TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2014
GIANDO ON THE WATER HONORING José Parlá
Internationally renowned, cutting edge Brooklyn-based visual artist
PERFORMANCES BY
Kotchegna Dance Company Nathan Parker Smith Trio BROOKLYNARTSCOUNCIL.ORG 55 Washington Street, Suite 218 Brooklyn, NY 11201 facebook.com/brooklynartscouncil @BKARTSCOUNCIL
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WELCOME TO ALIVE WITH ART! Tonight, Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) honors an outstanding member of Brooklyn’s cultural community, internationally-renowned visual artist José Parlá. While Parlá’s extraordinary talent and career is truly noteworthy and has brought him much well-deserved acclaim, it is his generous and enthusiastic spirit, passion for giving back, and overall Brooklyn pride that make him an especially fitting choice as our honoree. Parlá is committed to using his art to reflect the rich vibrancy of our borough’s past, present, and future. As he highlights the diversity of cultures and schools of thought that call Brooklyn home, Parlá uses his creativity to let audiences across the globe know that Brooklyn is definitely Alive with Art. BAC shares this belief, providing artists across the borough with opportunities to support and sustain their work and ensuring that Brooklyn residents of all ages and backgrounds can participate in the arts. For almost fifty years, BAC has used the arts to create community, bringing together Brooklynites from all walks of life through cultural programs. We could not do this important work without the support of our friends and partners, including each of you here tonight. Your generosity helps us keep the arts thriving throughout all of Brooklyn today, tomorrow, and for years to come. On behalf of the many artists, arts organizations and audiences that we serve, thank you so much for your support. Enjoy the evening!
Ella J. Weiss, President
Dr. Thomas F. Schutte, Board Chair
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HONOREE JOSÉ PARLÁ José Parlá is a Brooklyn-based artist who has been exhibiting internationally since 2000. Parlá is a polyglot of stories and memories who engages in the sub-cultures and values of urban life, and shares the natural world of the elsewhere community he observes and documents by creating a body of work that is at once universal, engaging, glorious, and mindexpanding to see. In addition to his 70-foot-long painting at Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center, Parlá has also made permanent mural paintings at BAM FISHER - Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; André Balazs' CHILTERN FIREHOUSE, London, UK; North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library by SNØHETTA; and at Concord City Place, City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2013, Parlá was invited to participate in dialogues held as part of NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio’s Talking Transitions initiative with Manon Slome, Chief Curator of No Longer Empty; and spoke with Anne Pasternak of Creative Time at the Standard Hotel’s Standard Talks: Outside the Lines event, moderated by Sunny Bates. At The Museum of Modern Art’s Pop Rally program, Parlá participated in a dialogue hosted by curator Sarah Suzuki with GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, historian Alan Ket, and Adam Mansbach, New York Times-bestselling author. Recently, Parlá’s solo exhibitions have taken place in Tokyo, Japan with Yuka Tsuruno Gallery and Haunch of Venison in London. The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of The British Museum, London; POLA Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; and The Burger Collection in Hong Kong. In 2012, the 11th Havana Biennial selected the Wrinkles of the City: Havana, Cuba project, which was completed in the same year for a vertically integrated collaboration between Parlá and French artist JR. Parlá and JR co-directed a documentary by the same title that was awarded the Grand Prize for Documentary Short and Best U.S. Premiere Documentary Short in 2013 at The Heartland Film Festival, Indianapolis, IN. Parlá started painting in the early 1980s, exhibiting his works in the streets of Miami, and studied at Miami Dade Community College, New World School of the Arts and Savannah College of Art & Design. 3
ABOUT BROOKLYN ARTS COUNCIL (BAC) Founded in 1966, Brooklyn Arts Council is a catalyst that supports the health and growth of the arts community throughout the borough’s amazing diversity of neighborhoods. We are dedicated to serving Brooklyn artists and cultural organizations, and to ensuring that residents of all backgrounds and ages have access to affordable arts experiences. From Greenpoint to Coney Island, and from Bay Ridge to East New York, BAC helps keep Brooklyn Alive with Art. Proceeds from Alive with Art will support BAC's programs and services throughout 2014 including: • BAC’s Arts in Education programs have played a critical role in keeping the arts alive in the public schools for over 25 years. In 2013 alone, our AIE programs employed over 300 artists at more than 75 program sites, and gave almost 20,000 students, teachers, parents, and seniors opportunities to create and experience art in all disciplines. • BAC’s Creative Coalitions program helps build arts infrastructure in some of Brooklyn’s most underserved neighborhoods, including East New York, Brownsville, and eastern/southern Bushwick. Through a unique combination of community organizing and capacity building training for grassroots arts groups and emerging artists, this program leverages the power of the arts to foster long-term community and economic development. • In 2014, BAC awarded almost $300,000 in close to 200 grants for Brooklynbased artists and cultural groups, with funds provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts, supporting cultural projects throughout the borough. • This spring, BAC Folk Arts is presenting The Sweetest Song: Brooklyn Traditional Singers and Their Songs, an unprecedented series of 12 public concerts and 8 singing master classes at various Brooklyn venues. These programs will explore a range of singing traditions that are practiced and performed in Brooklyn’s immigrant and diaspora communities and engage New Yorkers in a creative, cross-cultural exchange.
