Archer Aymes Lost and Found Retrospective: A Juneteenth Exhibition

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EXCERPT FROM TALK BY CARL HANCOCK RUX “Carl Hancock Rux's dazzling new play ‘Talk’ takes us back to the golden age when the panel was the best theater of ideas around. There's an intellectual riot going on in New York, and we’re part of it.

History matters. Art matters.” — Margo Jefferson, The New York Times So many pieces to put back together again. So many … dear Moderator … So many pieces—a mystery but real. There is a son.

There is a mother. And there was a woman who died—there was a man who killed himself. Was the man the son—the one who took his own life? Was the mother the one who died unidentified in the halls of great antiquity? The one who fell to her death, from the upper balcony? Did she arrive, young and eighteen—an eighteen-year-old goddess—in a raincoat with a scarf on her head, carrying with her the words of Albert Camus? Or was she not eighteen, perhaps older … ancient? An ancient performance … the mother who had betrayed the son? Did she think to herself, perhaps it is better to die now, for the life of my son? Perhaps it is better to die. Did she arrive at the museum … ailing … her fingers tracing a large amphora? Did it tip over? Was it the first to smash against an absolute black marble floor? Did she vanish amongst the crowd—catch a glimpse of her son there amongst the protestors, intending to destroy antiquity, things that are aged, that are of before? Did she then say to him, if it is antiquity that must be destroyed in order for you to have a voice, then let me be that sacrifice … let me? Did she climb the stone steps toward the balcony, then … lean against the marble railing and hurl herself down … onto an absolute black marble floor? Did she? Did the son observe her body, there amongst the crowd of police and protestors—his mother—lying there? … Did he, the son, gaze upon her and think to himself, first she had failed him … but now it was he who had failed her … because it was not his intention that she die … rather it was his intention to live? Did he take her body with him then? Did he take her body with him wherever he went? Had he always? Did he see her body in everybody? Did he take his own life out of guilt, then? Did she have life then?

Could she continue his life then? Did she rise up from the dead and give birth to him again? Has she been waiting all these years, just to give birth to him again?

— Monologue by Apollodoros, from the Coda to Talk

CONVERSATION SERIES: MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY

ARCHER AYMES LOST AND FOUND RETROSPECTIVE: A JUNETEENTH EXHIBITION sunday, june 19, 2022 from 3:00pm to 6:00pm Curated by Carl Hancock Rux and Dianne Smith Featuring performances by mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran, pianist Aaron Diehl, and Jamel Gaines Creative Outlet Dance Theatre

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Prospect Hill Foundation, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council.

Cover photo: irinaorel.

2022 SEASON SPONSORS

Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street

CURATOR’S NOTE

BY TAVIA NYONG’O, CURATOR OF PUBLIC PROGRAMMING, PARK AVENUE ARMORY 328. That is the approximate distance between Uvalde and Galveston, Texas. Galveston, for any who don’t know, is the location where Union General Gordon Granger delivered the emancipation approximation to the enslaved folk of Texas on June 19, 1865.1 Everyone reading this today knows what happened at Uvalde. Between the gut-wrenching present and a seemingly settled past, there rises the politics of memorial and commemoration that a divided nation must return to with an ever-greater anxiety, as the social fabric of that nation continues to fray. Three hundred miles of distance mapped onto the span of a land first peopled by the Karankawa nation, striated by centuries of Spanish and American settler colonialism, seized from Mexico by the US in the 1840s, and today the battleground of voting rights, guns, abortion, LGBT rights, and the rising tide of latter-day fascism.

The Juneteenth events that are curated by the polymathic artist and impresario Carl Hancock Rux for this weekend all reflect upon the astonishing fact that, as Pulitzer-prize winning historian (and Texas-native) Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, until last year there was no national “date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.”2 A Black Texas tradition, signed into federal holiday in 2021 by President Joe Biden, now fulfills that contested function. That a post-Trump regime has thrown its weight behind a date associated with delayed announcement of emancipation in Texas, years after Lincoln signed the proclamation, suggests that Black history is still taking place in the key of an old Basie tune: “Sent for you yesterday, here you come today.” It also intimates that the State of Texas remains a battleground for the soul of our democracy.

