September 21, 2017–January 13, 2018
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation
The 8th Floor
17 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11am–6pm
Featuring discussions with Elia Alba, Mary Mattingly, and The Black Lunch Table, among others, with performances by Rafael Sanchez, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, and Guadalupe Maravilla
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation announces their fall and winter events season, centered around the idea of sustained conversation as a prompt for collective political and social transformation, including panel and round-table discussions, performances, and a Wikipedia edit-a-thon. All events are free, open to the public, and located at The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, NYC. The program is organized in conjunction with The Supper Club, a solo exhibition by Elia Alba focused on racial politics and visual culture, on view throughJanuary 13, 2018. The 8th Floor is now open on Saturdays.
For more information on each of these events, and to RSVP, please visit the8thfloor.org.
Thursday, November 9, 6–8pm
At the Table: Elia Alba, Maren Hassinger, Zachary Fabri, and Juana Valdes in conversation
Artists Elia Alba, Zachary Fabri, Maren Hassinger, and Juana Valdes will discuss their participation in the Supper Club Dinners. Presented in partnership with NYFA (a Rubin Foundation grantee), At the Table offers a glimpse of the intimate dinner conversations that shaped the discourse of The Supper Club, with themes like Global Blackness and Transnational Identities, Gender and Race Intersectionality, and Post Black in the Age of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice.
Thursday, November 16, 6–8pm
Food is Love: Tanya Field, Ben Hall, and Mary Mattingly in Conversation
Food is Love explores the intersection of food, politics, activism, and art, referencing interventions in local communities. The panel brings together Mary Mattingly, known for her large-scale public, agricultural artwork Swale (2016); Tanya Field of the BLK ProjeK, which develops opportunities for underserved youth and women of color; and Ben Hall, whose work in advocacy and education includes distributing 5,000 gallons of soup throughout Detroit each week.
Thursday, November 30, 6–8pm
Performances by Rafael Sanchez and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
This evening will bring two artists together, both featured in The Supper Club portraits, Rafael Sanchez and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. Sanchez, known for his performance-based practice, will perform a work related to the themes of the exhibition. Skvirsky will stage an iteration of her performance The poems my mother recited, reenacting her mother’s poetry recitals from her childhood in Guayaquil, Ecuador in the 1960s. Sanchez and Skvirsky’s performances are organized by Anjuli Nanda.
Saturday, December 9
1–3pm: The Black Lunch Table
5–8pm: Wikipedia edit-a-thon
Black Lunch Table (Jina Valentine and Heather Hart)
Supper Club artist Heather Hart and Jina Valentine will host an edition of The Black Lunch Table (BLT), their ongoing oral-history archiving project, that brings together black diaspora artists and cultural producers in a discursive site where they can engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. If you identify within this group, BLT invites you to participate in this roundtable discussion for visual artists, curators, and art workers of the African Diaspora. After the roundtable lunch, we invite all who are interested to participate in a Wikipedia edit-a-thon where the artists will be on hand to lead a collective authoring of articles regarding the lives and works of black artists.
Friday, December 15, 6–8pm
Performance by Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice merges sculpture, performance, photography, and video, often drawing on his Salvadorian background to address themes of Latin American identity and migration. Investigating the passage of traditions over both time and geographic locations, Maravilla often combines pre-Colombian mythologies and ritual with touchstones of contemporary urban culture. Maravilla’s performance is organized by George Bolster.
Saturday, January 13, 6–8pm
disappearing acts: Performance by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.
Writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs will perform disappearing acts, a meditation employing found text, song lyrics and multiple languages. Diggs, accompanied by a musician, will enact how the black and brown female body (of advanced years) encounters erasure within the arts and dating, posing the question of what it means to be a forty plus woman of color disappearing. disappearing acts is organized by George Bolster.
About The 8th Floor
The 8th Floor is an exhibition and events space established in 2010 by Shelley and Donald Rubin, dedicated to promoting cultural and philanthropic initiatives, and to expanding artistic and cultural accessibility in New York City. The 8th Floor is located at 17 West 17th Street and is free and open to the public. Schools groups are encouraged. Viewing hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
About The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation
The Foundation believes in art as a cornerstone of cohesive, resilient communities and greater participation in civic life. In its mission to make art available to the broader public, in particular to underserved communities, the Foundation provides direct support to, and facilitates partnerships between, cultural organizations and advocates of social justice across the public and private sectors. Through grantmaking, the Foundation supports cross-disciplinary work connecting art with social justice via experimental collaborations, as well as extending cultural resources to organizations and areas of New York City in need. sdrubin.org
Join the conversation with the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the hashtags #RubinFoundation, #The8thFloor, #EliaAlbaSupperClub, #SupperClubArtists, and #ArtandSocialJustice.
For further information, members of the media may contact:
Sarah Simpson, Blue Medium Inc.: T 212 675 1800 / sarah [at] bluemedium.com
George Bolster, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation: T 646 738 3971 / gbolster [at] sdrubin.org
