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The Broad Announces Second Season of Summer Happenings at The Broad, Popular Late-Night Music and Performance Series
Summer Happenings line-ups to include performances by Jenny Hval, Vaginal Davis, Kembra Pfahler, Xiu Xiu, Devendra Banhart, Afrirampo, Miho Hatori, A Place to Bury Strangers, Geneva Jacuzzi, Zebra Katz, DJ Rashida, Downtown Boys, Mecca Vazie Andrews and more
LOS ANGELES, May 23, 2017—Following the success of last year’s summer programs, the museum today announced the return of Summer Happenings at The Broad, inspired by artists in the Broad collection and the current exhibition, Oracle. The late-night series will animate important influences of leading contemporary artists through music and performance, fluctuating between happenings, salons and concerts.
Co-curated by luminaries such as performance artist Ron Athey; artist and Afropunk festival co-founder James Spooner; curator Ryu Takahashi; and 2016 inaugural curators Bradford Nordeen, independent curator and writer, and Brandon Stosuy, Editor-in-Chief at The Creative Independent; Summer Happenings at The Broad will be held one Saturday night a month and will occupy various spaces throughout the museum and public outdoor plaza. A constellation of thrilling musicians, performers and multimedia artists will take their thematic calling from Andy Warhol’s muse Nico, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Basquiat and organizing themes from Oracle. The series features performances by Devendra Banhart, Vaginal Davis, Miho Hatori, Xiu Xiu, Zebra Katz, A Place To Bury Strangers and more. Tickets to Summer Happenings at The Broad also include access to the full museum.
The Broad also announced a new Series Pass option for Summer Happenings at The Broad tickets. Ticket purchasers will be able to purchase a pass for all four Summer Happenings for a savings of $25. Additionally, a create-your-own series option will allow purchasers to select any two or more events and save $5 on each.
Summer Happenings at The Broad are made possible in part by leading partner East West Bank. Series Pass and individual tickets for Summer Happenings at The Broad will go on sale Wednesday, May 24 at noon PT.
THE BROAD PROGRAMMING IN DETAIL
SUMMER HAPPENINGS AT THE BROAD
Summer Happenings at The Broad is a series of late-night performances that will be held one Saturday night a month from June through September 2017. Summer Happenings is inspired by art in the Broad collection, while shifting focus toward the immersive and immaterial, including performance, dance, music and spoken word. Occupying various spaces throughout the museum and plaza, Summer Happenings at The Broad will orchestrate a constellation of thrilling musicians, performers and multimedia artists. The performers will take their thematic calling from artists such as Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as The Broad’s current exhibition, Oracle. These events fluctuate between happenings, salons and scenes and will animate important influences of the leading artists of our time.
Summer Happening at The Broad—Warhol Icon
Saturday, June 24 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $25 in advance and will be available beginning May 24 at noon PT at thebroad.org
The first program in Summer Happenings at The Broad is Warhol Icon, inspired by Nico, the German singer-songwriter, model and actress who became famous as one of Andy Warhol’s superstars in the 1960s. The program covers the breadth of her work from the Velvet Underground, through later synth collaborations, to her neo-folk approaches. Musical performances by Jenny Hval, Kembra Pfahler, Rose McDowall, Tiny Vipers and Geneva Jacuzzi evoke Nico’s experimental approaches toward music, while forging new frontiers within each artist’s respective practices. Vaginal Davis weaves her performance with a rare screening of Philippe Garrel’s collaborative film starring Nico and Pierre Clementi, The Inner Scar, the histrionics of which are echoed in Nao Bustamante’s video installation, positioned in the lobby of The Broad. Taken as a whole, Warhol Icon surveys a lasting musical legacy still resoundingly felt today.
Guest Curators:
Bradford Nordeen is an independent curator and writer who lives in Los Angeles. The founder of Dirty Looks, a bicoastal platform for queer experimental film and video, and its site-specific, offshoot series Dirty Looks: On Location, Nordeen served as the Platinum Programmer for Outfest Los Angeles, 2013 – 2016. His writing has been published in Art in America, Afterimage, Lambda Literary, X-TRA, Little Joe, and BUTT Magazine. Nordeen is the author and co-editor of three Dirty Looks publications: Dirty Looks at MoMA, Check Your Vernacular and the Dirty Looks Volumes series, as well as the forthcoming survey, Analog Tendencies.
Brandon Stosuy is Editor in Chief at The Creative Independent. He was formerly Director of Editorial Operations at Pitchfork. He co-curates the annual Basilica Soundscape festival in Hudson, New York and the Tinnitus music series in NYC. He and the artist Matthew Barney have collaborated on a series of live events and publications. ADAC, their most recent book-length project, was published in 2013 by Dashwood. The collaborative exhibition, Rural Violence, opened in August 2015 in Troy, New York, and had editions in Long Island City, NYC in November 2015, and in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2016. He has also collaborated on exhibitions and books with the German artist Kai Althoff and the American artist Brody Condon. His anthology, Up is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974- 1992, was published by NYU Press in 2006. His first children’s book, Music Is…, was published in 2016 and his second children’s book is forthcoming in 2017.