At Park Avenue Armory, home of the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard (the first militia to respond to Lincoln’s call for volunteers during the Civil War), Carl Hancock Rux has drawn from his inventory of literary, musical, and dramatic accomplishments to present the archive of a literal iconoclast, Archer Aymes. The obscure object of desire of Rux’s 2001 play, Talk, Aymes is an imaginary hero of desperate invention, presiding over a retrospective which can also be seen as an overture for “I Dream a Dream that Dreams Back at Me” later this evening at Lincoln Center.3 It picks up a conversation that began at the Harlem Stage, a discussing evoking a Black counterpoint to American patriotism, bringing the freedom dreams of those of us who live in the wake of slavery into the new social environment.

In the play Talk, a panel discussion is convened in the fabled Museum of Antiquities to discuss the legacy of a mysterious artist who had once stormed the temple of knowledge like Jesus with a whip. Born in Marks, Mississippi, Archer Aymes shot to fame in 1959 on the strength of his surrealist novel Mother and Son, which became a succès de scandale on the New York literary scene.

Meteoric fame was followed by a short tenure as a literature professor at NYU, the founding of an artistic cult to neo-Dionysus, and an experimental film (which is reconstructed from lost footage in the grand Veterans Room) also called Mother and Son. In 1971, Aymes died in prison awaiting trial for unlawful protest and second-degree manslaughter following a protest he organized at the very Museum at which the panel discussion was being held. Spanning Black Power, the literary avant-garde, and the revolution of the poor, Talk also drew upon the forms of classical Greek drama and philosophy to stage its ironic intervention in the house of culture. In lieu of the objects of the fictional Museum of Antiquities, altars created by Dianne Smith and Carl Hancock Rux are placed throughout the grand historic rooms of the Armory, offering spaces of reflection and remembrance. In the Board of Officers Room stands a sculptural altar predominantly constructed by objects taken from the apartment of Rux’s great aunt Ellen Rux, who (perhaps ironically) died in the very hospital in which she was born three minutes or so after her identical twin sister, Helen.

Quarantined throughout a very long and exasperating illness, Ms. Rux died alone just shy of her 92nd birthday during one of the over-burdened hospital’s mandatory lockdowns. Though not infected by Coronavirus, she remained there without the ability to receive in-person familial visitation. Rux (in the character of Aymes) dedicates the Aymes altars to her.

The musical program offered by acclaimed mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran invites a hushed audience into Rux’s selections from Aymes’ record collection, beginning with “It Must Be So,” an aria from Dr. Pangloss’ prize pupil, slave to the fashionable optimism of the Enlightenment, followed by “Pirate Jenny,” the defiant outcry of an insurrectionary pickpocket, and concluding with CioCio-San’s dying lament before sacrificing her life on the altar of American imperialism. When Ms. Moran is not performing in the room with pianist Aaron Diehl, a vinyl record haunts the Board of Officers Room with the plaintive voice of Etta Jones 1960 recording telling you, “don’t go to strangers, darling, come on to me.” This musical program was selected by Rux in omaggio to all enslaved peoples in the Americas, past and present. In re-introducing Aymes’ film, record collection, and musical influences to the general public, Rux sites them within a social sculpture of public gathering and Black study, one which activates Aymes’ iconoclastic American history. The audience is invited to attune itself to the quiet militancy of the Black radical tradition into which Aymes’ fictional legacy as a pugnacious literary trickster finds his place. What’s old is new again: sent for you yesterday, here you come today.

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C.f. Kara Walker, The Emancipation Approximation.

Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth, (New York: Liveright, 2021).

Carl Hancock Rux, Talk, (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2004).

Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

BY CARL HANCOCK RUX

When an artist creates or recreates something, it is not for anyone else to see. That’s to say, if the artist is really creating work from within the vantage point of his own psychological singularization. In the moment of true creation (I argue), that commissioned or un-commissioned work belongs neither to its creator nor its audience. What the artist is achieving (or attempting to achieve) for themselves is not even the work itself, but the attainment of the captious oneiromancy of human joy and suffering, and all the sublimation a tenured existence can actually offer.

Archer Aymes seemed to live a life of myriad created works of legerdemain, always concealing that part of himself we might most want to understand and to know. Archer Aymes, author of only one book and director of only one short abstract film, still captivates and somehow eludes his audience. Appearing sometimes a regnant and relatively handsome, yet fugitive figure, he sometimes occupies a proto-Proustian space of clerisy; other times an intellectual funambulist trapped perpetual tatterdemalion. Aymes’s entire life seemed to be trapped in a chiaroscuro of race in an era that grappled to understand race in order to ameliorate and package it for mass consumption. In a post-war period of creation and destruction, that unobtainable ostensible experiment he seemed to inject into the conversation of race and human existence, failed to achieve its ear-reach.

Fifty years later, new works by an artist who has been dead equally as long, emerge from nowhere (a storage space in Brooklyn).

Unlike his book and film, these “found objects” intended to be assembled in an exacting presentation, might seem strange as representations of art in a gallery setting. But if you look closely at the positioning of these everyday objects (a chair; a coffee table; a painting; a lithograph) you realize that Aymes is in fact creating something for us to experience as “altars” to the dead. Perhaps borrowing from Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of “readymades”: a porcelain urinal presented at the Society of Independent Artists inaugural exhibition at The Grand Palace in New York in 1917 as “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice”; an ordinary bottle rack—Aymes offers furniture and a myriad of objects to represent complications of race in the modern world. In this way, his own white granite and brown wood Cold war era mid-century boomerang coffee table encourages the viewer to think about concepts of race in America as it grappled with the geopolitical tensions between the US and Russia while trying to maintain some sense of capitalist normalcy by using an everyday object inspired by an Aboriginal Australian air borne weapon slightly resembling either a Turkish scimitar or a human kidney, itself an organ of filtering blood to remove waste and excess water in order to make urine. Aymes juxtaposes this object (and or adorns it) with ancient Ebony and iron wood hand carved African masks, and elephants—positioned and arranged not as decorative objects or functional frameworks of leisure and rest, but as ancestral altars used to summon spirits and Gods. Even the Mahogany mid-century Modern credenza, typically used as a bar, record player, and for album storage, becomes a container of ritualistic remuneration—as do the metal peacock wall decor sculptures, symbolic of re-growth, royalty, respect, and rejuvenation.

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM 3:00pm – 6:00pm Veterans Room Light and sound installation curated by Carl Hancock Rux and Dianne Smith that reconstructs Aymes’ experimental film Mother and Son—based on his novel of the same name and cultural artifacts that may have helped Aymes construct its story.

3:00pm – 6:00pm, Open Hours Library Altar of lost and found objects from the impossible archive of images, objects, and sounds Aymes collected in his attempt to explore the never-ending racial injustice that continues to shape the lives of its victims into the 21st century.

3:30pm - 4:00pm Board of Officers Room Mezzo soprano and composer Alicia Hall Moran and pianist Aaron Diehl perform a 30-minute program of works chosen by Carl Hancock Rux. These songs evoke various themes, from Aymes’ rumored closeness to Nina Simone to the desolation of family separation.

Leonard Bernstein Kurt Weill Giacomo Puccini Duke Ellington

“It must be so” from Candide “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera “Un bel dí, vedremo” from Madama Butterfly “Black Butterfly”

4:30pm - 5:30pm First Floor Hallway Performance by Jamel Gaines and his Creative Outlet Dance Theatre.

