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.

ELIZABETH GUTHRIE

Elizabeth Guthrie is a poet and performer living in NYC researching for a practice-based PhD in text and performance at the University of East London. She is a co-editor of Livestock Editions and co-curator of Impossible Reading Series with work appearing in journals including Onedit, Requited, Bombay Gin, Pinstripe Fedora, Alba Londres, Open Letter, and Fact-Simile. She has a pamphlet, X Portraits, through Crater Press, a chapbook, Yellow and Red, through Black Lodge Press, the collaborative chapbook with Andrew K. Peterson, Between Here and the Telescopes, through Slumgullion Press a book entitled, Portraits - Captions from Contraband Books along with the forthcoming Portraits - Negatives. She is poet in residence at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London.

JIM PIRTLE

Jim Pirtle is a performance and visual artist from Houston. He puts pillows on a staircase and then throws his audience down the stairs. He has performed across the world best known for self abusive mayonnaise binging and picante sauce drinking. The Purple Necklace has no mess or self abuse but takes on America's final taboo... Suicide. 

Jim Pirtle at CUE Art Foundation: Read here 

Hector Canonge is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and cultural entrepreneur based in New York City. His work incorporates the use of New-media technologies, physical environments, cinematic and performance art narratives to explore and treat issues related to construction of identity, gender roles, and the politics of migration. Challenging the white box settings of a gallery or a museum, or intervening directly in public spaces his performances mediate movement, endurance, and ritualistic processes. Some of his actions and carefully choreographed performances involve collaborating with other artists and interacting with audiences. His visual arts projects and performance art work have been exhibited and presented in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. As cultural promoter, Canonge launched ARTerial Performance Lab, an initiative to foster collaboration among performance artists from the Americas, started the project PERFORMEANDO, a program that focuses on featuring Hispanic performance artists living in the USA, and created the series NEXUSURNEXUS presented by the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, BIPAF. As curator, Canonge organized the monthly artists’ program A-LAB Forum, directed the monthly independent film series CINEMAROSA, and created the annual Performance Art Festival, ITINERANT.

Canonge's performance is accompanied by the electronic music and sound ambients of sound artist Gregory Paul.

Zavé Martohardjono is ​a multidisciplinary queer and transgender artist from Indonesia, New York City, and Canada. Working across disciplines, he makes performances, theater, videos, and audience-interactive installations that explore political experiences, notions of belonging and “homeland,” and liminal embodiments. His work often speaks from mixed-race, multi-national, queer, and trans perspectives. 

He’s shown in galleries and theater venues including Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Bowery Poetry Club, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Bronx River Art Center Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Chashama 540, Dixon Place, La MaMa E.T.C., Grace Exhibition Space, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, Rats 9 Gallery, SOMArts, the Wild Project, and Winslow Garage. His videos have screened at film festivals in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Montréal, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Jakarta.

Hee Ran is a performance artist whose body centered work explores private and public gestures of the Asian female body in the patriarchal power structure and investigates cultural marginalization. Her recent grants have included the ARKO Young Art Frontier from Arts Council Korea (2013), she was a Semi-finalist for the emerging artist prize from The Claire Rosen & Samuel Edes Foundation (2012) and The Anna Louise Raymond Fellowship (2012). Her work has been shown at Culture Station Seoul 284(Korea 2014), Grace Exhibition Space (New York 2013), The Watermill Center (New York 2012), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago 2012), and Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai 2011). She holds an MFA specializing in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a fellow artist of LEIMAY 2014-2015 at CAVE in New York.

Nyugen E. Smith earned his BA in Fine Arts from Seton Hall University and is currently a MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing heavily on his West Indian heritage, Smith is interested in raising consciousness of past and present political struggles through his work, which consists of sculpture, installation, video and performance. His interest in identity politics and social constructs has left an indelible mark as Smith seeks to redress historical misrepresentations, subjective politics and omissions of the truth.

