ABOUT THE ARTISTS
GUILLERMO E. BROWN
Guillermo E. Brown is a performer and artist who appears most recently as a smiley face for Quip and over 1,000 shows as the drummer in the house band of Emmy-winning “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS, with Reggie Watts. In addition he is featured on over 50 full length recordings, and has appeared live, recorded and as drummer-vocalist-electronics/collaborator with David S. Ware, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Roy Campbell, Anti-Pop Consortium, Anthony Braxton, DJ Spooky, El-P, Carl Hancock Rux, Vernon Reid, DJ Logic, Latasha Diggs, Dave Burrell, George E. Lewis, Mendi & Keith Obadike, Victor Gama, Arto Lindsay, Spoek Mathambo, Jamie Lidell, Saul Williams, CANT, Mocky, Twin Shadow, Grisha Coleman, Suphala, Nia Andrews, and Tunde Adebimpe, among others.
A graduate of Wesleyan University (BA) and Bard College (MFA), Brown was adjunct professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and Gallatin School, and Artist-in-Residence at PNCA. He has given talks at Princeton, LACC, CalArts, and LIU. He is a recipient of an inaugural Doris Duke Foundation Performing Arts Technologies Lab grant, a Creative Capital Award and MAPFund in Performing Arts for Bee Boy, and a recipient of a Harvestworks New Works Residency and Van Lier Fellowship.
CINQUE KEMP
Cinque Kemp is a drummer, producer, musical director, creative director, visual artist, and athlete relentlessly devoted to the elevation of human vibrations and consciousness as well as the protection of the planet. Based in New York City, he has toured, produced, and directed his own compositions as well as those by Macklemore, Pink Siifu, Flatbush ZOMBiES, Shaun Ross, James Corden’s Late Late Show, Arto Lindsay, Ana Tijoux, Melanie Charles, A.Chal, Soul Science Labs for Carnegie Hall, Janka Nabay, and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, among others. His prowess for protecting his vessel is highlighted by years of modeling and acting work alongside swimming, surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, longboarding, rock climbing, hockey, tennis, handball, basketball, and soccer.
NÊGAH SANTOS
Nêgah Santos is an incredible hand percussionist and songwriter born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. Residing in New York, and as part of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Santos has worked and performed with great names in the music industry, such as Jon Batiste, Lake Street Dive, Esperanza Spalding, James Taylor, Jon Bellion, Cory Wong, Louis Cato, Bill Whelan (Riverdance), Terri Lyne Carrington, Dianne Reeves, Alejandro Sanz, Alcione, Joyce Moreno, and Marcos Valle, among others. As a solo artist Nêgah Santo shas focused on songwriting, singing, and leading her own projects, mixing a lot of her influences through out her carrier. Her most recent projects, “O Pandeiro” and “Forró Da Nêgah,” are tributes to family and culture.
YUSUKE YAMAMOTO
As a multi-instrumental player, Yusuke Yamamoto plays vibraphone, percussion, drums, keyboard, and flute. Yamamoto has produced six albums under the names Channel U and Golden Monkeys, also soundtrack for Gran Turismo on SONY PlayStation. His performances include the Broadway musical FELA! and Blue Man Group. Recording with Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and on “Strange Love” (closing theme of Disney movie Frankenweenie). And recently performed with TV on the Radio. Based in New York, Yamamoto continues to produce music and collaborates with musicians from around the globe. His new dream-pop project with singer Julia Haltigan, Moon Radio’s first album is coming soon.
PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Erika Earl, Ellie Kelly Fabrication Mikaela Elson Project Assistant Will Johnson, Terris Poole, Rucyl Mills, Robert Lester Design Team Jeff Rowell Audio Engineer
2025 ARTISTS STUDIO IN THE RESTORED VETERANS ROOM
GUILLERMO E. BROWN
saturday, october 11, 2025 at 7pm and 9pm
with collaborators
Cinque Kemp , Nêgah Santos , and Yusuke Yamamoto
Leadership support for the Armory’s artistic programming has been generously provided by the Anita K. Hersh Philanthropic Fund, Charina Endowment Fund, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, the Pinkerton Foundation, the Starr Foundation, and the Thompson Family Foundation. Major support was also provided by the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the SHS Foundation, and Wescustogo Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams. Cover image by James Ewing.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO
Launched in March 2016 alongside the inauguration of the revitalized Veterans Room, the Artists Studio serves as a space for artists to experiment, collaborate, create, and push the boundaries of their craft. This season, the series takes inspiration from the inventive spirit and collaboration present at the room’s inception with interventions by some of today’s most creative voices who have a distinct relationship to sound with a visual aesthetic. Curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur fellow Jason Moran, these performances invite these imaginative innovators to explore exciting new directions in their practice.