MORE JUNETEENTH COMMEMORATION

This event is one component of a three-part series curated by Carl Hancock Rux in commemoration of Juneteenth, in collaboration with Harlem Stage and Lincoln Center. On Thursday, June 16, 2022, Rux in conversation with Charles M. Blow— best-selling author (Fire Shut Up in My Bones) and The New York Times Opinion columnist—leads an in-depth discussion on some of the myths of the Emancipation Proclamation and the truth of modern-day slavery, held at Harlem Stage, where Rux is Associate Artistic Director. Following the Armory’s exhibition and concert on June 19, Lincoln Center will present I Dream A Dream That Dreams Back At Me, an evening of immersive art, music, and performance that will take visitors on an emotional journey into the afterlives of slavery enslaved people and the powers of Black resilience. These events are part of the Festival of New York.

PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS María Fernanda Snellings, Producer, Park Avenue Armory Davison Scandrett, Production Manager Aidan Nelson, Technical Director Belynda M’Baye, Stage Manager Kirrin Tubo, Stage Manager Angela Reynoso, Production Assistant Mohamed Adesumbo, Production Assistant Steinway & Sons

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Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street

TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990) “It Must Be So” from Candide (1956) Lyrics by Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) and Leonard Bernstein My world is dust now, And all I loved is dead.

Oh, let me trust now In what my master said: “There is a sweetness in every woe.”

It must be so. It must be so.

The dawn will find me Alone in some strange land.

But men are kindly; They’ll give a helping hand.

So said my master, and he must know.

It must be so. It must be so.

KURT WEILL (1900-1950) “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera (1928) Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) You gentlemen can watch while I’m scrubbin’ the floors, And I’m scrubbin’ the floors while you’re gawkin’.

Maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell, In this crummy Southern town, in this crummy old hotel.

But you’ll never guess to who you’re talkin’, You never guess to who you’re talkin’!

Suddenly one night, there’s a yell in the night, And you wonder who could that have been, And then you see me kinda grinnin’ while I’m scrubbin’, And you say, “What’s she got to grin?”

I’ll tell you!

There’s a ship, The Black Freighter, With a skull on its masthead, will be comin’ in!

You gentlemen can say, “Hey gal, finish them floors!

What’s wrong with you? Earn your keep here!”

You toss me your tips And look out at the ships, But I’m counting your heads As I’m making the beds, ‘Cause there's nobody gonna sleep here, There’s nobody gonna sleep here!

Suddenly one night there’s a yell in the night, And you say, “Who’s that kicking up a row?”

And you see me starin’ out the winder, And you say, “What the hell she's got to stare at now?”

There’s a ship, The Black Freighter, Turns around in the harbour, shootin’ guns from her bow!

Now, you gentlemen can wipe off the smile off your face, ‘Cause every building in town is a flat one!

This whole frickin’ place will be down to the ground, Only this cheap hotel standing up safe and sound, And you yell, “Why do they spare that one?”

And you yell, “Why do they spare that one?”

All the night through, Through the noise and to do, You wonder, who’s that person that lives up there?

And then you see me kind of stepping out in the morning, Looking nice with gold in my hair.

And the ship, The Black Freighter, Runs a skull up its masthead, And a cheer rings the air!

By noon time the dock is a-swarmin’ with men, Comin’ out from the ghostly freighter.

They’re movin’ in the shadows where no-one can see, And they’re chaining up people and they’re bringin’ ‘em to me, Asking me, “Kill then now, or later?”

Asking me, “Kill then now, or later?”

Noon by the clock, And so still at the dock, You can hear a foghorn miles away.

And in that choir of death, I'll say, “Right now!”

Then they pile up the bodies, And I'll say, “That’ll learn you!”

And the ship, The Black Freighter, Disappears out to sea, And on it is me!

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GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858-1924) “Un bel dì, vedremo” from Madama Butterfly (1904) Libretto by Luigi Illica (1857-1919) and Giuseppe Giacosa (1847-1906) Translation by Robert Glaubitz from the Aria Database Un bel dì, vedremo Levarsi un fil di fuomo Sull’estremo confin del mare E poi la nave appare E poi la nave è bianca.

