Text: Jeremy Whitaker
As to be expected from an event held by one of the most forward-thinking institutions in New York City, The Kitchen’s Spring Gala was electric.
Honoring the relentlessly advocative couple Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi, multimedia disciplinarian Lynn Hershman Leeson, and trailblazing jazz musician Max Roach, the event was a look into a world that artists across generations have created through the support of The Kitchen. What an expansive world it is.
To celebrate art and further The Kitchen’s mission to empower radical and experimental thought, the event chairs brought together an evening with performances from musician Eartheater, a multimedia sensory experience from Justin Allen, and words from Fab 5 Freddy, the honorees, and members of The Kitchen community.
As business cards exchanged hands and we talked of art, I watched the true beauty of The Kitchen unfold before my eyes. The sense of community that the cutting-edge arts space has fostered for over 50 years was on full display in the camaraderie of the attendees.
For me, this camaraderie began before I even stepped foot into the event.
It was as I first fumbled my way to the entrance of Guastavino’s on the Upper East Side that I spotted a delightfully radiant woman in red polka dots. “I’m following your lead,” I told her. “Don’t do that!” she jokingly exclaimed, and we walked into The Kitchen’s Spring Gala together.
Ruby Lerner, art executive and my generous guide would be speaking later that evening in honor of the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, I learned. Although hours of preparation went into the speech of only a few minutes, Ruby admitted to me she was feeling last-minute jitters. I understood as the task of honoring an artist of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s caliber is no small feat. Her lifetime of earth-shattering contributions to the art world defy genre, medium, and form; how Ruby could craft a speech that encapsulated such a broad contribution, I was eager to see.
It wasn’t long after I had wished Ruby luck before I was swept into a flurry of conversations with artists, patrons, and innovators alike. Throughout many of these conversations, it became clear that the future of art was on the collective mind.
What is the future of art? “Experimental,” “industrial,” “extreme,” “diverse,” and “The Kitchen,” were among many of the responses.
I have to imagine all of these are true. None more than the rearmost description putting The Kitchen in synonymous terms with the future of art itself. By now, it is a fact the honorees and The Kitchen are embedded in both the past and future of art. Connecting the two through an enduring passionate community is what brought me to the event.
The Kitchen is intentional in the way it connects its family. “We wanted at least one The Kitchen artist at every table. We want to pack as many artists into the space as we can,” a member of The Kitchen’s crack team told me.
To my luck, I was seated next to one of the artists. Maren Hassinger is a past honoree of The Kitchen’s Spring Gala and a veteran sculptor whose recent exhibition “This is How We Grow” was featured at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition highlighted two works made primarily of steel cable titled Showers, and Paradise Regained. Her specialty, as I discovered, is to use heavy industrial materials and synthetics to mimic elements of nature in a commentary about what “nature has become.”
She talked to me about her craft and we discussed how art and writing are complementary forms. We decided that critical reading is a trait vastly possessed while the muscle of visual literacy is not flexed nearly as often as it ought to be. Writing, as she put it, often helps to “digest” what the viewer sees. “I wish I could do what you do,” I told her. “No you don’t,” she joked.
After professing her love of crime fiction and after I described the plot of the new season of True Detective, Maren allowed me a few questions about her work.
“Do you title your works before, during, or after their creation?”
“Usually after, but you never know,” she responded as her studio assistant laughed.
“What does your future hold, Maren?”
“Well, there’s The Getty,” she said humbly. Maren’s future will take her back to Los Angeles, the city of her birth where recently The Getty acquired her archive and plans to display it on a grand scale soon. Much like The Kitchen, Maren’s future is seeped with elements of the past.
As the program began, it was clear that none are more concerned with the future of art than Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi. The two honorees who passionately advocate for investing in artists of color and artists from underprivileged communities have taken matters into their own hands.
“Tonight we are celebrating one of the leading incubators of new and groundbreaking art in the world… As we remember the past, celebrate the present, and envision the future.” The two discussed their “Kitchen moments” and how these moments informed their approach to their many projects including “Young, Gifted, and Black.” The duo reminds us that there is hands-on work to be done. They encourage collective action and insist on each individual’s responsibility to uplift and diversify the art world as we know it. The audience was undoubtedly left stirred by the words of the power couple.
