Join us Sunday afternoons, 1:30 – 4pm for Sundays on the Lawn, a new outdoor program featuring internationally renowned bands and musicians, plus free art making classes and lawn games. Bring your friends and families for an afternoon on the museum’s lawn. Grab a picnic from the cafe and enjoy a stellar line-up of bands organized around the theme of call and response and calls to action by guest curator Ariana Hellerman. Art making classes and lawn games start at 1:30pm, music performances start at 3pm.

This Sunday will feature the family art-making workshops, as well as interactive design and planning games with the summer fellows of the Institute for Public Architecture, starting at 1:30pm 

*In case of rain, all programs will take place inside the museum on the 2nd floor!

Musical Performance at 3pm: Ani Cordero

Ani Cordero is a singer, songwriter, drummer, guitarist, and Latin American music researcher living in NYC. In 2014, Ani released an album entitled “Recordar” (“Remember”), which re-imagined songs by influential Latin American songwriters of the turbulent “Nueva Cancion” era, including Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Chavela Vargas, and Atahualpa Yupanqui. Her critically-acclaimed album received accolades from NPR’s All Things Considered, Alt-Latino, and Soundcheck, as well as, Billboard, USA Today, PRI The World, Brooklyn Vegan, BUST, Remezcla, and more. Following the success of “Recordar,” Ani has written a new album of her own political protest and love songs called “Querido Mundo” (“Dear World”). The album is Ani’s love letter to a complicated world and addresses several themes including immigration, Black Lives Matter, Feminism, and government corruption. The songs feature heavy percussion, sing-along choruses and strong lyrics that aim to inspire political resistance and support for social justice. Ani has toured with the legendary Os Mutantes, as well as a founding member of the celebrated Mexican rock band Pistolera. In the early 2000s, Ani led her own bilingual art rock band, Cordero who released such Feminist anthems such as “Vamos Nenas,” and “Matadora.” Last year, after the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Maria on her native Puerto Rico, Ani organized the PRIMA Fund, to provide emergency aid to musicians and artists on the island.  

More about:

CALLS:

CALL and response

CALL to action

Call and Response is a form of interaction in which the speaker’s statements (“calls”) are punctuated by direct commentary from the audience. In music, it is a technique where one musician offers a phrase and a second player responds. The musicians build on each other’s offerings and move the song forward, collectively. Forms of call and response music are widely present in parts of the world touched by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and in this country, can be seen in the most famous of African-American music genres including gospel, blues, soul, R&B, and hip hop. Often times, the lyrics reflect the social struggles experienced.

A Call To Action is an instruction to an audience, designed to provoke an immediate response. Calls to Action have inspired radical collaborations that call for change, whether for peace, the end of war, community formation, or political resistance.

Artist’s Calls to Action have inspired songs that become protest anthems, fighting issues of injustice, including institutional racism, income inequality, and war. In the United States, Sam Cooke penned the Civil Rights masterpiece “A Change Is Gonna Come;”  folk and mainstream artists like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, helped to create the soundtrack to the anti-war movement during Vietnam.

In many ways, both Call and Response music and musician’s Calls to Action relate to civic life and the struggle for social justice. Call and Response is often a pervasive pattern of democratic participation— used in public gatherings, in the discussion of civic affairs, and in religious rituals – it ensures that all voices are heard and that all issues are addressed. Politically, social Calls to Action are usually sparked when something has gone awry; it signals an alarm for change.

In this series, we have engaged artists from different parts of the world, whose music shines light onto one of the two Calls. “Call and Response” music and musical “Calls to Action” are quite similar in that they both tell interactive stories and are both dependent on a collective experience.  In these dire political times, we are in need of dialogue and each other.

– statement by Ariana Hellerman