Entra nel porto, romba il suo saluto.

Vedi? È venuto!

Io non gli scendo incontro, io no.

Mi metto là sul ciglio del colle E aspetto gran tempo e non mi pesa a lunga attesa.

E uscito dalla folla cittadina Un uomo, un picciol punto S’avvia per la collina.

Chi sarà? Chi sarà?

E come sarà giunto Che dirà? Che dirà?

Chiamerà Butterfly dalla lontana Io senza far risposta Me ne starò nascosta Un po’ per celia, Un po’ per non morire Al primo incontro, Ed egli al quanto in pena Chiamerà, chiamerà: “Piccina – mogliettina Olezzo di verbena” I nomi che mi dava al suo venire.

Tutto questo avverrà, te lo prometto Tienti la tua paura – Io con sicura fede lo aspetto.

One good day, we will see Arising a strand of smoke Over the far horizon on the sea And then the ship appears And then the ship is white It enters into the port, it rumbles its salute Do you see it? He is coming!

I don’t go down to meet him, not I. I stay upon the edge of the hill And I wait a long time but I do not grow weary of the long wait And leaving from the crowded city, A man, a little speck Climbing the hill.

Who is it? Who is it?

And as he arrives What will he say? What will he say?

He will call Butterfly from the distance I without answering Stay hidden A little to tease him, A little as to not die.

At the first meeting, And then a little troubled He will call, he will call “Little one, dear wife Blossom of orange” The names he called me at his last coming.

All this will happen, I promise you this Hold back your fears – I with secure faith wait for him.

DUKE ELLINGTON (1899-1974) “Black Butterfly” (1936) You’re a black butterfly With your wings frayed and torn, Laughter’s yours so is scorn As they point to you in shame.

You’re a black butterfly With your wings near fire, But confess when your tire, Is the candle worth the flame?

Your Queen of the Night But with morning’s early light There’s not a hear to really call your own; So before it’s too late, Change your ways and repent, Take my love that was meant For black butterfly along.

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You’re a black butterfly With your wings frayed and torn, Laughter’s yours so is scorn As they point to you in shame.

You’re a black butterfly With your wings near fire, But confess when your tire, Is the candle worth the flame?

Your Queen of the Night But with morning’s early light There’s not a hear to really call your own; So before it’s too late, Change your ways and repent, Take my love that was meant For black butterfly along.

Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street

ION In December of 1969 I’d learned his film was going to show at the film festival and still no one knew where he was. I’d first seen some outtakes of his film when I assisted a photographer friend who was taking some pictures of the Dionysus center. You were among the people there that day Phaedo—young and sure of yourself and defending the privacy and the mystery of him as you do now. I was fascinated by what I saw in those out takes. I had some tape recordings of my conversations with Aymes, and some notes of when we’d first met in Marks, but not enough to write the profile I had hoped to get published in The Voice about him. I told few people about having encountered Aymes in Marks, fearing my idea of finishing my article would be scooped. I was still trying to get somebody to accept something more from me than the occasional book review. That January, I’d read that Aymes’ film was up for the Bunuel prize. My editor was suddenly interested in the profile piece. Aymes was press worthy again, especially because there’d been some buzz about this film for two years and Aymes had been missing for almost a year after the Douglasville incident. So a writer friend and I took that long drive down south in an old beat up Chevy with about forty dollars between us and lots of tape. We first stopped at the Southeast Catholic Center in Washington DC, which had hosted the initial meeting of the Poor People’s Campaign. I thought perhaps the nice white nuns would know what became of those arrested in Douglasville.