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KEEPING BROOKLYN ALIVE WITH ART: BAC AT WORK THROUGHOUT THE BOROUGH How exactly does BAC keep Brooklyn Alive with Art? Read on for a few examples of how we impact every corner of Brooklyn and touch lives across the borough.
BAY RIDGE BAC Fiscal Sponsee Katherine Toukhy’s project RASMI provides young adults of Arab and Muslim descent with summer arts workshops that empower participants to break down stereotypes as they create their own self-portraits.
BEDFORD STUYVESANT This year, BAC Grants is supporting STooPS, an annual summer art event that connects Bed-Stuy homeowners and residents with local artists and businesses to host mini performances and art showcases on their stoops, yards, or sidewalks.
Brock Mills, Reddy Or Not, 2012.
DUMBO BAC Gallery offers emerging Brooklyn-based artists an opportunity to show their art in an environment frequented by a host of arts enthusiasts, collectors, and gallerists. This year, in commemoration of the lasting impact left by Superstorm Sandy, BAC Gallery presented For and About: Art and Reactions to Superstorm Sandy.
BROWNSVILLE
Photo credit: Russell Frederick
Since summer 2013, BAC Arts in Education has presented Photovoice, a digital photography program that uses art to help court-involved and at-risk teenagers at the Brownsville Community Justice Center learn constructive new tools for self-expression, while building self-esteem and life skills.
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BUSHWICK Through BAC’s Creative Coalitions program, we recently convened a panel of Bushwick-based arts professionals–including an arts administrator, a fine artist, a graphic designer, a photographer, a spoken word artist, and a writer–to discuss their careers and educations with teen art students and their families at El Puente’s Bushwick Leadership Center.
Last fall, in light of Superstorm Sandy’s lasting effect on Coney Island, BAC Arts in Education provided 38 seniors at two senior centers with ceramics workshops that offered participants the opportunity to share their life stories through art. This inspiring project culminated in a public mural comprised of the tiles on the Coney Island Boardwalk.
Photo credit: Jisun Min
CONEY ISLAND
EAST FLATBUSH BAC Arts in Education’s “History Alive” program provides approximately 50 students at Middle School for Arts and Philosophy with storytelling workshops that combine core English language skills with artistic expression. Students are paired with senior citizens for weekly interview sessions, during which both students and seniors share their life experiences. Students then transcribe these stories and publish them in a printed anthology.
Photo credit: Gregory Ingram
EAST NEW YORK BAC’s Creative Coalitions program in East New York has brought together a wide range of community members who are united in the belief that the arts can be a catalyst for positive change in their community. Now in its second year, the coalition is preparing for a collectivelyproduced series of free, public concerts featuring local talent and young people.
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FLATBUSH Through a BAC Grant, a team of artists are creating “Re-Envisioning the Homeless,” a public arts project that provides Flatbush’s homeless community with the opportunity to produce a collection of photographs and street performances. The Fall 2014 project will culminate in a free arts exhibition and a community meal open to members of the homeless and larger Flatbush communities.
As part of The Sweetest Song, BAC Folk Arts will offer a series of eight Master Class workshops taught by traditional singers from Caribbean, Eastern European, and South Asian cultures at Brooklyn Music School.
Uriye Kermenchikkli
The Morbid Anatomy Collection, Photo credit: Joanna Ebenstein
FORT GREENE
GOWANUS Inspired by the intersections of art and medicine, and beauty and death, BAC Fiscal Sponsee the Morbid Anatomy Museum is building a new permanent home to house a collection of artwork, books, photographs and other artifacts relating to medical museums, anatomical art, and the history of medicine and death in our society.
GREENPOINT BAC Grants is funding the Fowler Project Space Gallery Program, which hosts collaborative, self-directed shows for emerging artists, offering them the rare opportunity to organize and produce comprehensive exhibitions of their own work.
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MIDWOOD
Winston “Jeggae” Hoppie
As part of BAC Folk Arts’ The Sweetest Song, Midwood jazz drummer and tabla player Eric Alabaster will host the concert, "Pakistani Encounter: Midwood’s Master Ghazal and Thumri Singers" at Royal Catering Hall on May 9th. This concert will give audiences a rare opportunity to listen in on what is normally a private jam session featuring some of the most renowned Pakistani ghazal singers this side of Lahore.
