Join us for the second of four Second Saturdays, a new series of dynamic public programs presented to delve deeper into the themes, techniques, and aesthetics of Queens Museum’s temporary exhibitions. We will be kicking the series off with Mel Chin: All Over the Place on April 14, June 9, July 14, and August 11 from 12-4pm. Each afternoon will feature events produced in conversation with All Over the Place’s four thematic sections at the Queens Museum.

April 14: On “Cruel Light of the Sun”
June 9: On “The Artifice of Facts and Belief”
July 14: On “Destroying Angels of Our Creation”
August 11: On “Levity’s Wounds and Gravity’s Well”

On June 9th, we will be responding to “The Artifice of Facts and Belief”  which focuses on Chin’s works that investigate different approaches to apprehending meaning and seeing the world. Knowledge, as it is produced and presented, always reflects its source. Chin, a constant doubter of received knowledge, creates works to prompt re-seeing, re-reading, and re-imagining what and how we know. “Knowledge is power” is a widely used phrase; but knowledge can also be used to support the structures of power.

Events on June 9th will feature psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster in conversation with Mel Chin; a poetry reading and musical performance inspired by Chin’s work The Funk & Wag from A to Z (2012); a dance performance of Hungry choreographed by Lauren Hale Biniaris; and a drop-in collage workshop with artist Camille Hoffman.

Schedule of Events:

12:45-1:30pm Dance Performance of Hungry by Lauren Hale Biniaris
(Skylight Gallery, 1st Floor)

Text and Choreography by Lauren Hale Biniaris
Performance by Min Seon Jeun, Marisa Post, and Jenn Schulte
Music by Ben Kutner

Through dance, gesture, and prose, Hungry, explores our complicated relationship with food, sustenance, famine, and renewal. It looks to seeds, both literally and metaphorically, to thread together one woman’s journey through her own hungry past, present, and future. This piece is made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

1:00-3:00pm Drop-in Collage Workshop with Camille Hoffman
(Upper Atrium, 1st Floor)

2:00-3:30pm Poetry Reading and Performances: The Funk & Wag from A to Z
(Skylight Gallery, 1st Floor)

Poets: Jen Bervin, Nick Flynn, Tamalyn Miller, Rachel Zucker
Bands: KILLDEER and GODDESS

Poets and musicians respond to Mel Chin’s room-sized installation The Funk & Wag from A to Z (2012), in which the artist transforms engravings that illustrated a 25 volume set of encyclopedias into whimsically titled, fantastic new configurations. Four poets will read works inspired by individual volumes of the encyclopedia, published in the eponymous book on the installation alongside images of over 500 black-and-white collages, as well as new works related to “The Artifice of Facts and Belief”. Musical performances will follow.

3:30-4:30pm Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster in Conversation with Mel Chin
(Theater, 2nd Floor)

All events are free and open to the public.

Participant Bios (in order of appearance):

Lauren Hale Biniaris is a dancer, choreographer, and poet whose work explores the intersecting worlds of art, nature, and the messiness of being human. Lauren founded her own company, Lauren Hale Dance (LHD) in 2004 after receiving her MFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and before that, her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2002.  Since then, Lauren has acted as Resident Artist for the Chattanooga Ballet, Brown University, Mercersburg Academy, and the Q-StudioLab. She has presented choreography at Dance New Amsterdam, Dixon Place, The Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Museum of Biblical Art, and many other venues both in New York and beyond. Lauren is also a company member with Dancing Legacy, the repertory performance ensemble of the American Dance Legacy Initiative. Lauren is the grateful recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation, Fractured Atlas, and the Queens Arts Fund, and her poetry publishing credits include Newtown Literary Journal and International Doula Magazine.

Camille Hoffman received her BFA in Community Arts and Painting from California College of the Arts in 2009 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2015. She has worked for over a decade as an arts educator and community organizer in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Haven, Brooklyn, and Queens. She is a past recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Hoffman has shown throughout the United States and in Europe, in exhibitions including Pieceable Kingdom at the Museum of Arts and Design, Music and Conversation: East of the Wallace Line at the Yale University Art Gallery and MASIVAMENTE at Espai Cultural Biblioteca Azorín in Valencia, Spain, and participated in the Nuit Blanche arts festival in Paris, France. She recently completed residencies at Queenspace and Wave Hill, and currently lives and works in New York.