They did not. We proceeded to Atlanta and inquired of the SNCC, and the NAACP, and any church that might know – as to whether or not there was an account of those people arrested and whether or not they had all been released unharmed and did anybody know this fairskinned northern Negro named Archer? I was ashamed that I had not considered what might have happened to him. I never said it out loud, not even to myself. And in the thirty hours or so it took us to arrive in Marks, I prayed he would be alive in some jail cell so that I could be redeemed. He was not in prison in Atlanta! He had been released from prison in Douglasville only two days after the confrontation! He returned to Marks, Mississippi. He was living on run down pre-civil war cotton plantation where he worked no less than ten hours a day, making no more than $2.50 for a full day’s work chopping cotton. He supplemented his income by working nights in a mill for $1.25 an hour. There was a woman with whom he shared a small run down wood framed house on the opposite end of the cotton field from the main house. The main house was a derelict mansion of some stature solely occupied by his employer and landlord, an 89-year-old white Mississippi native who was the only surviving son of a once prominent cotton plantation owner. The five or six small cottages that lined the cotton fields, Archer’s among them, were explained to me to have been built as slave quarters no less than one hundred and twenty years before. Negro families who had been there for generations occupied them all. As it was explained to me, they were all descendants of slaves who had lived and worked on that very same plantation and never left, even after emancipation. It was also explained to me that the 89-year-old man was the biological father, grandfather, and even great uncle to many of these families. Including Archer. Archer identified him as his father’s father. Without much else said between us, he returned to New York with my friend and I the next morning. I didn’t hear him say goodbye to the beautiful Negro woman he lived with. I didn’t hear her say goodbye. I never heard her voice. She stood behind the screen door, quite expressionless—watching us we pulled up to the house to collect him, holding the door open only slightly. He emerged from behind her in his overalls and fisherman’s hat with no luggage, and walked a normal and steady pace toward the car with no verbal greeting and no sign he would be receptive to one. She watched our Orange Chevy devour him. Held her position behind the door, but her eyes stretched out beyond the ripped screen, across the dense rows of brush, up the mile long dirt path toward the elaborate rusting iron fence as what must have been by then a tiny orange dot.

Neither of them waved.

— Excerpted from Carl Hancock Rux’s Talk

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS CARL HANCOCK RUX

Carl Hancock Rux is an American poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, recording artist, actor, theater director, radio journalist, as well as a frequent collaborator in the fields of film, modern dance, and contemporary art. He is the author of several books including the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry Pagan Operetta, the novel Asphalt, and the Obie Awardwinning play Talk. His music has been released internationally on several labels including Sony/550, Thirsty Ear, and Giant Step. Rux is also Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines, an experimental theater company founded in 1970 and based in New York City, and Artistic Director of Harlem Stage.

DIANNE SMITH

Dianne Smith’s career as an interdisciplinary artist spans over 20 years. Her group and solo exhibitions include Visions for our Future; Echoes of our Past, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design, 2022; Stuff, Milstein Center, Barnard College, New York; Uptown Triennial, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York; 2020, and Festival de Artes al Aire Libre, Museo Municipal de Guayaquil, Ecuador, Fulbright, 2013. Smith is also known for her public art installations, such as Gumboot Juba, Armory Week, New York; Organic Abstract, New York City Parks Department, Armory Week; and Bartow Pell Mansion as the Andrew Freedman Houses, Bronx, New York, 2011. Smith is included in the following collections: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Brodsky Organization, Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and Dianne Smith Papers Barnard Archives and Special Collections. She currently lives and works in Harlem, New York, and received her MFA from Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany, via the University of Plymouth, UK, in 2012.

ALICIA HALL MORAN

Alicia Hall Moran is a classical singer and songwriter based in New York City. She works in the spaces between Opera, Broadway, Oratorio, Theater, Dance, Visual Art, Poetry, Soul Music, Spirituals, and History.

AARON DIEHL

Pianist and composer Aaron Diehl mystifies listeners with his layered artistry. At once temporal and ethereal, his expression transforms the piano into an orchestral vessel in the spirit of beloved predecessors Ahmad Jamal, Erroll Garner, and Jelly Roll Morton. Following three critically-acclaimed leader albums on Mack Avenue Records—and live appearances at historic venues from Jazz at Lincoln Center and The Village Vanguard to New York Philharmonic and the Philharmonie de Paris—the American Pianist Association’s 2011 Cole Porter fellow now

focuses his attention on what it means to be present within himself. His forthcoming solo record promises an expansion of that exploration in a setting at once unbound and intimate.

