DANCE
MUSIC
PERFORMANCES
Denniston Hill commissions alumni with performance-based practices to create new live-art works for presentation at our partner institutions around New York City and at our campus in Sullivan County.
From 2016-2020, Denniston Hill’s Distinguished Performance Artist Award (DPAA) was given for excellence in the field of performance art to multidisciplinary artists blurring the boundaries of the genre and exploring social issues. In addition to receiving a cash award, DPAA recipients spent one month at Denniston Hill and led an intensive workshop that culminated in a public performance at our annual Open House.
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September 2019
ABOUT THE EVENT:
NIC Kay (DH ALUMNI 2018) presented a site responsive performance on and around the theme of exodus, in relation to the office environment of Triangle Arts.ABOUT THE ARTIST:
NIC Kay makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. Their work choreographically highlights and meditates on Black life in relationship to space, social structures, and architecture through centering embodied practices. They are deeply invested in the act and process of moving, the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity gained from shifting perspective.
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September 2019ABOUT THE EVENT:
In terra, breathing, Tigue (DH ALUMNI 2019) collaged hypnotic percussive compositions, sculptural sound objects and experiments with the physical nature of sound into an evening-length performance that investigated our personal desires toward a greater ecological empathy. Rather than being “about” or “representing” our relationships with nature, these compositions embodied our curious and caring connection with this big ball of earth — our warming world. With terra, breathing, Tigue continued to fine-tune what they consider the reflexive theater of musical performance — how performing music is a natural form of theater and how that theater, in turn, informs a musical language.ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Tigue is a group of three percussionists with a fluid musical identity. The Brooklyn-based trio (Matt Evans, Amy Garapic and Carson Moody) makes their own kinetic and hypnotic blend of instrumental minimalism while opening up the possibilities of their instrumentation through commissioning and collaboration. Tigue’s debut album Peaks was released in 2015 with New Amsterdam Records with highlighted performances at the Ecstatic Music Festival, Bric Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, and the Zemlika Festival in Durbe, Latvia. Recent commissions and premieres have included works by Molly Herron, Randy Gibson, Jason Treuting, Adrian Knight and Robert Honstein alongside collaborative ventures with Kid Millions and visual artist / sculptor Michael Mercil. These works have been presented in concert halls, galleries, black box theaters and universities throughout the country including EMPAC, Roulette, The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Noguchi Museum, Yale School of Music, and Princeton University. Praised for their focused and “high octane” performances (New York Times), the Ohio-born band members have worked together since they were practically children.Along with performing, the members of Tigue are dedicated to outreach and community projects. In collaboration with Make Music New York, the trio has led three 10-week music education programs with adult and adolescent inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island Correctional Facility, featured in both the New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine. Working with inmates in both men’s and women’s facilitates, the trio shared the communicative nature of music through West African musical traditions and hand drumming culminating with inmate performances for the Rikers population. Tigue has also presented workshops and masterclasses with collegiate universities, elementary classrooms and community groups across the globe.
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Summer 2019ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate the year's Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. That year’s recipient was Robbie McCauley (DH ALUMNI 2019).The annual award is given to multidisciplinary artists for excellence in the field of performance art. We honor these artists who blur the boundaries of the genre and explore social issues. In addition to receiving a cash award, McCauley was in residence at Denniston Hill to develop a work-in-progress, culminating in a public performance with artists Tina Ruan and Eric Rasmussen.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
ROBBIE MCCAULEY (1942-2021), was an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. Her accolades included the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance, a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow, an OBIE Award and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance for her play, Sally’s Rape. She directed a critically successful Roxbury Repertory Theater production of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams. She receivedShe is widely anthologized including Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics, edited respectively by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, Robbie went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad.
Striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local whites and blacks, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston and Los Angeles produced by The Arts Company. In 1998 her “Buffalo Project” is highlighted as one of “The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments” by The Village Voice, a roster including work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage.
Robbie McCauley was Professor Emerita of Emerson College Department of Performing Arts and the 2014 Monan Professor in Theatre Arts at Boston College.
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March 2019ABOUT THE EVENT:
Find Out Where They At by Autumn Knight (DH ALUMNI 2017) uses text, sound, and sculpture to think about exodus as it exists in the psyche and the residue this type of departure leaves in those left behind. What is revealed in the trail of slime in a drawn out departure or in the particles of dust from a hasty escape?
