NOW Performance

Mary Coble, Documentation of the live performance Maneuvering with Difficulty: Mike and November, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Overgaden Institution of Contemporary Art

NOW Performance

Building on the Corcoran's contemporary exhibition series, NOW at the Corcoran, NOW Performance features live performances by emerging and mid-career artists. Highlighting new and site-specific work, NOW Performance addresses issues central to the local, national, and global communities of Washington, D.C.

Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, KPFK, 1972

January 29, 2013, 7 p.m.

For Men on the Line, KPFK, 1972, Fraser reenacts a 1972 radio broadcast of a dialogue among four men as they discuss their sympathies, anxieties, and struggles with the burgeoning feminist movement. By revisiting a conversation that occurred 40 years ago and performing all of the roles, Fraser addresses the complexity of reconciling disparate realities and the ongoing struggle for gender equality. Men on the Line, KPFK, 1972, was originally commissioned by and performed as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1954–1980, a multi-museum collaboration that explored the Los Angeles art scene.

Fraser’s work has been identified with performance, video, project-based art, context art, and institutional critique. She has presented projects, performances, and interventions in museums and exhibitions throughout Europe and North and South America. She was a founding member of the feminist performance group the V-Girls (1986–96), the project-based artist initiative Parasite (1997–98), and the cooperative art gallery Orchard (2005–08). She was also co-organizer, with Helmut Draxler, of Services, a “working-group exhibition” that toured eight venues in Europe and the United States between 1994 and 2001. Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser was published by MIT Press in 2005. Fraser is Professor of New Genres at UCLA’s Department of Art and visiting faculty at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Men on the Linewas originally produced by West of Rome, curated by Emi Fontana for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, and organized by the Getty Research Institute and LA><ART.

Tickets for the January 28 Visiting Artist lecture and the January 29 NOW Performance.

Shodekeh

March 13, 2013, 7 p.m.

Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero is a professional beatboxer and vocal percussionist currently working in the Baltimore area. He has applied his beatboxing to everything from ballet classes and Lithuanian folk singing to experimental improvisation and collaborations with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Channeling musical instruments and soundscapes, he vocalizes dynamic emulations of the world around him: drum sets, turntables, ocean waves, and sleigh bells.

For his Corcoran appearance, Shodekeh will collaborate with students from the Corcoran College of Art + Design and dancer/choreographer Krysia Bock. Shodekeh is the founding director of Embody, A Festival of the Vocal Arts, which strives for artistic and cultural unity through a variety of international vocal styles. Shodekeh has been commissioned to make original musical compositions by the Kennedy Center and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and he has created musical interpretations for exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the American Visionary Arts Museum. Shodekeh is currently the Department of Dance Accompanist at Towson University.

iona ROZEAL brown:  battle of yestermore

April 5, 2013, 7 p.m.
Admission is free. Pre-registration encouraged.

A performance presented by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in conjunction with the 2013 National Cherry Blossom Festival.

Washington, D.C., native iona ROZEAL brown extends the allegories of her paintings in her first work of live performance. Originally commissioned for the Performa 2011 festival in New York,battle of yestermore draws from the myth-based genres of Kabuki and Noh theater, as well as hip-hop culture and vogueing, made famous in the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960s. This will be the debut performance of battle of yestermore in Washington, D.C.

Born in Washington, D.C., iona ROZEAL brown earned a B.Sc. in Kinesiological Sciences at the University of Maryland in College Park in 1991, a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999, and in 2002, an MFA from Yale University.  In 2001 she traveled to Asia and in 2005 received a grant enabling her to live for half a year as a guest artist in Japan, where she studied kabuki drama.  Her work has been featured in Black Belt at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New Visions: Emerging Trends in African American Art at the Smithsonian, in a3 . . . black on both sides at Spelman College in Atlanta, and 30 Americans: Rubell Family Collection, and she has had one-artist exhibitions around the United States, including All Falls Down at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.  Her work is in the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, CA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.  brown works as an artist and a D.J. in both New York City and Washington, D.C.

Mary Coble

Upcoming

Through performance, video, and installation, Mary Coble explores the limits of her own body’s physical abilities while identifying and challenging social limitations and regulations. Past performances include binding her breasts continually with duct tape, inscribing the names of queer hate-crime murder victims on her body with inkless tattoos, and using flag semaphore to convey the difficulties of human connection and communication. Coble will be performing an original commission at the Corcoran. Coble has performed as part of Commitment Issues, FADO Performance Art Network, Toronto (2011); Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2007); and Performa 05, Artists Space, New York (2005). She has had solo exhibitions at the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2012) and Galerie Nina Menocal in Mexico City (2007).

Her work has recently been included in exhibitions such as re.act.feminism #2—a performing archive at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark (2012); Surface Tension: the Future of Water at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, New York (2012); Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive at Nikolaj Center of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, Denmark (2009); and Uncommon Beauty at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2008). Coble’s work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Originally from North Carolina, Coble received her BFA from University of North Carolina and her MFA from George Washington University. She is currently a professor at the Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark, and lives in Copenhagen.