NEW YORK FLOWER FESTIVAL

August 4 - 18, 2019

WEEK 1

Flowers Fest Music Series (organized by Virginia Poundstone)

SUNDAY | AUGUST 4, 8pm

Wilder Zoby on electronics and Ryan Sawyer on drums will perform as a duo exploring sonic boundaries and musical conversation. There might also be an excellent surprise guest.

MONDAY | AUGUST 5, 7pm

CARTHORSE ORCHESTRA is an amalgam of trans-dimensional mechanisms intent on propagating in the aural continuum.

Its devices are operated by Tim Foljahn (Two Dollar Guitar, Cat Power, Half Japanese) and Jeremy Wilms (Taylor Mac, Chico Hamilton, Butch Morris).
For this performance, entitled DRONE STRIKE, CARTHORSE ORCHESTRA will be experimenting with drones (devices) facilitating drones (sound sources) as an attempt to highlight the blurred space between control and controller.

FRIDAY | AUGUST 9, 7:30pm

A reading with Elizabeth Bradfield, Youmna Chlala, Maria Rapoport, and Alexandra Teague.

Organized by Erica Ehrenberg.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the four books, most recently Toward Antarctica, and her work has been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, a Stegner fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Founder of Broadsided Press, she works as a naturalist/guide locally as well as on expedition ships and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University. www.ebradfield.com

Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut and based in New York. Her poetry book, The Paper Camera, will by published by Litmus Press in the fall of 2019. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in publications such as BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke and Aster(ix), among others. She is a professor in the Humanities and Media Studies and Writing Departments at the Pratt Institute.

Maria Rapoport is a New York–based writer who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her work has appeared in BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, The Iowa Review, and The Pinch. She received an Iowa Review Award in creative nonfiction and has been awarded fellowships by the Edward Albee Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. She is currently working on a collection of experimental short fiction.

Alexandra Teague is the author of Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019), and two prior books of poetry—The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography—as well as the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Alexandra has been awarded the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize from Persea Books, the California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry, a Stegner Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship, and was a recent fellow at Civitella Ranieri. She is returning to teach in the MFA program at University of Idaho after a year’s sabbatical in Cardiff, Wales.

WEEK 2

E A T B L O O D Y P U S S Y : A Community Garden

Sunday, August 11th, 7 PM- Performance, screenings and immersive installation
Monday, August 12th, 11-6PM Open Gallery

EAT BLOODY PUSSY is a queer feminist performance project / she demands radical tenderness / she demands vulnerability and communication and guts / through her we explore our softer sources / we find sensual what is messy and utterly human

With EBP2 we are building a community garden. For two days we will bring soil and seeds, shit for composting, blooms for celebrating, tiny shoots buried in the deep dark, roughage to prune, benches for chilling, and conversations to grow.

We invite you to embrace what is raw, sexy, and soft. This is not about a particular body nor the notion of “gendered” biology. A bloody source resides within all of us. We all have a pussy, whether physical or energetic, to access. Eat Bloody Pussy asks us to make work from our basest source. She asks us to shed the bullshit and get to the meat of the matter. What do you need to cultivate right now?

/ a r t i s t s

Amy Tidwell - Untitled, 2019 - painting and plant mother
Chase Chualong - Rebirthing Your Venus: Plant Alchemy, 2019 - ritual performance and plant talisman
Courtney Stevens - Labial Quintet, 2017 - video
Emma Jay - Untitled, 2019 - video
Katie Cercone - Or Nah’s Raw, 2019 - performative video sculpture feat. Kali Xion Williams
Kat Hunt - The Fountain, 2019 - video
Katie Murray - Watermelon, 2019 - photo
Lexi Van Zant - Consumed, 2019 - video
Linda Gallager - Electric Garden, 2018 - painting
Matt Jones - The Flowers of Good, 2019 - durational coloring collaborative performance
MJ - My Queer Ancestors Surround Me, 2019 - totes and treasures
Mikeeh - DJ
Nicki Wong - Metamorphosis Stage 1/-0: Transgressions, 2019 - video, Window Pressures, 2018 - video
Priya Pena & Colby - Show Me Where Your Sun Doesn’t Shine, 2019 - collaborative drawing
Red Washburn - Tr@ns: Possibilities – Bodies, 2019 - text
S. Fredrick Wolken - Welcome Home, 2019 - tactile installation
Sada Spence - The Salon, 2019 - video installation
Shoshanna Kahne - Out of This World, 2019 - at times of uncertainty and transition I make new planets
Susannah Simpson - GOLDEN BOND, 2017 - eco-porn video, Grandmothers Tapestry, 2019 - ancestral fabrics, Ecosex Manifesto by Annie Sprinkle and Rosepetal Ritual - performance and reading
T. George - Haikus from Katy Trail in July, 2019 - photos and poems

