Susan Howe and David Grubbs: Performance Retrospective has been canceled due to unforeseen circumstances. Performances will be rescheduled in 2016.
The Museum of Modern Art is pleased to host the nonprofit organization ISSUE Project Room for a two-evening retrospective of collaborative performance works by poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. Howe and Grubbs will present a selection of works they created between 2007 and 2013, and the pair will also take part in a conversation following the second night’s performance.
Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and three of literary criticism, Susan Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. Her recent collection of poems, That This, received the 2011 Bollingen Prize. David Grubbs has released 12 solo albums and is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and he has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, among many others. Grubbs and Howe were brought together when the Fondation Cartier in Paris proposed a collaborative performance in 2003. Grubbs had been a dedicated reader of Howe’s work for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with her poetry and voice immediately intrigued him. The pair have since created four full-length works that they have presented widely in the U.S. and Europe, and they have also released four CDs.
Founded in 2003, ISSUE Project Room is a pioneering Brooklyn-based performance nonprofit, presenting cutting edge music, dance, film and more. ISSUE presents projects by more than 200 interdisciplinary artists each year that expand the boundaries of artistic practice and stimulate critical dialogue in the broader community. While ISSUE’s historic Downtown Brooklyn space undergoes renovations, programming continues in venues throughout the city through a constellation of partner organizations.