PARK SLOPE This year, seniors at the Park Slope Neighborhood Center are learning creative writing and dramatization skills and creating skits to be shared with their community in theater classes provided by BAC Arts in Education.
PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS BAC Fiscal Sponsee PLG Arts is a community-based arts organization that produces low-cost programming in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, including an annual arts & crafts fair, a twice-monthly jazz series, visual arts exhibitions, free theatrical performances, and more.
RED HOOK
Keith Johnson
On May 8th, BAC Folk Arts will present “Ballads, Blues, and Banana Boat Songs” at the Jalopy Music Theatre as part of The Sweetest Song. A celebration of cross-cultural connections, this performance will feature blues singer Bearether Reddy, English/Scottish ballad singer Heather Wood, and Jamaican mento and reggae singer Keith Johnston.
Through BAC Arts in Education, 50 first-grade students at PS 277 are experiencing their first sustained experience in the arts as they explore clay sculpture.
WILLIAMSBURG BAC’s Arts Consultancy program connects BAC’s curatorial expertise and vast Registry of Brooklyn Artists (over 6,500 and counting!) with public agencies, corporate clients, real estate developers and community groups to place art in public and private spaces. Our work can be seen at the new luxury building 184 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, where we placed installations by two emerging Brooklyn artists in the lobby. 8
Photo credit: Jisun Min
SHEEPSHEAD BAY
EVENT SPONSORS Producer Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
Artist All HVAC Service Company Dnynia and Michael Armstrong Peter Aschkenasy and Pamela Brier Brickner Makow LLP Brooklyn College Robyn-Alain Feldman Hudson Companies, Inc. Theresa Schieber Terra CRG Ella and Mike Weiss Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf LLP
Director Brooklyn Bridge Realty Con Edison Deutsche Bank Excel Builders & Renovators Inc. TD Bank Dr. Thomas and Tess Schutte Ensemble Julia Chu
List in formation
PERFORMERS Tonight, we will enjoy jazz music from Brooklyn-based artist and BAC teaching artist Nathan Parker Smith, accompanied by Noah Berman on guitar and Ben Thomas on bass. Nathan Parker Smith is an active performer and educator who performs music throughout New York. Recent shows include performances at the Fat Cat, Spike Hill, Cameo, the Tea Lounge, and the WNYC Greene Space. He has been a BAC teaching artist since 2008. Smith holds a BM in studio music and jazz performance from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, and a MM in jazz composition and contemporary media from the Eastman School of Music. We will also have a special performance from BAC teaching artist Vado Diomande and members of Kotchegna Dance Company. Diomande is a former principal dancer with the National Ballet of the Ivory Coast and is versed in over 60 different ethnic dance and drum traditions from his native country. He is also the Keeper of the Tall Mask of the Forest, a sacred dance performed on stilts. Diomande teaches dance and drumming throughout New York City in public schools, colleges and private studios including the Alvin Ailey School and Manhattanville College.
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Pratt Institute and President Thomas F. Schutte congratulate Brooklyn Arts Council and JosĂŠ ParlĂĄ
Thank you for making Brooklyn Alive with Art!
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“This world is but a canvas to our imagination” Henry David Thoreau
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BrooklynArtsCouncil_4-5x7-5_SisterhoodFlatbushShare_4.5x7 4/8/14 2:21 PM Page 1
We join with the
Brooklyn Arts Council in honoring
José Parlá Fred Hugue First Vice President Director of Relationship Management Business Banking Group 757 Third Avenue New York, NY 646.790.3121
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We are pleased to support the
Brooklyn Arts Council Alive with Art Benefit -------------------Congratulations to this evening’s Honoree:
José Parla
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Theresa Schieber & Ray Rybak are proud to support brooklyn arts council. congratulations JosĂŠ ParlĂĄ!
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JTJ Ventures proudly supports Brooklyn’s artists! Congratulations to José Parlá and Brooklyn Arts Council!
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Congratulations to José Parlá!
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Brooklyn College salutes Brooklyn Arts Council for their commitment to the arts in a borough of artists.
3 Robyn-Alain Feldman salutes Brooklyn Arts Council and tonight’s honoree José Parlá for keeping Brooklyn Alive with Art! 3 24
You! k n a h T staff e l b i d e r cil nc to the i klyn Arts Coun rk on behalf of Broo passionate wo munity. r for you klyn' s arts com spirit and c of Broo ur enthusiasti lp With yo efforts, you he With Art ! tireless borough Alive keep the
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Sincere Thanks to the
Brooklyn Arts Council staff for their exemplary service in support of BAC's mission.