/ p r o d u c t i o n

Fitch Ball - creator / curator / host
Allison Baar - photo documentation
Deanna Garcia - video documentation
Ashley Jordan - production assistant / pool boy

Comedian Ike Ufomadu

Friday August 16th, 8PM

Ikechukwu Ufomadu is a Drama Desk Award-winning actor, writer and comic entertainer. Time Out New York named him 1 of 5 “Comics to Watch in 2018”, and he’s an inaugural recipient of the 2019-2020 Jerome Foundation Artist Fellowship.

He is creator and host to a number of original, live shows including: the talk show Ike at Night (Public Theater, Bushwick Starr, JACK); the comedy and music variety hour Nightcap | by Ike (Joe’s Pub at The Public); the one-man variety show Ike Night (Ars Nova, San Francisco Sketchfest, Good Good Comedy Theatre); the Christmas special Ike for the Holidays (Joe’s Pub at The Public); the game show Ike by Chance (Ars Nova, Union Hall); the murder mystery Inspector Ike (Comedy Central Corporate Retreat); and more.

He trained at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts; the International Theatre Workshop in The Netherlands; and Studio Five's theatre and dance programs in Indonesia. Ikechukwu has also been an artist-in-residence at Joe’s Pub at The Public, SPACE on Ryder Farm and The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep.

www.ikehimself.com

Poetry Reading with Alexis Almeida, Alan Felsenthal, and Christine Hou, organized by Emily Hunt

Saturday August 17, 7 PM

Alexis Almeida's long poem, I Have Never Been Able to Sing, is recently out from Ugly Duckling Presse. Her translation of Florencia Castellano's Propiedades vigiladas[Monitored Properties] is also recently out from UDP, and her translation of Roberta Iannamico's Tendal [Wreckage] is just out from Toad Press. She was a Fulbright research fellow to Argentina, and has received residencies and awards from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Centre, Bread Loaf, the Center for Books Arts, the Emily Harvey Foundation, and the University of Colorado, where she did her MFA. She teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard, and at the Bard microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Alan Felsenthal is the author of Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). He runs a small press called The Song Cave with Ben Estes. Together they edited A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (2013). His writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly, jubilat, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Publications include Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Poetry 2017), I'm Sunlight (The Song Cave 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011) a collaborative artists’ book with Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio 2010) featuring drawings by Hannah Rawe. She has received awards from The Key West Literary Seminar, The Flow Chart Foundation/Academy for American Poets, and Naropa University.

Emily Hunt is the author of the poetry collection Dark Green (The Song Cave, 2015), named a standout debut by Publishers Weekly and a "Must-Read Poetry Debut" by Lit Hub. Her most recent works are Company (The Song Cave, 2019), a poetry chapbook, and Cousins (Cold Cube Press, 2019), a book of photographs. More info at emilyrhunt.org and on Instagram @its_ehu.

My Mexican Petroleum (performance)

Sunday, August 18th, 7PM

Mónica Palma was born and raised in Mexico City. Since 2008 has been living and working in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown at TSA (Brooklyn), 245 Varet Street (Brooklyn), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), Five Myles (Brooklyn), and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City). Past exhibitions were reviewed in Artforum and Temporary Art Review and her recent solo show at Ortega y Gasset Projects was reviewed in Art in America.

My Mexican Petroleum is her latest performance utilizing chapopote (bitumen), a substance derived from petroleum. Chapopote has been found on ceremonial Precolumbian objects and in particular on anthropomorphic figures that represent deities associated with night and death. For this performance, she brought pieces of bitumen from México to the U.S. to allegorically speak of the transit of energies from one place to another.