What does it mean to be American? American in the sense of what it is to be living, working, and creating in the Americas: a broad and fluid definition of this hemispheric region and the people who identify with it—people of first nations, South/Central/North America, Canada, the Caribbean. The Great American Performance Art Festival is a series of performance art events curated around this question and its implications, most specifically the notion of borders and barriers. Borders are an arbitrary social construct reminiscent of colonization, war, and exploitation. The population of the Americas has grappled with issues regarding borders and migration, and barriers such as those between languages, political ideologies, religious beliefs, identities, races, ethnicities, demographics, privileges, communities, individuals, governing and law enforcement bodies, and countless other tensions that arise as a part of living in, working in, and identifying with the Americas.

Grace Exhibition Space Brooklyn and this horizontally organized group of curators and artists invited erformance art pieces that respond to the problematics of borders and barriers within the Americas. We seeked proposals for embodied art that reinterpret and reimagine the diverse social, cultural, and economic landscape of the Americas. We encourage proposals for pieces that extend to include broad cross-sections of communities and demographics, and especially those which include participatory elements that address the natural performative barrier between artist and audience. The Great American Performance Art Festival welcomes any interpretation, however abstract, of its proposed theme.

The Great American Performance Art Festival will take place from March-August 2015. Events will be held every other weekend at Grace Exhibition Space for March-May, and every other weekend at the Grace Performance Art Farm in Rosendale, NY from June-August. We will curate roughly 4-5 artists per event.

GRAY ZONE
1. An area intermediate between two mutually exclusive states or categories, where the border between the two is fuzzy.
2. It exists in a grey area between legal and illegal.
3. topic that is not clearly one thing or the other, that is open to interpretation.
4. Synonyms[ (an area intermediate between two mutually exclusive states or categories): penumbra
-wiktionary

The Gray Zone, Kingston and The Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn are run the by husband and wife team of Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson

Presenting a Performance Art Gallery:
PERFORMANCE ART is not theater, dance, spoken-word, painting, poetry or sculpture yet it is all of these.

GRAY ZONE, KINGSTON continues the founding mission of the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn: the Glorification of Performance Art, yet in a location more loudly resonant in Nature. Gray Zone on the Rondout is only yards away from the Hudson River estuary that provides life-sustaining water for agriculture and wildlife. Gray Zone is on Broadway, a life-sustaining thoroughfare through all of the variances of the City of Kingston, itself in a gray area surrounded by river, mountains, farms and towns.

GRAY ZONE celebrates the diversity of our world by centering itself in this city and in this valley that are abundant with all kinds of diversity - providing a conduit of experience for the peoples of Kingston, the Hudson Valley and beyond.

McDermid was first based in Marbletown, NY then Brooklyn where in 2006, with Melissa Lockwood, they opened the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, offering live works by the current generation of performance artists from around New York, the USA and the world. These live performances have always been presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer.

Grace Exhibition Space has had the opportunity to present local artists Thomas Albrecht [Kingston], Meghan Van Alstyne [Albany/Kinderhook]area artists Peter Dobill, Marni Kotak, Rob Andrews [NYC] Nyugen Smith, Rafael Sanchez [New Jersey] Marilyn Arsem , Mari Novotny-Jones, Jeff Huckleberry, Sandy Huckleberry, Alice Vogler, Vela Phelan, Sandrine Scheaffer, [Boston] and internationally renowned artists Roi Vaara, Essi Kasalinnen [Finland] Gim Gwang Cheol [South Korea] Boris Nieslony [Germany] W. Christiawan [Indonesia] Chen Jin [China] Fernando Ribiero [Brazil], Martin Renteria and Pancho Lopez [Mexico], Non Grata [Estonia + Beyond]

We plan to continue our focus on diverse community-building through our unique programming which will continue in Kingston, throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Jill McDermid earned an MFA in Intermedia: Video + Performance after three intense years of study and creating at the University of Iowa, 2000. Since then, she has presented hundreds of performance art fdisolyas through the Grace Exhibition Space for Performance Art since 2006, the Fountain Art Fair, the Egeszegedre series and 21st Suffragettes: Art + Performance by Women.

Erik Hokanson studied at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA. He worked as a painter, sculptor, jeweler and object-maker until 2007 when he began making conceptual performance art. Since then, he has been performing in NYC and international performance art festivals. He currently runs the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn with Jill McDermid. Erik Hokanson is also a highly skilled luthier, making guitars from idea to design through building and playing.