Diehl conjures three-dimensional expansion of melody, counterpoint, and movement through time. Rather than choose one sound or another, he invites listeners into the chambered whole of his artistry. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Diehl traveled to New York in 2003, following his success as a finalist in JALC’s Essentially Ellington competition and a subsequent European tour with Wynton Marsalis. His love affair with rub and tension prompted a years-long immersion in distinctive repertoire from Monk and Ravel to Gershwin and William Grant Still. Among other towering figures, Still in particular inspires Diehl’s ongoing curation of Black American composers in his own performance programming, unveiled this past fall at 92nd St. Y. Diehl has enjoyed artistic associations with Wynton Marsalis, Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, Buster Williams, Branford Marsalis, Wycliffe Gordon, Philip Glass, and Cecile McLorin Salvant.

He recently appeared with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra as featured soloist. Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies, Juilliard.

JAMEL GAINES

Founder and Artistic Director of Creative Outlet Dance Theatre, Jamel Gaines has dedicated his life to delivering artistic excellence and stirring, soaring performance to audiences everywhere. During his over 22 years of teaching and choreographing, Gaines has worked artists such as Jennifer Holiday, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Savion Glover, Malik Yoba, George Fasion, Ornette Coleman, Ossie Davis, Olatunje Babatunde, Max Roach, Cassandra Wilson, and Rick James. He has created and staged over 25 repertory and concert productions, working in the United States as well as Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Spain, Germany, Canada, Italy, London, and Portugal. His work has been staged by the Actors Theater Workshop, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Paramount Theatre, and Martha Graham School. Gaines has been featured in publications such as Essence Magazine, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, and The Daily News. Recent television appearances of Gaines’ choreography includes Spike Lee’s Annual Tribute Concert to Michael Jackson (August 2017), So You Think You Can Dance, and Public Television’s American Talent (The Teacher Recognition Award). Gaines serves as the director of St. Paul’s Eldad Medad Danced Ministry, where he led “He Got Up”, the commemoration of the African Holocaust, and the acclaimed “Black Nativity” (Obie Award). Early career credits include work with JUBILATION! Dance Company, Diane and Adrian Brown, and James Grant. BFA, SUNY Purchase.

armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory

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ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMMING AT THE ARMORY Park Avenue Armory’s Public Programming series brings diverse artists and cultural thought-leaders together for discussion and performance around the important issues of our time viewed through an artistic lens. Launched in 2017, the series encompasses a variety of programs including large-scale community events; multiday symposia; intimate salons featuring performances, panels, and discussions; Artist Talks in relation to the Armory’s Drill Hall programming; and other creative interventions. As the live arts return amidst an ongoing pandemic, the 2022 Public Programming series—titled Making Space and led by Tavia Nyong’o, Curator of Public Programming at Park Avenue Armory—offers a series of intimate talks, salons, symposia, performances, and other activations.

As social gathering remains both vital and challenging, we explore how art can address the fault-lines in our racial and social order that 2020 laid bare. How can artists speak to this moment, holding space for discovery, deliberation, and experimenting, while claiming the environment we need?

Highlights from the Public Programming series include: Carrie Mae Weems’ 2017 event The Shape of Things and 2021 convening and concert series Land of Broken Dreams, whose participants included Elizabeth Alexander, Theaster Gates, Elizabeth Diller, Nona Hendryx, Somi, and Spike Lee, among others; a daylong Lenape Pow Wow and Standing Ground Symposium held in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the first congregation of Lenape Elders on Manhattan Island since the 1700s; “A New Vision for Justice in America” conversation series in collaboration with Common Justice, exploring new coalitions, insights, and ways of understanding question of justice and injustice in relation moderated by FLEXN Evolution creators Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and director Peter Sellars; Culture in a Changing America Symposia exploring the role of art, creativity, and imagination in the social and political issues in American society today; the 2019 Black Artists Retreat hosted by Theaster Gates, which included public talks and performances, private sessions for the 300 attending artists, and a roller skating rink; and 100 Years | 100 Women, a multi organization commissioning project that invited 100 women artists and cultural creators to respond to women’s suffrage.