Summer Happening at The Broad—Strange Forest
Saturday, July 29 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $25 in advance and will be available beginning May 24 at noon PT at thebroad.org
The second program in Summer Happenings at The Broad takes its title from the work of Takashi Murakami, who has long found inspiration in the collaged cultures that emerged in Japan at the end of the Tokugawa period of isolation. Strange Forest presents artists who work with those traditional and Western influences in real-time. The evening opens with Tokiko Ihara, who plays the Sho, a meditative traditional woodwind instrument. This contrasts with the blistering female drum and guitar duo Afrirampo and the solo artist Oorutaichi, known for his “drifting folklore music” that combines electronic music, folk and pop with his own invented language. Those Japan-based groups are joined by ex-DNA member Ikue Mori and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, who arrived to NYC in the 1970s and 1990s respectively, both unintentionally joining bands and quickly developing their own styles in the downtown NYC music scene. The evening also features L.A. based Devendra Banhart, whose last album “Ape in the Pink Marble” was deeply inspired by Japanese culture, and onetime Ponytail member Dustin Wong in collaboration with Takako Minekawa.
Guest Curators
Ryu Takahashi is an independent curator, producer and artist manager based in New York and Tokyo. He was formerly a publicist at Sony Music, and as a codirector/curator at VACANT, a gallery and performance space in Harajuku Tokyo, he has worked with artists like David Byrne, Zs, Jenny Hval and Devendra Banhart. He is currently managing artists Arto Lindsay and BIGYUKI.
Brandon Stosuy is Editor in Chief at The Creative Independent. He was formerly Director of Editorial Operations at Pitchfork. He co-curates the annual Basilica Soundscape festival in Hudson, New York and the Tinnitus music series in NYC. He and the artist Matthew Barney have collaborated on a series of live events and publications. ADAC, their most recent book-length project, was published in 2013 by Dashwood. The collaborative exhibition, Rural Violence, opened in August 2015 in Troy, New York, and had editions in Long Island City, NYC in November 2015, and in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2016. He has also collaborated on exhibitions and books with the German artist Kai Althoff and the American artist Brody Condon. His anthology, Up is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974- 1992, was published by NYU Press in 2006. His first children’s book, Music Is…, was published in 2016 and his second children’s book is forthcoming, also on Simon & Schuster, in 2017.
Summer Happening at The Broad—Oracle
Saturday, Aug. 26 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $25 in advance and will be available beginning May 24 at noon PT at thebroad.org
August’s Summer Happening is inspired by themes of globalization, surveillance and the underlying systems and forces at work in the world that make up the current exhibition Oracle. Oracle the Happening strives to reclaim that heightened experience and anxiety as artists pick up abundant stereotypes and play prophet, sage, historian and cheerleader. A Place to Bury Strangers performs what could be a soundtrack for the apocalypse, while Xiu Xiu make music for people opposed to and opposed by the horror and disquiet of life. Transformative performance artist Linda Mary Montano offers healings and blessings, and Keijaun Thomas will perform his work, “Distance is not Separation”. The third-floor galleries will feature a Xenolalia room – the Christian missionary spirit gift or ability to speak in an unlearned language – with poets Raquel Gutiérrez, Elliot Reed and Lisa Teasley, and musicians Gabie Strong, Pauline Gloss and David Harrow.
Guest Curators
Ron Athey is a performance artist associated with Los Angeles music scenes, body art and a 1990s response to HIV/AIDS. His first outing was Premature Ejaculation, a noise/actionist group started with Rozz Williams in 1981. Athey has toured performance projects internationally, including commissions from the English Arts Council, MADRE Napoli and Kampnagel Hamburg. In 2013 Dominic Johnson produced an extensive monograph on Intellect Press: Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Life of Ron Athey. Curatorially, Athey has, alongside his collaborator Vaginal Davis, co-curated the Visions of Excess events at Platinum Oasis/OUTFEST, Fierce Festival Birmingham UK and Aksioma/Kapelica at Castle Codelli in Ljubljana Slovenia. Athey is currently working on a participant-based automatism project with the composer and opera director Sean Griffin.
James Spooner is a working artist from New York living in Los Angeles. He first gained recognition with his critically acclaimed cult documentary “Afro-punk,” which provided the inspiration for the Afropunk festivals that James also co-founded and cocurated for four years before leaving the organization. He has spent the last decade tattooing in his Los Angeles private studio Monocle Tattoo, where he developed a pioneering vegan tattoo procedure. Currently he is finishing his first graphic novel in which he is both the author and illustrator.
Summer Happening at The Broad—Jean-Michel Basquiat
Saturday, Sept. 23 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $25 in advance and will be available beginning May 24 at noon PT at thebroad.org
Punk meets hip hop, gay meets straight, black meets white, and downtown party meets uptown art world— influences that made Jean Michel Basquiat the man he was. Zebra Katz and Downtown Boys provide a musical clash of punk and hip hop. DJ Rashida and Michael Stock turn The Oculus into a downtown dance party. Mecca V A and The MOVEMENT movement and Jay Carlon offer choreographed interventions and “dance-bombs.” Shani Crowe’s performance is centered on cultural coiffure and beauty ritual related to the diasporic African, and Damon Locks will present a sound piece based on themes found in Basquiat’s paintings.
Guest Curator:
James Spooner is a working artist from New York living in Los Angeles. He first gained recognition with his critically acclaimed cult documentary “Afro-punk,” which provided the inspiration for the Afropunk festivals that James also co-founded and cocurated for four years before leaving the organization. He has spent the last decade tattooing in his Los Angeles private studio Monocle Tattoo, where he developed a pioneering vegan tattoo procedure. Currently he is finishing his first graphic novel in which he is both the author and illustrator.