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Celebrating the music and spirit of a true original.
Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda was an American jazz pianist, organist, harpist, singer, composer and the wife of John Coltrane, the most venerated and influential saxophonist in the history of jazz. Alice’s recording catalog dates back to 1957, and during the last decade of her career – starting in the mid-’80s – she self-released four brilliant cassette albums. They contained a music she invented, inspired by the gospel music of the Detroit churches she grew up in, mixed together with the Indian devotional music of her religious practice.
Ten years after Alice’s passing, in what would have been her 80th year, we will celebrate her music and spirit at the stunning arts and performance space Knockdown Center in Queens. The first part is presented with New York label Luaka Bop, and inspired by the Sunday ceremonies Alice held at her Sai Anantam Ashram in California. Timed to coincide with sundown, the powerful, spiritual music will be performed by an ensemble led by music director Surya Botofasina, who grew up at the Ashram. The latter half will be a concert led by her son, Ravi Coltrane, featuring an all-star band playing music from throughout Alice’s career.
SUNSET SET: The Sai Anantam Singers & Special Guests
EVENING SET: Ravi Coltrane, Brandee Younger and more
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We are pleased to announce a series of events celebrating the legacy and spirit of avant-garde musician, filmmaker, and artist Tony Conrad (1940–2016). Planned by friends, family, curators, and collaborators, the events include concerts and screenings at venues such as The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, and ISSUE Project Room, centering on a memorial the afternoon of Saturday, April 8, at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. The memorial will feature speeches, videos, and musical performances from artists and writers that were close to Conrad.
TONY CONRAD
Throughout the six decades of his career, Tony Conrad stretched the limits of music and performance. In the 1960s, he drafted post-Cagean music compositions and text pieces, collaborating with artists such as Henry Flynt, Jack Smith, and—as part of legendary drone ensemble Theatre of Eternal Music—La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale. By the mid-’60s, Conrad had begun to focus his attention on film; in 1966, he created The Flicker, a stroboscopic masterpiece which stands as one of the first examples of structural film
From then on, Conrad’s socially-engaged multimedia works, such as Straight and Narrow and Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, continued to push boundaries while investigating notions of authorship, viewership, discipline, and power.
In the ’70s, Conrad turned his attention to new media, working alongside artists such as Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton while a professor State University of New York at Buffalo. In the ensuing decades, Conrad was a leader in Buffalo’s film, media, and educational communities through involvement with the Squeaky Wheel Media Coalition, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo Cable Access Media, and the Department of Media Study at the university.
Conrad continued to make films in the ’80s, working with—and proving a major influence on—a younger generation of artists, namely Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler. The ’90s brought a resurgence of interest in Conrad’s music, with new and archival releases creating a wider audience than ever before for his groundbreaking minimal compositions.
Conrad performed music, screened films, and exhibited art in numerous mediums at festivals and institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern. He had recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; and 80WSE, New York University. His films and artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media, among others. He continued to teach, perform, transgress, and inspire up until his passing on April 9, 2016. A radical and thoughtful visionary, Tony Conrad is missed.
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Man Forever
Man Forever is an exploratory percussion project helmed by John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions), one of New York’s most versatile and critically lauded collaborators and a founding member of Oneida.
https://johncolpitts.bandcamp.com/
CCDS
From St. Louis – Two Drummers, two drum sets. SciFi and Horror blasts.
https://ccdsdeathsquad.bandcamp.com/releases
Collapsible Shoulder
Collapsible Shoulder’s music is drawn from its members’ years in the downtown NYC and Brooklyn music scenes: neo-psychedelic with unpredictable twists and turns, an electronic-acoustic-sonic mash.
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To celebrate the launch of aCCeSsions issue three, the journal’s editorial team will host an event featuring DJ sets from artists Juliana Huxtable, James Hoff and HD at the Knockdown Center. aCCeSsions is the online journal edited by the graduate students at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
Issue 3: “Transmissions”
Digital Launch: Thursday, March 16, 2017
https://accessions.org/
Launch Party: Saturday March 18, 7pm
Featuring DJ sets by James Hoff, Juliana Huxtable, and HD
Event is free and open to the public
Issue 3 contributors: Armen Avanessian, Dora Budor, Lauren Duca, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Anna Friz, Chrissie Iles, Daniel Llano Parra, Christopher Roth, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.
The latest issue of aCCeSsions features nine new commissions from artists, curators, critics, journalists, and scholars. Articles, artworks, and interviews address the ways ideas are packaged and the politics latent in their dissemination. “Transmissions” considers what happens when information is intercepted, mediated, or fragmented. The high stakes of curating discourse and technological secrecy are discussed in an interview with Armen Avanessian and expanded upon in his film with Christopher Roth, Discreet, which will stream exclusively on aCCeSsions. Chrissie Iles’ interview discusses the construction of community in cinema and her curatorial approach to crafting of a total viewing experience, while Lauren Duca’s essay raises questions about the circulation of the Pepe the Frog meme and the ways the cartoon character has been co-opted as a malicious mascot. This third issue of aCCeSsions assembles interdisciplinary perspectives that reassess the concept of transmission.
This issue also marks the redesign of the aCCeSsions website by Other Means, a graphic design studio in New York City. The revamped format features animated content and visual interventions that seek to redefine the experience of this online publication. The journal’s redesign also marks the introduction of BackTalk, a bi-monthly selection of personal trains of thought and ruminations shared by our student editors and found in aCCeSsions.
About aCCeSsions
aCCeSsions is the graduate student-led online journal of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
The second year graduate students comprise the editorial board of aCCeSsions. Together, they employ a collaborative approach to commissioning, editing, and curating new transdisciplinary writing and artworks for online space. These new visual, text-based, and aural contributions revolve around a new theme each issue. The journal also includes a new section called BackTalk. Here, each individual editor will publish a compilation of links related to their trains of thought, on a bi-monthly basis.
aCCeSsions represents a culmination of each graduating class’ collaborative interests and concerns. The platform is a space in which graduate students may test the limits of curatorial practice over the course of an annual publication cycle.
Past issues of aCCeSsions are available in the “Archive” section of the website. The website and each issue of the journal has been designed by Other Means in close collaboration with each graduating class at CCS Bard.
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http://www.rapoon.org/
Pas Musique
http://www.pasmusique.net/
House of Blondes
http://houseofblondes.com/
House of Blondes is an electronic quartet, whose debut album was recently acclaimed by The Quietus as “the most phenomenologically beautiful album heard in a long time. The synthesisers across the whole record sound like they’re floating in the room in front of you, as though the tendrils of their oscillations and reverberations are reaching out and stroking your face, your skin, your inner organs.” Best New Bands premiered their newest track “Are You Boys All Right?”, praising it as “a dark, ambient pulser that feels like it could be part of a soundtrack to a Wong Kar-Wai film, evoking images of a smokey night punctuated by neon lines”.
On a Clear Day
https://onacleardaynyc.bandcam
Luciernaga
https://luciernaga.bandcamp.co