Notable Public Programming salons include: the Literature Salon hosted by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose participants included Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Jeremy O. Harris, a Spoken Word Salon cohosted with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; a Film Salon featuring the works of immersive artist and film director Lynette Wallworth; “Museum as Sanctuary” led by installation artist and Artist-in-Residence Tania Bruguera, curated by Sonia Guiñansaca and CultureStrike, and featuring undocu-artists Julio Salgado and Emulsify; and a Dance Salon presented in partnership with Dance Theater of Harlem, including New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and choreographer Francesca Harper, among others.

Artist Talks have featured esteemed artists, scholars, and thought leaders, such as: architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in conversation with Ai Wei Wei, moderated by Juilliard president Damian Woetzel; director Ariane Mnouchkine and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Tony Kushner in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick; director Ivo van Hove in conversation with James Nicola, Artistic Director of New York Theater Workshop; artist William Kentridge and his collaborators Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi in conversation with Dr. Augustus Casely Hayford, Director of the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art; Lehman Trilogy director Sam Mendez and adapter Ben Power in conversation with playwright Lynn Nottage; artist and composer Heiner Goebbels in conversation with composer, vocalist, and scholar Gelsey Bell; and choreographer Bill T. Jones in conversation with architect Elizabeth Diller and designer Peter Nigrini, moderated by vocalist and performance artist Helga Davis.

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Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street

NEXT IN THE SERIES SKILLSHARE

SYMPOSIUM: ART AT WATER’S EDGE

august 21

october 9

Artists-in-Residence activate the Armory as a space for mutual aid through skill share, maker spaces, and master classes.

Artists, activists, and designers engage the meeting of land with water. Facing climate change and rising sea levels, this event links New York with communities across the nation and globe that sit at water’s edge. Centering the work of Indigenous water protectors who challenge extractive futures, as well as a generation of youth leaders who are rebelling against climate nihilism, Art at Water’s Edge is an intergenerational forum for the imagination in action.

BLOOM september 10 Legendary Chicana performance and visual artist Nao Bustamante prototypes a new vision for feminist autonomy.

NEXT AT THE ARMORY HAMLET

ORESTEIA

june 10 – august 13

july 8 – august 13

The Olivier Award-winning director Robert Icke unleashes his visionary creativity at the Armory with the North American premiere of a radical new staging of Shakespeare’s classic. This highly charged staging transforms the traditional family drama into a psychological thriller, transporting the action to our current surveillance society in which rolling media news feeds provide juicy updates of a life lived on screen while blurring the lines between public and private life. Alex Lawther (The Imitation Game, The Last Duel, The French Dispatch, Black Mirror) portrays the obsessive prince consumed by grief, brilliantly embodying his mental decay to boldly examine the devastating effects his anguish has not only on his own psyche, but on his family and country.

Aeschylus’ greatest and final play is a searing familial saga that examines the sins of a family over several decades and explores whether justice can ever really be done. Robert Icke’s Olivier Award-winning adaptation comes to the Armory for its North American premiere following sold-out runs at the Almeida Theatre and in London’s West End. Icke radically reimagines this Greek drama for the modern stage, condensing the tragic trilogy into a single performance that electrifies and devastates in equal measure with Olivier Award-nominated Anastasia Hille (The Effect, The Master Builder) in the role of Klytemnestra. This daring update allows audiences to investigate the justification of vengeance, the possibility of finding justice in retaliation, and the role of judicial democracy at work—themes that continue to resonate nearly two and a half millennia after the play was written.

RECITAL SERIES

ARTISTS STUDIO

MICHAEL SPYRES & MATHIEU PORDOY september 7 & 9

RODNEY MCMILLIAN october 15

armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory

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