tickets to the November 5-7 performances: http://www.lottentertainmentpresents.com/#!Bridget-Everett/pkr3j/55e080e50cf28ffc7eeabe1e

Lott Entertainment Presents Board of Directors
Malcolm Hackney - Stuart Folb - Mark Sullivan - Pamela Ulmer - Janet Phelps

Bridget Everett is suitable for ages 18 and up. Seating is cabaret style at tables of four and general admission. If you purchase 3 or fewer tickets, be prepared to get cozy with a stranger!

Join The Center for Creative Work, The Creative Writing Program, and Students for Justice in Palestine at University of Houston for a reading and conversation with Philip Metres.

Philip Metres’ writing, collected in several books, has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two Arab American Book Awards, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, the PEN/Heim Translation Grant, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Akron Poetry Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the inaugural George W. Hunt, S.J. Award for Excellence in Journalism, Literature & the Arts.

Listen to an audio version of some of Phil’s poems (the Abu Ghraib arias) here: http://philipmetres.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/abughraibarias-2-audio-2013.mp3

ONE WEEK LEFT TO APPLY!

Application closes Wednesday, October 15 @5pm CST

Artadia is accepting applications for the 2015 Houston Artadia Awards from all visual artists who have lived and worked throughout Harris County, TX for two years or more.

A preliminary panel will evaluate all online submissions and select 10 finalists in late October. A second panel of curators will visit Houston in November to conduct studio visits with each finalist and select Awardees to receive unrestricted Artadia Awards between $5,000 and $20,000. The 2015 Houston Awardees will be announced in late November.

The Houston Artadia Awards are:
- Open to artists and collaboratives at any stage in their career
- Free of application fees and project outline requirements
- A chance to have your work seen by a panel of prominent curators
- Image-based
- Merit-based
- Unrestricted

For access to the application and eligibility requirements, visit artadia.submittable.com

Prize in Translation

Deadline Extended To September 21st

Dear Translators!

We are excited to announce that the deadline for the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation has been extended to September 21st. You now have three more weeks to edit, submit, and send your questions our way. To those of you who have already submitted, please know that makes us pleased as punch.

We can’t wait to read your translations, to see which prose piece our judge Ammiel Alcalay chooses, cut the winner a check for $1,000 and to print the winning entry next spring, in issue 28.2.

No Land’s Song, the latest documentary from Iranian filmmaker Ayat Najafi (Football Under Cover), follows a charismatic central character as she struggles to produce an all-women concert in Iran. Composer Sara Najafi’s (Ayat’s sister) has two motivations: she wants to use the female voice to its fullest potential and in doing so protest Iran’s ban on female soloists performing in front of men. Najafi’s film, which manages many moments of levity in the service of exposing an absurd logic of artistic repression, won the Human Rights Watch (HRW) Film Festival’s Nestor Almendros Award, the only honor the festival bestows.

Read the full review on Hyperallergic here.

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2014 grants. Designed to support writing about contemporary art, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

In its 2014 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $600,000 to twenty writers. Ranging from $6,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books and short-form writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to self-published blogs.

Articles
Elissa Auther, Senga Nengudi: The Performing Body (Denver, CO)
Andrea K. Scott, No Picnic: The Rematerialization of Digital Art (New York, NY)
Aliza Shvarts, Unseen Acts: The Material Force of Nothing (Brooklyn, NY)

Blogs
Kate Palmer Albers, Project K: Photography and Art in the Age of Social Media (Los Angeles, CA)
Christopher Howard, In Terms Of (Brooklyn, NY)
Silvia Kolbowski, Another platform for art (New York, NY)
Lee Rosenbaum, CultureGrrl (Fort Lee, NJ)
Daniel Temkin, esoteric.codes (Astoria, NY)

Books
Erin Aldana, Xerox Art in Brazil and Argentina, 1970-1980 (San Diego, CA)
Svetlana Boym, Off Modern (Cambridge, MA)
Kaira M. Cabañas, Expressive Restraint: Modern Art and Madness in Brazil and Beyond (Rio de Janiero, Brazil)
Suzanne Hudson, Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process (Santa Monica, CA)
Sharon Irish, Stephen Willats in the Yew Kay (Urbana, IL)
Janet Koplos, The Loyal Opposition: The Life and Times of Chicago’s Controversial New Art Examiner (St. Paul, MN)
Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith, Media Metahistory: The Radical Art and Ideas of Peter Watkins (Brooklyn, NY)
Andrew Wasserman, Bang! We’re All Dead! The Places of Nuclear Fear in 1980s America (Ruston, LA)

Short-Form Writing
Johanna Fateman (New York, NY)
Corrine Fitzpatrick (Brooklyn, NY)
Maurice Berger (New York, NY)
James Trainor (New York, NY)

Art Writing Workshop
The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program is pleased to continue its partnership with the International Art Critics Association/USA Section, to give practicing writers the opportunity to strengthen their work through one-on-one consultations with leading art critics. For a list of 2014 Art Writing Workshop recipients, click here.