This performance is curious about the mechanisms or vehicles of both forced and autonomous exodus -from vast bodies of water to deadened eyes. Find Out Where They At is considering these questions: How do we, in secret, communicate the moment of exodus? How do we keep the forces of oppression and violation from following us into the space of exodus? How will they know that we are gone? The title is derived from a line within Douglas Turned Ward’s play Day of Absence wherein a town wakes up to find that all the black people have disappeared without a trace.ABOUT THE ARTIST:
AUTUMN KNIGHT is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum, and Krannert Art Museum. Knight has been an artist in residence with Denniston Hill (2017) and most recently Triangle Arts Association (2019).
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December 2018
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Unpacking was a new performance by Clifford Owens (DH ALUMNI 2017), co-presented with Triangle Arts.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
CLIFFORD OWENS is a New York City-based artist. His work has been presented internationally in both solo and group exhibitions. Clifford Owens’ art has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His solo exhibitions include “Anthology: Clifford Owens” Museum of Modern Art PS1 (2011-2012), “Better the Rebel You Know” Home, Manchester, England (2014), and “Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011). His many group exhibitions include, “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” Contemporary Arts Museum (2012 - 2014), “Greater New York 2005” Museum of Modern Art PS1 (2005), “Freestyle” The Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), and “Performance Now” (2013 – 2014), and “Lone Wolf Recital Corp” Museum of Modern Art (2017).His interdisciplinary performance projects include, “Photographs with an Audience” (ongoing since 2008), “Seminar,” at Pioneer Works and Denniston Hill, “A Forum for Performance Art” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and “A Salon for Performance Art” at Artpace.
Owens studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rutgers University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He has received numerous grants and fellowships including the William H. Johnson Prize, the Art Matters Grant, the Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Community Trust, the Lambent Foundation, Denniston Hill Distinguished Performance Artist Prize, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Publications, reviews, and interviews about his work include New York Times, Art +Auction, Village Voice, Modern Painters, Art in America, Art Forum, The New Yorker, BOMB, The Wall Street Journal, The Drama Review, Greater New York 2005, Performa: New Visual Art Performance, Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, and Why Art Photography? He has written for exhibition catalogues, the New York Times, Art Forum, and Performing Arts Journal. His project “Anthology” is the subject of his first book.
He has been an artist in residence at Studio Museum in Harlem (2005), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2004), Pioneer Works (2014), Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2016, I think), Denniston Hill (2017), MacDowell Colony (2018), and Artpace International Artist in Residence (2018).
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November 2018
ABOUT THE EVENT:
This Is A Film (1.2) by Chloë Bass (DH ALUMNI 2018) is a lecture performance exploring what it means to turn footage into language. Using clips of family home movies found in various online archives, Chloë Bass creates a descriptive piece for the audience to hear and imagine. Where is the film: in the language? in the images that come into each listener's head? Is it shared between us? What do we see, and how does it make a story?This Is A Film (1.0) premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Version 1.1 was presented for an intimate audience at Amherst College at the invitation of Macon Reed. This is version 1.2. Each new edit reflects changes based on the specifics of the venue or organization presenting the work, as well as straying further from direct description of the original pieces of footage.
This Is A Film (1.2) was developed with the support of The Laundromat Project's Create Change Residency Program in partnership with Denniston Hill. Chloë Bass was also a 2017 artist-in-residence at Triangle Arts Association.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
CHLOË BASS is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), is currently observing immediate families (Obligation To Others Holds Me In My Place, 2018 - 2020), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies; 2018’s include a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her forthcoming monograph will be published by The Operating System in Fall 2018; she also has a chapbook, #sky #nofilter, forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published on Hyperallergic, Arts. Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.
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Summer 2018ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate the year's Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. That year’s recipient was Xaviera Simmons (DH ALUMNI 2018).The annual award is given to multidisciplinary artists for excellence in the field of performance art. We honor these artists who blur the boundaries of the genre and explore social issues. In addition to receiving a cash award, McCauley was in residence at Denniston Hill to develop a work-in-progress.
The event included special performances by workshop participants: Pelenakeke Brown, Malcolm Peacock, Rina Espritu and Sonia Louise Davis
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
XAVIERA SIMMONS' sweeping body of work spans photography, performance, choreography video, sound, sculpture, and installation. Simmons’ interdisciplinary practice is rooted in shifting definitions of landscape, character development, art, political and social histories and the interconnectedness of formal processes.Simmons received her BFA from Bard College in 2004 after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art in 2005 while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally. Major exhibitions and performances include The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; MoMA PS1, NYC; The Studio Museum In Harlem, NYC; The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; The Kitchen, NY, The Public Art Fund, NYC; David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL; among many others.
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DATE:
Summer 2018ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate the year's Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. That year’s recipient was Xaviera Simmons (DH ALUMNI 2018).
The event included special performances by workshop participants: Pelenakeke Brown, Malcolm Peacock, Rina Espritu and Sonia Louise Davis — all under the title: RESPITE.
