ABOUT THE ARTISTS
SOFIA JERNBERG
Sofia Jernberg, born in Ethiopia and raised in Vietnam and Sweden, is an exceptional singer/voice artist and composer. She studied jazz and composition in Sweden and lives and works in Stockholm. Her work focuses on unconventional techniques and sounds such as non-verbal vocalization, split tones, toneless singing, and distortion.
Music theater and contemporary opera play an important role in Jernberg’s artistic work. She participated in performances of Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire in 2010 and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Lohengrin in 2014 by the Swedish ensemble Norrbotten NEO and embodied roles specifically written for her in new works such as Folie à Deux by Emily Hall and UR_ by Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. PIERROT LUNAIRE’s production, directed by Marlene Monteiro Freitas and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, featured her as soloist together with Klangforum Wien at the Wiener Festwochen 2021 as well as at the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen and the Festival d’Automne à Paris 2022.
Another running theme in her work is the collaboration with visual artists such as Camille Norment in her pieces Rapture and Lull. Sofia Jernberg can be seen as a singer in the film Union of the North with Matthew Barney, Erna Ómarsdóttir, and Valdimar Jóhannsson. She has received several commissions for compositions and recently premiered Dreams of our future
TOMEKA REID
Described as a “New Jazz Power Source” by The New York Times, cellist and composer Tomeka Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community over the last decade. Her distinctive melodic sensibility, always rooted in a strong sense of groove, has been featured in many distinguished ensembles over the years.
Reid grew up outside of Washington DC, but her musical career began after moving to Chicago in 2000. By focusing on developing her craft in countless improvisational contexts, Reid has achieved a stunning musical fluency. A 2022 MacArthur Fellow and Herb Alpert awardee and 2021 USA Fellow, Reid has received awards from the Foundation of the Arts (2019), 3Arts (2016), and received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017.
Reid released her debut recording as a bandleader in 2015, with the Tomeka Reid Quartet, a vibrant showcase for the cellist’s improvisational acumen as well as her dynamic arrangements and compositional ability. The quartet’s second album, Old New, was
PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Benjamin Wygonik Production Audio
FiveOhm
for children’s choir, soprano, voice, and chamber ensemble at the Ultima Festival Oslo 2022 and a new composition for the Ensemble Contrechamps at the Borealis Festival 2023 in Bergen.
In 2021, she sang the successful world premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s Atara with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Wien at the Musikverein Wien presented by the Festival Wien Modern. She performed a solo concert at the Warsaw Autumn 2022 and made her debuts in 2023 with the Collegium Novum Zurich and Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in Basel and Zurich, with the Ensemble Resonanz and the program Hymns & Laments at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg as well as at the Lucerne Festival Forward with Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals – a video opera.
In the 2024-25 season, Jernberg will perform the program Noise Uprising: A Polystylistic Atlas at De Bijloke Gent and at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival together with the ZWERM Ensemble. Furthermore, she will sing the world premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s piece No! with the LA Phil New Music Group at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles as well as the German premiere with the WDR Sinfonieorchester at the WDR Funkhaus Cologne. She will also make her debuts at Park Avenue Armory on the Artists Studio series as well as at the Concertgebouw Brugge in her program Eroica I and will give a duo concert with Alexander Hawkins at the Jazzfest Berlin.
released in Oct 2019 on Cuneiform Records. Most recently, in April of 2024, Reid released what has been considered her most adventurous Quartet recording to date, the highly acclaimed 3+3
Reid has been a key member of ensembles led by legendary reedists like Anthony Braxton (Zim Sextet) and Roscoe Mitchell (Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, Art Ensemble Of Chicago), as well as a younger generation of visionaries including flutist Nicole Mitchell (Black Earth Ensemble, Artifacts), vocalist Dee Alexander (EVOLUTION ENSEMBLE), and drummer Mike Reed (Loose Assembly, Living By Lanterns, Artifacts). In 2013, she launched the first Chicago Jazz String Summit, a semi-annual three-day international festival of cutting-edge string players held in Chicago. From 2019 to 2021 Tomeka Reid received a teaching appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition. Tomeka Reid was a Visiting Roth Scholar at Dartmouth College during the 2023-24 academic year and is excited to be back during the 2024-25 academic to teach two courses for the music department in the Winter and Spring terms.
SEASON SPONSORS
2025 ARTISTS STUDIO IN THE RESTORED VETERANS ROOM
SOFIA JERNBERG
Tuesday, May 20, 2025 at 7pm & 9pm with cellist Tomeka Reid
PUBLIC SUPPORT
The Artists Studio is made possible with support from the Consulate General of Sweden in New York.
Citi and Bloomberg Philanthropies are Park Avenue Armory’s 2025 Season Sponsors. Leadership support for the Armory’s artistic programming has been generously provided by the 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
GUILLERMO E. BROWN
OCTOBER 11
Drummer, composer, and creator Guillermo E. Brown pushes music performance to new heights through musical collaborations, sound installations, and singular theatrical works. Brown comes to the Veterans Room with a cast of collaborators for an insightful overview of the past, present, and future of his work, including some of his Creative Capital projects and new compositions played on a new audio-visual musical instrument he is building as part of the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Arts Technology Lab.
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
SANDRA MUJINGA NOVEMBER 20 & 21
Norwegian artist and musician Sandra Mujinga uses speculative fiction in the Afrofuturist tradition to investigate economies of visibility and disappearance, in which she typically reverses established identity politics of presence. After recent exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel, the Guggenheim, and the Venice Biennale, the multifaceted creator comes to the Veterans Room to broaden and expand her practice in the performative spectrum by creating an otherworldly sonic environment that plays off the architecture of the room.
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 around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman Emeritus Elihu Rose, PhD
Co-Chairs
Adam R. Flatto
Amanda J.T. Riegel
President
Robertson
Vice Presidents
Marina Abramović
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.
Treasurer
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Edward G. Klein, Brigadier
(Ret.)
Dabie Tsai
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