Jen Bervin is an artist and poet whose research-driven interdisciplinary works weave together art, writing, science and life in a complex yet elegant way. In spirit and in subject, poetry and the embodied and visual aspects of language hold sway throughout her work, which is featured in exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center, Brown University, MASS MoCA, The Power Plant in Toronto, Harvard Natural History Museum, The Morgan Library and Museum, and the Walker Art Center. It can be found in more than thirty international collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, and The J. Paul Getty Museum. Bervin has published ten books, including Silk Poems (Nightboat Books 2017). She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017), The Rauschenberg Residency (2016), Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2016), SETI Institute Artist in Residence (2016) and a Creative Capital Grant (2013).

Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and as a case-worker with homeless adults. His most recent book is My Feelings (Graywolf, 2015), a collection of poems. In 2019, two new books will appear, Stay (Ze Books), a collection of collaborations and writings, as well as I Will Destroy You (Graywolf), a collection of poems. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Tamalyn Miller is a visual artist, musician and poet who blends residues of ancient systems with contemporary perspectives and forms. Crossing genres and reclaiming antiquated craft techniques, she produces handcrafted poetry bookworks, conceptually charged objects and experiential installations that suggest recovered artifacts or rites imbued with mysterious powers and functions. Her work hovers at junctures: the threshold that separates a medicinal dose from a lethal one, for example, or the frontier between spirit and materiality. As a musician (handmade horsehair fiddle, voice) and composer, Tamalyn performs solo and is a founding member of the psychedelic folk band GODDESS and the altered-state ambient duo SPIRIT RADIO. She exhibits and performs widely at diverse venues including Wave Hill, SculptureCenter, Dixon Place, WFMU, Project Row Houses, Proteus Gowanus, Joyce Theater SoHo and the Black Mountain College Museum.

Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, including MOTHERs and The Pedestrians. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Zucker teaches poetry at New York University and spent a year delivering a series of lectures on the intersection of poetry, confession, ethics and disobedience as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. Zucker is the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets and Other People.

KILLDEER is a band which manifests in various incarnations, each with its own sound [from punk/folk to ambient noise]. On any given night players include Nick Flynn, Guy Barash, Simi Stone, and/or Philip Marshall—who appears depends on who’s in town.

GODDESS is a psych-folk anomaly featuring eerie atonal harmonies, dime-store instruments and a homemade horsehair shaman’s fiddle. We write songs and musical fairytales about the dark places in our heads and pasts, influenced by madrigals, nursery rhymes, Amish culture, shamanic trance music, ghost stories and animal bones.  GODDESS consists of founding members Fran Pado and Tamalyn Miller, multi-instrumentalist Andy Newman and guitarist Bob Bannister. Our 2015 release Paradise was called “One of the Year’s Best and Most Hauntingly Psychedelic Albums” by New York Music Daily.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst  in New York. She has written for Artforum, Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, Playboy, The New York Times. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Stay, Illusion!, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013). She is currently working on The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, with Marcus Coelen, and a new book, Conversion Disorder (Columbia, 2018).

Upcoming Second Saturday Schedule 
July 14: On “Destroying Angels of Our Creation”
August 11: On “Levity’s Wounds and Gravity’s Well”

NOTE: Second Saturdays will take a break for May 12, as Queens Museum is hosting Open Engagement, an artist-led conference dedicated to expanding the dialogue around and creating a site of care for the field of socially engaged art. This year’s conference focuses on the theme of SUSTAINABILITY and features keynote presentations by Mel Chin and Lucy Lippard.

Featured Image: The Funk & Wag from A to Z (2012), installation view at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX

Mel Chin: All Over the Place is made possible in part by lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation and Ford Foundation. Major support is provided by Sarah Arison, Suzanne Deal Booth, Agnes Gund, The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Ann and James Harithas, Ellen and Bill Taubman, The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, Annette Blum, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo and the Dorothea Leonhardt Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas, Inc., Matthew Cushing, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Thomas Pascal Will Robinson, and two anonymous donors. Additional support is provided by Fairfax Dorn and Marc Glimcher, and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

Public programs at the Queens Museum are made possible by Surdna Foundation and The New York Community Trust.