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DATE:
Summer 2018ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate the year's Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. That year’s recipient was Xaviera Simmons (DH ALUMNI 2018).
The event included special performances by workshop participants: Pelenakeke Brown, Malcolm Peacock, Rina Espritu and Sonia Louise Davis
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DATE:
Summer 2018ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate the year's Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. That year’s recipient was Xaviera Simmons (DH ALUMNI 2018).
The event included special performances by workshop participants: Pelenakeke Brown, Malcolm Peacock, Rina Espritu and Sonia Louise Davis
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DATE:
Summer 2018ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate the year's Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. That year’s recipient was Xaviera Simmons (DH ALUMNI 2018).
The event included special performances by workshop participants: Pelenakeke Brown, Malcolm Peacock, Rina Espritu and Sonia Louise Davis
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DATE:
2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Cherie Dre by Sacha Yanow (DH ALUMNI 2017) was a work-in-progress solo performance about the showgirl alter ego of Yanow’s grandmother who suffered from bipolar disorder before the invention of modern treatments.Set in the 1950’s, the performance unfolds in two places simultaneously: her grandmother’s bedroom in the Bronx and a ballroom at the Concord resort hotel in the Catskills. The artist embodies her own imagining of Cherie Dre through covers of the Yiddish pop songs by the Barry Sisters, dance routines, monologues, and “dialogues.” As with Yanow’s previous work, this piece weaves together personal experience with broader social histories through physical storytelling and queer embodying.
Specifically, Cherie Dre excavates the artist’s relationship to gender and femininity, magical thinking, gambling, and performing, alongside the history of the Borscht Belt, Jewish entertainers, and McCarthy era witch hunts.Yanow, who had been developing the piece for the past year, spent one month in residence at Denniston Hill to continue her research by gathering personal histories from local relatives and community members as well as mining the archives of Sullivan County’s historical records, where Denniston Hill and the Concord Hotel are located.
The performance took place at our co-presenters, the nearby Hurleyville Arts Centre (HAC) in Hurleyville, NY, in their new state-of-the-art 150 seat theater and was followed by a Q+A session with the artist and a reception.
Development support for Cherie Dre was provided by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space Residency (March, 2016), and by a residency-based exhibition at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College (September 9–October 9, 2016), curated by Stephanie Snyder.
This project was made possible in part with funding from a Sullivan County Arts & Heritage Grant funded by the Sullivan County Legislature and administered by Delaware Valley Arts Alliance.
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Summer 2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Each summer we open the farm house, surrounding garden and river paths to our alumni, friends and supporters to celebrate our annual Distinguished Performance Artist award recipient. The 2017 recipient was Clifford Owens (DH ALUMNI 2017).The award is given to multidisciplinary artists for excellence in the field of performance art. We honor these artists who blur the boundaries of the genre and explore social issues.
Clifford Owens was the second recipient of Denniston Hill’s Distinguished Performance Artist Award. During his month-long residency, Owens led Seminar: Denniston Hill: A Performance Art Seminar with Clifford Owens, our first residency within a residency.
Conceived as a performance art workshop for emerging performance artists, this initiative marks a milestone in Denniston Hill’s long-term commitment to alternative models for creative pedagogy and mentorship.
The workshop and performances were made possible by a generous donation from Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi.
Many thanks to Charles Von Herrlich/Von Bar and Samara Ferris/Blind Dog Catering. Photographs by Whitney Brown and Danny Sze.
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Summer 2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Seminar: Denniston Hill was the second iteration of a conceptual, performance-based project by Clifford Owens that involves a workshop-residency within an artist-residency, which was initiated in 2014 at Pioneer Works, a contemporary arts center located in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The title of the project is its organizing structure; five intense days of performance art workshops led by Owens with five participants, selected by a jury, that imagines a critical pedagogy of performance art. During the five-day workshop-residency, each participant developed a new performance, concluding with a public performance.
Alex Beriault’s performance was titled, Untitled (performance with table).
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
ALEX BERIAULT lives and works in Toronto. She holds a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, graduating as the recipient of the 2014 Sculpture/Installation Medal award. Beriault has performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Toronto International and most recently, at the in/Future exhibition at Ontario Place.
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DATE:
Summer 2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Seminar: Denniston Hill was the second iteration of a conceptual, performance-based project by Clifford Owens that involves a workshop-residency within an artist-residency, which was initiated in 2014 at Pioneer Works, a contemporary arts center located in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The title of the project is its organizing structure; five intense days of performance art workshops led by Owens with five participants, selected by a jury, that imagines a critical pedagogy of performance art. During the five-day workshop-residency, each participant developed a new performance, concluding with a public performance.