At last, I saw red polka dots step toward the microphone. As the program began its honoring of Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ruby Lerner took the stage.
“Over a dizzying level of production, [Lynn Hershman Leeson] has been there for every important platform of artistic inquiry from the late 20th century to the current.” Highlighting projects that brought Leeson to the forefront, such as Roberta Breitmore, the persona that she invented with a driver’s license, credit score, and psychiatric records in a commentary on personhood, Deep Contact, the first artwork to use a touch screen, and Women Art Revolution, “her decades-long contribution to the feminist art movement,” Ruby expertly explained how delightfully broad Leeson’s contributions and innovations really are.
“I dare you to try and keep up with her latest work on the cutting edge of art, biology, and technology,” challenged Ruby. While she describes the path ahead as uncertain, in her words, it seems that the only certainty is the continued evolution of art itself.
For Lynn Hershman Leeson, the honor could not have come sooner. “I spent so many decades trying to show the work,” said Leeson. She spoke of a show at The Kitchen in 1990 that gave her the continued confidence to follow through with her progressive vision. Her advice is to “Trust your own vision and honor your own intuition, even if it takes decades for people to understand what you’re doing. Keep your sense of humor, and finally, don’t throw anything away.”
The night’s highlight came soon after with a performance from New York’s own Eartheater.
Without the spotlights, armed with just her guitar, Eartheater began her breathlessly awaited set with a stringy interlude. Before launching into the unachievable highs that Eartheater makes appear so effortless, she took a moment to thank The Kitchen. It was within those walls that Eartheater discovered these notes and the true nature of her vocal capabilities. More specifically, “I figured out I could hold a very high note for a very long time,” she said softly.
I wondered how the artist I admired for her unique provocation might be received by the crowd of elegant women and polished men that I saw as I perused the highboys and bistro tables during the opening hour of the festivities. A handsome face from the Metropolitan Museum of Art reminded me, “That’s what makes The Kitchen so great.” It was the element of the unexpected to which he referred.
As the vocal crescendo of “Below the Clavicle” unfolded, the audience’s reverence for the act was only matched by the thunderous applause that followed. “The future of art is niche, micro-niche,” I jotted in my notepad.
The night was full of highs and higher highs. Finally, Fab 5 Freddy took centerstage to culminate the evening's discoveries by looking at his past with Godfather Max Roach, and his future that will honor them both.
His words need no further introduction:
“My dad and Max Roach were childhood friends in the forties and fifties when jazz took over the world. Max Roach is one of the leaders [of jazz] along with his contemporaries Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. I grew up hearing all of these incredible stories my entire life. But also growing up, something called hip-hop happened and I was right there early on. I was never trying to be a rapper, but I had a few rhymes back in the early days of hip-hop.”
He continued, “One day Max had come by the house to visit. He asked my Dad what I was up to, he told him I was into this rap thing. A couple of weeks later, he came by the house. Max told me he was blown away. I always thought he was just trying to make a young cat feel good. Not long after that, a guy at The Kitchen had met Max and mentioned me.
At this point, I'm basically involved in disrupting the art world as we know it with some partners in art crime that I ran with, close friends like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring. The idea came together to do a performance at The Kitchen. My heart was about to jump out of my chest, but I had to stand up and figure it out. So I got some great dancers together. I got two DJs and we had a performance at The Kitchen over two nights. We called it Estate Fresh. The Kitchen thankfully had a couple of cameras set up that I didn't even know about.
We've got this footage of this performance that we did decades ago. We're adding some fly flavor to it and in October at the kitchen, we’re doing a remix.”
Fab 5 Freddy's reflections connecting the revolutionary spirit of jazz legends with the innovative pulse of early hip-hop underscores The Kitchen's role as a timeless incubator for artistic evolution. The “remix,” another example of the past and present colliding with the future will be anxiously anticipated.
As I sat at the crowded after-party, I had time to think. In the end, what I wrote is this:
With air rich in inspiration, The Kitchen Spring Gala is a reminder that art is not a solitary endeavor but a collective journey. At The Kitchen, there will always be room for revolution, past, present, and future.
Text: Jeremy Whitaker