Previous Artists Studio programs have featured performances by: jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran; Dutch contemporary composer Louis Andriessen and pianist Jason Moran; American composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros and noted author, director, and dream specialist IONE; pianist and composer Conrad Tao and multifaceted percussionist, instrumentalist, and composer Tyshawn Sorey; seminal drummer and acupuncturist Milford Graves and drummer and musician Deantoni Parks; artist Lucy Raven; groundbreaking sound designer Ryan Trecartin with his primary collaborator Lizzie Fitch, music producer and DJ Ashland Mines (aka Total Freedom), and composer/ producer Aaron David Ross; acoustic ensemble Dawn of Midi; composer Ryuichi Sakamoto; tenor Lawrence Brownlee with pianists Myra Huang and Jason Moran; multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome; vocalist Dominique Eade and pianist Ran
NEXT IN THE SERIES
SANDRA MUJINGA
NOVEMBER 20 & 21
Norwegian artist and musician Sandra Mujinga works at the intersection of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, investigating economies of visibility and disappearance. In Sunless Mouths, a new installation and durational performance created specifically for the Armory’s Veterans Room, Mujinga explores distance and intimacy through worldbuilding rooted in selective memory. Set in the aftermath of abandonment and estrangement, two siblings confront the silence between them, unsure if what they see is real or merely the shadow cast by grief. Combining original electronic music, a pre-recorded radio play, live performance, and a fabricated frosted-glass environment, Mujinga investigates how we live alongside one another: how closely we know each other, and how architecture, climate, and memory shape, or obstruct, that closeness. Using shifting light, layered sound, textured glass, and bodies in motion, the work reframes how we perceive our cities and our neighbors, suggesting intimacy not as something given, but as something that must be continuously negotiated, remembered, and reimagined.
Blake with composer Kavita Shah; experimental composer Alvin Curran; internationally renowned composer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts; pioneer of experimental music Charlemagne Palestine; art icon and DJ Juliana Huxtable; composer and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell; experimental composer, improviser, and performer Miya Masaoka; My Barbarian collective founders Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade; cutting edge visual artist Rosa Barba; Dominican accordionist Krency Garcia (El Prodigio); the late trumpeter jaimie branch and visual artist Carol Szymanski; pioneer of performance and video art Joan Jonas; conceptual artist, writer, and performer, Rodney McMillian; a full season residency by the revolutionary collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Inc. (AACM), featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, drummer and percussionist Thurman Barker, musical partners Adegoke Steve Colson and Iqua Colson, scholar and composer George Lewis, composer and percussionist Reggie Nicholson, and multidimensional artist and creator Amina Claudine Myers; artist and musician Jasper Marsalis; American poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother with free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements (IE); performance artist EJ Hill; and filmmaker, writer, curator, and founder of the BlackStar Film Festival Maori Karmael Holmes
NEXT AT THE ARMORY
THE FAGGOTS AND THEIR FRIENDS BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS
DECEMBER 2 – 14
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
This cult book of fables and myths serves as the starting point for a new music theater adaptation from the creative minds of composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman. Together they conjure up a world that takes the original text on a kaleidoscopic journey that ignores boundaries just like the characters on stage do, drawing on theater, dance, and song from the Baroque to Broadway and beyond. The performers serve as actors, storytellers, and musicians all rolled into one, continually swapping roles while doing away with gender and genre norms and replacing them with unapologetic individuality and a lust for life. The resulting cabaret-like spectacle is both vulnerable and daring, a fantastic parable hiding a political manifesto for survival that gives voice to the marginalized and oppressed everywhere.
RECITAL SERIES
SASHA COOKE & MYRA HUANG
NOVEMBER 13 & 15
Two-time Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke comes to the Board of Officers Room for new program titled “Of Thee I Sing,” including an artfully curated set of works by Copland, Barber, Ives, Weill, Jake Heggie, Sondheim, and more, as well as the New York premiere of an Armory-commissioned work by American composer Jasmine Barnes.
ATTACCA QUARTET
DECEMBER 16 & 18
Attacca Quartet are recognized as one of the most versatile and outstanding ensembles of the moment, gliding through traditional classical repertoire to electronica, video game music, and contemporary collaborations. They come to the Armory with a wide-ranging program of classic quartets by Bartók and Felix Mendelssohn, quartet-arranged interpretations of signal works for other instrumentation, and the North American premiere of “Daisy”—a new Armory-commissioned composition by David Lang.