For updates on events and publications by Arts Writers grantees, follow the program on Twitter @artswriters.

The Arts Writers Grant Program is funded by the Warhol Foundation and administered by Creative Capital.

Wu Tsang: Not in my language
22 November 2014–8 February 2015

Opening: Friday, 21 November, 6–9 pm

Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270
CH-8005 Zürich Switzerland
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 11am–6pm,
Thursday 11am–8pm,
Saturday–Sunday 10am–5pm
www.migrosmuseum.ch

Wu Tsang (b. 1982) is an artist, performer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His multimedia-oriented oeuvre focuses on narratives that construct identity and the self in relation to others. In particular, Tsang is interested in the socio-political dimensions of communities and is also significantly inspired by his involvement with queer, trans, and immigrant communities in Los Angeles. Evoking “the underground” as a site of cultural resistance, Tsang considers how fantasy can play an important role in representing social movements. For instance, his award-winning 2012 film Wildness documents a legendary party venue in Los Angeles, which has been a popular meeting point for the Latin American transgender community for decades. Through magical realism and personal narrative, the film invites discussion of documentary strategies and societal circumstances. Wu Tsang’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe brings together works from the years 2008 to 2014.

Wu Tsang’s works have been presented at the Tate Modern (London), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum (New York), the MCA (Chicago), and MOCA (Los Angeles). In 2012, Tsang took part in the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial (New York), the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea) and the Liverpool Biennial (Great Britain). His documentary film Wildness has received many awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest 2012.

Curated by Raphael Gygax, Curator, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

In early 2015, a JRP|Ringier publication will be released in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

The University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts invites you to an INTERSECTIONS Community Meeting.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 3:00pm

2310 Elgin Street (Elgin and Dowling), Eldorado Ballroom , Ground Floor

Hosted by Project Row Houses

Special guest: Artist Payam Sharifi (Houston, Berlin)

INTERSECTIONS is two-year initiative aimed at building knowledge and changing perceptions of Muslim societies through contemporary art. Throughout the span of the project, four artists from different parts of the world will be commissioned by the UH Mitchell Center to develop new performance-based works in Houston that reflect the complexity of Houston’s many Muslim cultures. The initiative is driven by a steering committee of faculty, artists, and community members, and will also encompass monthly meetings at which new stakeholders may help guide and refine the project and expand its scope and reach. The Mitchell Center received a two year grant from the Building Bridges program – which is administered by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art – to launch this ambitious project. INTERSECTIONS will culminate in new works presented in spring 2015 and 2016. More about INTERSECTIONS and Building Bridges can be found at the Mitchell Center website.

At this month’s community meeting, artist Payam Sharifi will discuss the work of his collective, Slavs and Tatars, and the project they are creating as part of INTERSECTIONS. Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.

We’d also like to hear from you — your feedback and ideas — since community participation will help to guide this project.

This is an open meeting and we hope you will invite others to join us. All are welcome.

Artist as Activist: apply now

Application deadline: October 13, 2014

www.rauschenbergfoundation.org

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation announced today that it will build on its recent grant-making pilots and for the first time in its history roll out a series of open calls for proposals. Over the next six months, the foundation will announce new grant opportunities related to arts and culture as well as efforts to address climate change. The first open call launches today, September 8.
Letters of interest are invited for the Artist as Activist program, which will support a wide range of creative professionals to tackle pressing issues around the globe. Current grant opportunities include a two-year fellowship for artists, designers, and other creative thinkers working to address problems facing societies in the U.S. and beyond, as well as ongoing travel and research grants for similar artists.

For specific program details, applicants should visit www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/grants. Fellowship letters of interest will be accepted from September 8 to October 13, while Artist as Activist travel and research grant applications will be accepted on a rolling basis between September 8, 2014 and March15, 2015. Fellows will receive up to 100,000 USD in project support while Artist as Activist travel and research grants will range from 2,500 to 10,000 USD.

The Artist as Activist program is designed in response to a growing body of artists working in service of a larger social purpose. The central goal of the Artist as Activist program is to ensure such artists have the kind of flexible support required to execute ambitious creative projects intended to move the needle on the critical issues of our times. The next call for proposals, which will support innovative efforts to address climate change, will be announced on November 10.

About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation:
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation fosters the legacy of the artist’s life, work, and philosophy that art can change the world. The foundation supports initiatives at the intersection of arts and issues that embody the fearlessness, innovation, and multidisciplinary approach that Robert Rauschenberg exemplified in both his art and philanthropic endeavors. In the last year alone, the foundation has broadened its philanthropic efforts from seven legacy grantees to 95 across the USA; loaned over 100 Rauschenberg artworks to 20 exhibitions globally; and converted Rauschenberg’s home and studio in Florida into a dynamic residency program for emerging and recognized artists.

Media contact Taylor Maxwell, BerlinRosen Public Affairs
T +1 646 200 5330 / [email protected]