7 The Board of Directors Brooklyn Arts Council
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SPECIAL THANKS Event Commitee
Giando on the Water Joe Leone
Ellen Gottlieb, Chair Michele Arbeeny, Esq Julia Chu Jack Esterson, AIA Alan Ket Theresa Schieber Antonia Yuille Williams
Photographer Marvin Roberts
Award Vado Diomande
Centerpieces Carlos Mare aka Mare139
BAC BOARD OF DIRECTORS Honorary Chairman
Audrey Frank Anastasi Michele Arbeeny, Esq Julia Chu Jennifer L. Davis Jack Esterson, AIA Robyn-Alain Feldman Ellen Gottlieb Frazier Holloway Sidney R. Jean, Esq Alan Ket Sandhya R. Rao Theresa Schieber
Eric Adams Brooklyn Borough President
Chairman Thomas F. Schutte, PhD
Vice Chairs Peter Aschkenasy Antonia Yuille Williams
Secretary Michael A. Armstrong
Directors Emeritus
Treasurer
Theodore Gunn Marvin Numeroff Susan Rowland
Carl Self
President Ella J. Weiss
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BAC STAFF Ella J. Weiss, President Deniz Ayaz Kathleen Christie Reginald L. Douglas Melissa Estro Deborah Field Thomas Fordham Sarah Gepigon Malika L. Granville
Christopher MulĂŠ Katherine P. Higgins Rebecca Potts Tegan B. Roberts Morgan Lindsey Tachco Ethany Uttech Courtney J. Wendroff
BAC SUPPORTERS Brooklyn Arts Council programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council; New York City Department of Youth and Community Development; New York City Department for the Aging; New York City Councilmembers Laurie Cumbo, Vincent J. Gentile, Brad Lander, Stephen Levin, Alan Maisel, Steven Matteo, Carlos Menchaca, Antonio Reynoso, Mark Treyger, and Jumaane D. Williams; and Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams. Major corporate, foundation and in-kind support is provided by Altman Foundation; Booth Ferris Foundation; CME Group Community Foundation; Con Edison; Concord Baptist Christfund; Henry Nias Foundation; JPMorgan Chase Foundation; Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; MetroPlus Health Plan; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; M&T Bank; Rose M. Badgeley Residuary Charitable Trust; Smart Family Foundation; TD Charitable Foundation; The H.W. Wilson Foundation; The William Talbott Hillman Foundation; The Emma A. Sheafer Charitable Trust; The Laura B. Vogler Foundation, Inc.; The New York Community Trust; and Two Trees Management Co., LLC. Major individual supporters are Michele Arbeeny, Esq., Julia Chu, Ellen Gottlieb, and Nadia and Achilles Perry. Additional support comes from Materials for the Arts and WNYC, New York Public Radio.
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We proudly support Brooklyn Arts Council.
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3/21/13 11:30 AM
THE CITY OF NEW YORK OFFI CE OF THE MAYOR NEW YORK, NY 10007
April 29, 2014
Dear Friends: It is a great pleasure to welcome everyone to Brooklyn Arts Council’s Alive with Art benefit. Our city has always been a place where culture and creativity have thrived, and my Administration is determined to ensure that people from every neighborhood and every background can be part of the extraordinary cultural life of the five boroughs. BAC has been working toward this goal for nearly 50 years, supporting the Brooklyn arts community and working to engage Brooklynites of all ages in the visual, performing, and literary arts. By supporting local artists, offering them employment opportunities, and providing instruction to thousands of students through its Arts in Education programs, the Council unites the people it serves in celebration of the diverse Brooklyn arts scene. I am grateful for the important role BAC plays in helping us maintain our reputation as a global center of culture. On behalf of all New Yorkers, congratulations to José Parlá, tonight’s honoree for his impressive career and all he has contributed to the arts in Brooklyn. Please accept my best wishes for a wonderful event and continued success. Sincerely,
Bill de Blasio Mayor
Michael & Dnynia Armstrong
celebrate Brooklyn Arts Council’s hard work on behalf of Brooklyn’s arts community!
111 Front Street, Suite 218
Artists: Megan Hays • Colleen Ho Sarah Nicole Phillips • Carlton Scott Sturgill
Artist Talk: Thursday, May 1, 6:30pm Exhibition: Through July 31, 2014
Michael & Dnynia Armstrong
celebrate Brooklyn Arts Council’s hard work on behalf of Brooklyn’s arts community!
We support Brooklyn Arts Council and congratulate José Parlá !
400 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249 Tel: (718) 387-7000 Fax: (718) 387-7138 www.giandoonthewater.com