Will Rawls—in conjunction with his Hammer residency—presents a dance/stop-motion animation work-in-progress this week at the museum.
Tuesday, July 16, at 7:30 pm.
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.
From top: Will Rawls, photograph by Luis Rodriguez; Rawls performing in his The Planet Eaters at the 2016 River to River Festival, New York, photographs by Darial Sneed (2); Rawls by Luis Rodriguez, 2015. Images courtesy and © the artists, photographers, and the Hammer Museum.
“I’m still thinking about the potential of using abstraction to speak to identity: How can these two things fit together when identity is so much about announcing, concretizing, and naming, and abstraction is about undoing? Of course, abstraction has roots in something real…
“What does it mean to break apart language, and its history, and to work with it pictographically? Dance has this process built into it already: its visual and affective impact scrambles language. It produces and speaks other languages of and about the body.” — Will Rawls*
WHAT REMAINS—a collaboration between poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, dancer/choreographer Will Rawls, and filmmaker and photographer John Lucas exploring how “erasure and exposure shape black American life”—comes to MCA/Chicago’s Warehouse this week.
Performers include Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis. The sound design is by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, production design by David Szlasa, and costume design by Eleanor O’Connell.
Tonight, the museum presents Rankine and Rawls for a discussion about their practice.
TALK—CLAUDIA RANKINE WITH WILL RAWLS
Tuesday, December 4, at 8 pm.
Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago.
Wednesday through Sunday, December 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, at 7:30 pm.
MCA Warehouse, 1747 West Hubbard Street, Chicago.
*”Will Rawls: 1000 Words,” Artforum, October 2018, 194.
Claudia Rankine, Will Rawls, and John Lucas, What Remains. Photographs © Julieta Cervantes, courtesy Live Arts Bard.
“[Jane Jacobs’] name still summons an entire city vision—the much watched corner, the mixed-use neighborhood—and her holy tale is all the stronger for including a nemesis of equal stature: Robert Moses, the Sauron of the street corner. The New York planning dictator wanted to drive an expressway through lower Manhattan, and was defeated, the legend runs, by this ordinary mom.” — Adam Gopnik*
Robert Moses—the “master builder” of New York’s expressways who dreamed of leveling Soho—met his match in Jane Jacobs, author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.** This 20th century battle—the forces of suburbanization vs. middle-class New Yorkers who did not want to destroy their city to save it—is the focus of CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY, the new documentary by Matt Tyrnauer screening this week at USC.
CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY, Monday, April 24 at 7 pm. Free with reservation:
cinema.usc.edu/events/event.cfm?id=16830
BROCCOLI THEATRE, USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS, Los Angeles.
CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY opens at the Nuart on Friday, April 28.
NUART THEATRE, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles.
landmarktheatres.com/FilmCalendar/Nuart_calendar_2017_0310_0511.pdf
This summer, the RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL in Lower Manhattan will feature excerpts from A MARVELOUS ORDER, a new opera about Jacobs and Moses. Written, composed, and designed by Joshua Frankel, Judd Greenstein, Will Rawls, and Tracy K. Smith, the work will be performed in the transit/shopping hub Fulton Center.
A MARVELOUS ORDER, June 15–18.
RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL, FULTON CENTER, 200 Broadway, Manhattan.
*Adam Gopnik, “Jane Jacobs’ Street Smarts,” The New Yorker, September 26, 2016.
newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-street-smarts
**See: theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/jane-jacobs-death-and-life-rereading
Jane Jacobs, 1961.
Image credit: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection
