Mercer Arts Center
   HOME
*





Mercer Arts Center
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in Greenwich Village in 1971 by Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were frustrated at the lack of an outlet for video art. The space takes its name from the original location, the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center which was the only available place for the artists to screen their video pieces. Although first intended as a location for the exhibition of video art, The Kitchen soon expanded its mission to include other forms of art and performance. In 1974, The Kitchen relocated to a building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets in SoHo, and incorporated as a not-for-profit arts organization. In 1987 it moved to its current location. The first music director of The Kitchen was composer Rhys Chatham. The venue became known as a place w ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

19th Street (Manhattan)
The New York City borough of Manhattan contains 214 numbered east–west streets ranging from 1st to 228th, the majority of them designated in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. These streets do not run exactly east–west, because the grid plan is aligned with the Hudson River, rather than with the cardinal directions. Thus, the majority of the Manhattan grid's "west" is approximately 29 degrees north of true west; the angle differs above 155th Street, where the grid initially ended. The grid now covers the length of the island from 14th Street north. All numbered streets carry an East or West prefix – for example, East 10th Street or West 10th Street – which is demarcated at Broadway below 8th Street, and at Fifth Avenue at 8th Street and above. The numbered streets carry crosstown traffic. In general, but with numerous exceptions, even-numbered streets are one-way eastbound and odd-numbered streets are one-way westbound. Most wider streets, and a few of the narrow ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

James Chance
James Chance, also known as James White (born James Siegfried, April 20, 1953), is an American saxophonist, keyboard player, and singer. A key figure in no wave, Chance has been playing a combination of improvisational jazz-like music and punk in the New York music scene since the late 1970s, in such bands as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, James White and the Blacks (as he appeared in the film ''Downtown 81''), The Flaming Demonics, James Chance & the Sardonic Symphonics, James Chance and Terminal City, and James Chance and Les Contortions. Biography Born and raised in Milwaukee and Brookfield, Wisconsin, Chance attended Michigan State University, then the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee. There, Chance joined a band named Death, which performed covers of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground before moving toward original songs. At the end of 1975, Chance dropped out and moved to New York City after the dissolution of the band an ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Leisure Class (band)
Leisure Class is an American rock band. Formed in Detroit in 1977 as Mr. Unique & the Leisure Suits, the band got their start as the opening act for The Mumps (featuring Lance Loud) and local favorites like Flirt and Destroy All Monsters. They released their debut record, the four-song EP, "''Mr. Unique & the Leisure Class"'' in 1983. Dennis Loren, reviewing it in the ''Metro Times'', found "something to offend everyone",. The band moved to New York City, making their debut at CBGB in 1984. Venues for the band during this period included CBGB, 8BC, SNAFU, the Henry Street Settlement, the Kitchen, the Gas Station, the Lone Star Roadhouse, Under Acme, Woody's, Beowulf, and Tramps. Their performances featured, at various times, writer Herbert Huncke, impaled goat heads, and a two-story prison (designed and built by conceptual artist and photographer Misha Gordin. The limited edition two-CD compilation, ''Leisure Class Recordings 1979–1994'' was released in 2004. The following year ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


The Future Sound Of London
The Future Sound of London (often abbreviated FSOL) is a British electronic music duo composed of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans. They have been described as a "boundary-pushing" electronic act, covering techno, ambient, house music, trip hop, psychedelia, and dub. While keeping an enigmatic image and releasing music under many aliases, the band found commercial success with singles "Papua New Guinea" (1991), "Cascade" (1993), and albums '' Lifeforms'' (1994) and ''Dead Cities'' (1996). In recent years, the duo has become more candid with their fanbase online. History Formation Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans met in the mid-1980s while studying electronics at university in Manchester, England. Dougans had already been making electronic music, working between Glasgow and Manchester, when the pair first began working together in local clubs. In 1988, Dougans embarked on a project for a graphic studio ''Stakker'', which resulted with a single "Stakker Humanoid" that reached ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Anthony Rzewski ( ; April 13, 1938 – June 26, 2021) was an American composer and pianist, considered to be one of the most important American composer-pianists of his time. His major compositions, which often incorporate social and political themes, include the minimalist ''Coming Together'' and the variation set '' The People United Will Never Be Defeated!'', which has been called "a modern classic". Early life and education Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Massachusetts, to parents of Polish and Jewish descent, and raised Catholic. He began playing piano at age 5 and attended Phillips Academy, Harvard, and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy on a Fulbright grant, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship he began a career as a performer of ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Gordon Mumma
Gordon Mumma (born March 30, 1935, in Framingham, Massachusetts) is an American composer. He is known most for his work with electronics, many devices of which he builds himself, and for his performances on horn. Biography Mumma entered the University of Michigan in 1952 at age 17, after dropping out of high school. He dropped out of Michigan after a year, but the connections he made in Ann Arbor were the foundation of much of his musical career. His early work was in piano, and his musical development drew on traditional composers such as Bach and Haydn, as well as modern composers such as Bartók, Schoenberg, Webern, and Ives.Fillion, Michell"Gordon Mumma's Music for Solo Piano (1960–2001)" Liner notes to ''GORDON MUMMA - MUSIC FOR SOLO PIANO 1960–2001''. New World Records. Mumma's performances on piano were often in the context of piano ensembles, partnered with John Cage, David Tudor, and other performers. He toured internationally in the 1960s in a two-piano performance ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliveros authored books, formulated new music theories, and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of "deep listening" and "sonic awareness", drawing on metaphors from cybernetics. She was an Eyebeam resident. Early life and career Oliveros was born in Houston, Texas. She started to play music as early as kindergarten, and at nine years of age she began to play the accordion, received from her mother, a pianist, because of its popularity in the 1940s.Baker, Alan"An interview with Pauline Oliveros" January 2003. '' ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich ( ; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." To do so, his music employs the technique of phase shifting, in which a phrase is slightly altered over time, in a flow that is clearly perceptible to the listener. His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns, as on the early compositions ''It's Gonna Rain'' (1965) and '' Come Out'' (1966), and the use of simple, audible processes, as on ''Pendulum Music'' (1968) and ''Four Organs'' (1970). The 1978 recording ''Music for 18 Musicians'' would help entrench minimalism as a movement. Reich's work took o ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, Order of the British Empire, CBE (born 23 March 1944) is an English composer, pianist, libretto, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film soundtrack, scores (many written during his lengthy collaboration with the film director, filmmaker Peter Greenaway), and his multi-platinum The Piano (soundtrack), soundtrack album to Jane Campion's ''The Piano''. He has written a number of operas, including ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (opera), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat''; ''Letters, Riddles and Writs''; ''Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs''; ''Facing Goya''; ''Man and Boy: Dada''; ''Love Counts''; and ''Sparkie: Cage and Beyond''. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber music, chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music. Early life and education Nyman was born in Stratford, London, Stratford ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway, (born 5 April 1942) is a Welsh film director, screenwriter and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. Common traits in his films are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. Early life Greenaway was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, to a teacher mother and a builder's merchant father. Greenaway's family left South Wales when he was three years old (they had moved there originally to avoid the Blitz) and settled in Chingford, Essex. He attended Forest School in nearby Walthamstow. At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French ''nouvelle vague'' filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais. Greenaway ha ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Jay Scheib
Jay Scheib (born October 6, 1969) is an American stage director, playwright and artist, noted for his contemporary productions of both classical and new plays and operas. Scheib is a Professor for Music and Theater Arts and director of the Program in Theater Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he teaches performance media, motion theater, media and methods, and introduction to directing. Scheib has been a regular guest professor at the ''Mozarteum, Thomas Bernhard Institut, Abteilung für Regie und Schauspiel'' in Salzburg, Austria, where he conducts an annual "viewpoints and composition" studio. Biography Early career Scheib was born in Shenandoah, Iowa and attended the University of Minnesota. In 1997 he entered Columbia University School of the Arts from where he later received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Theater Directing. He began his career in Minneapolis, Minnesota with a 1991 production of Antonin Artaud's ''Le Jet du Sang'' followed by a com ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John Moran (composer)
John Moran is an American composer, choreographer, and theater artist. He has been called an "operatic trailblazer", and his works are variously described as "unconventional", "innovative", and difficult to categorize. His works bring together a variety of mediums, including recorded music, spoken word, choreography and dance, mime, lip syncing, and video. Additionally, his works have featured a range of performers, including actors Uma Thurman and Julia Stiles, as well as singer Iggy Pop, and poet Allen Ginsberg. Early life and education John Moran was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1965. He lacks a formal education in composition and in fact never graduated from high school. He unsuccessfully attempted to study informally at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where his father was the assistant dean of arts and sciences. But he knew he was drawn to composition and given his experience singing children's parts in operas. When the Philip Glass Ensemble was performing in town, Mo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]