OTHER HAPPENINGS
GUIDED TOURS
Take a guided tour of the Park Avenue Armory with one of our staff and view the unique qualities of this landmark building, from the soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall to the extraordinary interiors by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler, Herter Brothers and others. The 75-minute walking tour covers the first floor period rooms including the magnificent Board of Officers Room and Veterans Room, views the vast Drill Hall, and some of the second floor areas not normally on view to the public.
MALKIN LECTURE SERIES
Launched in 2007, the Malkin Lecture Series presents scholars and experts on topics relating to Park Avenue Armory and its pivotal role in the civic, cultural, and aesthetic evolution of New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This season’s lectures shine a light on figures from the late nineteenth century, and how their actions continue to influence the way we view rule breakers, Civil War monuments, and landscape architecture today.
ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.
The Armory both commissions and presents performances and installations in the grand Drill Hall and offers more intimate programming through its acclaimed Recital Series, which showcases musical talent from across the globe within the salon setting of the Board of Officers Room; its Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in the restored Veterans Room; Making Space at the Armory, a public programming series that brings together a discipline-spanning group of artists and cultural thought-leaders
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman Emeritus Elihu Rose, PhD
Co-Chairs Adam R. Flatto
Amanda J.T. Riegel President
around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture Series that features presentations by scholars and writers on topics related to Park Avenue Armory and its history. In addition, the Armory also has a year-round Artists-in-Residence program, providing space and support for artists to create new work and expand their practices.
The Armory’s creativity-based arts education programs provide access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, engaging them with the institutions artistic programming and outside-the-box creative processes. Through its education initiatives, the Armory provides access to all Drill Hall performances, workshops taught by Master Teaching Artists, and in-depth residencies that support the schools’ curriculum. Youth Corps, the Armory’s year-round paid internship program, begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college and career goals.
The Armory is undergoing a multi-phase renovation and restoration of its historic building led by architects Herzog & de Meuron, with Platt Byard Dovell White as Executive Architects.
Edward G. Klein, Brigadier
Avant-Garde Chair
Adrienne Katz
Directors Emeriti Harrison M. Bains
Angela E. Thompson*
Wade F.B. Thompson*
Founding Chairman, 2000-2009
Pierre Audi*
Anita K. Hersh Artistic Director
*In memoriam
ABOUT THE VETERANS ROOM
“In a sense, the Veterans Room, of all the Armory’s opulent reception rooms, has the deepest spiritual kinship with a work of contemporary art.” —The New York Times
The Veterans Room is among the most significant surviving interiors of the American Aesthetic Movement, and the most significant remaining intact interior in the world by Louis C. Tiffany and Co., Associated Artists. The newly formed collective led by Tiffany included some of the most significant American designers of the 19th century at early stages of their very distinguished careers: Stanford White, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler among them. The design of the room by these artists was exotic, eclectic, and full of experimentation, as noted by Decorator and Furnisher in 1885 that “the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque, and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian, and the Japanese in the appropriate places.”
A monument of late 19th-century decorative arts, the Veterans Room is the fourth period room at the Armory completed (out of 18). The revitalization of the room responds to the original exuberant vision for the room’s design, bringing into dialogue some of the most talented designers of the 19th and 21st centuries – Associated Artists with Herzog & de Meuron, Platt Byrd Dovell
White Architects, and a team of world-renowned artisans and experts in Tiffany glass, fine woodworking, and decorative arts. The revitalization of the Veterans Room follows Herzog & de Meuron’s design approach for the Armory building, which seeks to highlight the distinct qualities and existing character of each individual room while interweaving contemporary elements to improve its function. Even more so than in other rooms at the Armory, Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to the Veterans Room is to amplify the beauty of the room’s original vision through adding contemporary reconstructions of lost historic materials and subtle additions with the same ethos and creative passion as the original artisans to infuse a modern energy into a harmonious, holistic design. The room’s restoration is part of an ongoing $215-million transformation, which is guided by the understanding that the Armory’s rich history and the patina of time are essential to its character, with a design process for the period rooms that emphasizes close collaboration between architect and artisan.
The restoration and renovation of the Veterans Room was made possible by The Thopson Family Foundation, Inc., Susan and Elihu Rose, Charina Endowment Fund, Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Assemblymember Dan Quart and the New York State Assembly, Emanuel Stern, Adam R. Flatto, Olivia Tournay Flatto, Kenneth S. Kuchin, R. Mark and Wendy Adams, American Express, Rebecca Robertson and Byron Knief, Amy and Jeffrey Silverman, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anonymous (2).