Photo By: Miguel Peralta

Clara Diamond studied studio art at Bard College and upon graduation decided not to move to Brooklyn. For the next decade she entered a period of artistic dormancy, attending to other matters. Finally settling in Kingston, NY, Clara returned to an art-making practice in 2012. Since then, she has made performance art in the Kingston area. Clara’s performance practice is based upon impermanence and/or decay, the body as art object, action as art object, and ultimately the experience of the viewer as art object with memory and story as relic. Clara’s performances have included creating installation environments and posing in tableau; textual features such as books, signs, spoken words; exploring and exploiting symbols, stories, space, interaction and relationship; object-making as a performative action with the resulting object as inconsequential yet integral to the procession of narrative across individual pieces; and themes of self/other inner/outer asleep/awake death/life art/garbage.

ANGELA FREIBERGER

For the last eleven years Angela has been living in New York City. She moved to New York in 2004 to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She graduated in 2007. In 2009, Freiberger performed with Marina Abramovic at her solo exhibition, “The Artist is Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2010, Angela received the Senior Fellowship from Terra Foundation for American Art in Europe (Giverny, France). In 2012, she participated at a residency in Hasselt, Belgium, “Hotel de Immigrantes 2, Cosmopolitan Stranger,” which paralleled Manifesta 9.
“My work explores the complexity of social and political relationships and human behavior in which the memories and factual narratives about historical and symbolic figures can shift and be revised across time. As part of my practice, I use performance and interventionist actions to challenge and transgress physical and mental boundaries. In addition, my video installations examine the tension between the material and the immaterial. My works with performances, videos and installations are characterized by elaborately layered stories, translating and conveying the poetic moments between reality and fiction. My diverse visual language is engaged in an ongoing conversation with history and memory.” Angela was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While still living in Brazil, she embarked in numerous adventures and journeys, producing performances, videos and interactive works in different places in the world, from Macapá in the Northeast of Brazil to New York City, and later France, England and other countries in Europe.

Angela Freiberger: www.angelafreiberger.com/ 

+ JOSEPH RAVENS!

I aim to project energy and images with abundant focus. Through various hybrids of visual art, dance, and theater, I devise highly stylized situations in which images and actions coalesce to produce decidedly poetic, often conceptual, narratives. I strive to challenge expectations and champion a dialogue between art forms. Pre-established artistic disciplines serve as points of departure for blending the abstract with the concrete.

Joseph Ravens creates time-based art works that encompass text, movement, installation, technology, costume, and object. He completed his undergraduate degree in theater at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; studied audio/visuals at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Netherlands; and is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Performance Art. Ravens is a recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Interdisciplinary/Performance Art, the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for New Performance Forms, and an Artist Project grant in New Performance Forms from the Illinois Arts Council.

Joseph Ravens: www.josephravens.com

ABOUT GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE

Grace Exhibition Space opened in 2006 and is devoted exclusively to Performance Art. We offer an opportunity to experience visceral and challenging performance works by the current generation of international performance artists, whether emerging, mid career or established. Being a Brooklyn loft, our events are presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer. Grace Exhibition Space is run by Jill & Erik with Vincent Tiley. Jamie is our bartender and Leah runs the door.

Please also support PANOPLY PERFORMANCE LAB [Brooklyn] GLASSHOUSE GALLERY [Brooklyn], MOBIUS [Boston] DFBRL8R GALLERY [Chicago] and EAMES ARMSTRONG [Washington, DC] - when you want to see more Performance Art!

"I have found Grace Space to be a breath of fresh air, and a new way to see and experience feelings you may have not faced in a long time. It’s a place to let yourself be exposed, amused, delighted, and terrified all at the same time, and I can say I haven’t experienced this combination of emotions at any gallery or theater I have ever stepped into, and that’s a wonderful thing. The space provides a refreshing perspective on an art scene that has been somewhat shackled and restrained for quite a bit of time now. Grace Exhibition Space is a brave pioneer as it puts Bushwick, as well as New York City, on the forefront of exploration and exposure into the minds and bodies of artists who are truly gifted, fearless, and unique." Terri Ciccone. Bushwick Daily January, 2013 "On each night, and in each performance, the human body is redeemed from the mundane and made anew."

David Lagaccia, Williamsburg Greenpoint News+Art (June, 2012)

www.thewgnews.com/2012/07/the-rules-of-grace-bend-em-break-em-and-make-em-performance-art-thrives-at-840-broadway/comment-page-1/#comment-55584