Asif Mian’s performance was titled, Merchant.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
ASIF MIAN lives and works in New York City. He works at the intersection of sculpture, performance and filmmaking, Mian explores the imprint that masculinity, competition, ritual and violence have on contemporary culture. Mian is an MFA candidate (2018) in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Mian recently had a solo show at False Flag Gallery, and has exhibited at Bitforms Gallery, NYC. His film work has premiered at SXSW, the Los Angeles and Krakow Film Festivals, among others.
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DATE:
Summer 2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Seminar: Denniston Hill was the second iteration of a conceptual, performance-based project by Clifford Owens that involves a workshop-residency within an artist-residency, which was initiated in 2014 at Pioneer Works, a contemporary arts center located in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The title of the project is its organizing structure; five intense days of performance art workshops led by Owens with five participants, selected by a jury, that imagines a critical pedagogy of performance art. During the five-day workshop-residency, each participant developed a new performance, concluding with a public performance.
Emma Sulkowicz’ performance was titled, Something Bigger Than Me.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
EMMA SULKOWICZ lives and works in New York City. She earned a BFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2015 and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her awards include the National Organization for Women’s Woman of Courage Award (2016) and Susan B. Anthony Award (2014), the United States Student Association’s National Student Movement Builder of the Year Award (2015), and the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine’s Ms. Wonder Award (2015).
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DATE:
Summer 2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Seminar: Denniston Hill was the second iteration of a conceptual, performance-based project by Clifford Owens that involves a workshop-residency within an artist-residency, which was initiated in 2014 at Pioneer Works, a contemporary arts center located in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The title of the project is its organizing structure; five intense days of performance art workshops led by Owens with five participants, selected by a jury, that imagines a critical pedagogy of performance art. During the five-day workshop-residency, each participant developed a new performance, concluding with a public performance.
Joseph Liatela’s performance was titled, BOUND.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
JOSEPH LIATELA is a multimedia artist based in Oakland, California (as of 2017). His work explores the way we perceive gender, sexuality, the body, memory, trans/queer intergenerational trauma, and the self. He completed his BFA from the Individualized Honors program at California College of the Arts (2017). His work has been featured at the National Queer Arts Festival (2016), the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival (2017), SOMArts (2017), and was selected for the New York Arts Practicum (2016).
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DATE:
Summer 2017ABOUT THE EVENT:
Seminar: Denniston Hill was the second iteration of a conceptual, performance-based project by Clifford Owens that involves a workshop-residency within an artist-residency, which was initiated in 2014 at Pioneer Works, a contemporary arts center located in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The title of the project is its organizing structure; five intense days of performance art workshops led by Owens with five participants, selected by a jury, that imagines a critical pedagogy of performance art. During the five-day workshop-residency, each participant developed a new performance, concluding with a public performance.
Nadja Verena Marcin’s performance was titled, New Cube.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
NADJA VERENA MARCIN divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and Nordrhine-Westphalia, Germany. Marcin graduated from the Visual Art Department of New Genre, School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York in 2010, after obtaining a Diploma of Fine Arts from the Department of New Media at Academy of Fine Arts Münster. Her work has been featured at Abrons Art Center, New York; Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Human Resources, Los Angeles; ZKM-Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Dortmunder Kunstverein; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; amongst many others. She is represented by Thomas Jaeckel in New York and AKArt in San Francisco.
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April 2017
ABOUT THE EVENT:
A gathering to celebrate our growing community of artists, supporters, and partners.The afternoon featured former residents and poets Brenda Shaughnessy (DH ALUMNI 2016) and Cathy Park Hong (DH ALUMNI 2016), and special guest, writer and photographer Timothy Gerken.
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DATE:
Summer 2016
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Poor People’s TV Room was a public performance by Okwui Okpokwasili, recipient of Denniston Hill’s inaugural Distinguished Performance Artist Award (DPAA), performed at our first Annual Open House.As part of the DPAA award, Okpokwasili staged a “collective embodied performance” with a number of guests who volunteered to participate in the piece. The work, led by Okpokwasili, drew on material from a new performance Okpokwasili was developing while in residence at Denniston Hill.
Poor People's TV Room, which premiered last fall, is a multi-media performance rooted in the kinetic history of collective action in Nigeria. It references two historic incidents in Nigeria: the Women's War of 1929, an anti-colonial resistance movement led by women, and the Boko Haram kidnappings which launched the Bring Back Our Girls movement. Poor People's TV Room not only excavates these historical events but underscores the ways that women of color have historically been--and continue to be--a catalyst for social change throughout the world.