Azikiwe Mohammed asked his friend Leroy Robinson if he knew anyone making the stuffs. Leroy invited three research-based artists – peter bd, Lex Brown, and Yoshie Sakai – who work in video, sound, or other time-based media. Join us and see what they have cooking.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
PROGRAM
peter bd: changeover
A dance performance featuring peter bd, janine hartmann, divine lotus, owen prum, and special guest elise wunderlich.
figuring out who you are
ultimately becoming free
shift
transference
redirection
changeover
the powers that be engendered the path
but one must say
“fuck it” and unlock
intrinsic creativity
Lex Brown: Letters for Gaza
In this collective writing/artmaking session, we will write oversized letters for Ceasefire in occupied Palestine. These letters will be mailed in oversized envelopes to key political and cultural figures. This is a space to express sorrow, anger, and solidarity. Letters may be anonymized if desired.
Yoshie Sakai: Bathroom Stall Tears: Take Two
Where do you go in a public place to have privacy? The Bathroom Stall. Bathroom Stall Tears began as a series of videos meant to be viewed in the context of public restroom stalls. These videos opened the door to a more intimate space for expression and reflection by capturing Yoshie Sakai’s personal childhood memories of their grandmother’s (“obaa-chan” in Japanese) and mother’s selfless acts and small sacrifices to critique the power of gender stereotypes in shaping intergenerational expectations. For CPR, Sakai will experiment with combining the video form with live performance of these characters, “obaa-chan” and mother.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
peter bd is a writer, curator, performer and the author of the book milk & henny.
Lex Brown is a multimedia artist who uses poetry and science-fiction to create existential narratives about the Information Age. Working fluidly between installation, film, live performance, painting, and sculpture her work contemplates spiritual experience through humor and satire. Brown has performed and exhibited work at the MIT List Center, New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, and The Kitchen. Her films have been presented at e-flux Screening Room, New York; Transmediale, Berlin; and the East End Film Festival, London. Brown received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and an MFA from Yale. She was a 2021 United States Artist Fellow. She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer (Badlands Unlimited, 2015), Consciousness (Genderfail, 2019), and the creator of the audio project 1-800-POWERS. She will premiere her first operatic work at the Kennedy Center in January 2025 as a librettist in the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative.
Yoshie Sakai is a multimedia artist who works with video, sculpture, installation, and performance, and is based in Gardena, CA. Her work is centered on accessibility and nurturing human connection while critiquing capitalist productions of space and ways of being. She draws on popular forms of entertainment and media to engage diverse audiences, especially those who have been historically devalued, ignored, and seen as burdens. She is the recipient of the 2021/22 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Master Artist Fellowship in Design and Visual Arts, 2012 California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Emerging Artist Fellowship, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. She completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency in Foundry at the Kohler Company. Her work has been exhibited at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Verge Center for the Arts, Antenna, the Chinese American Museum Los Angeles, and most recently, her first museum solo exhibition “Grandma Entertainment Franchise” at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, CA.
Working across performance, sculpture, painting, sound and video, Azikiwe Mohammed is a crafter who builds physical spaces that include Blackness and the stories of the people of this land. Sometimes that land is physical, and other times it lives in our bodies. These attempts at land shapings have taken place at Canada Gallery, NY; Transformer, Washington, D.C.; The High Line, NY; California African American Museum, LA; Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia, PA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; among others. Mohammed is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2023), a Rauschenberg Artists Fund grant (2021), a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016), and an Art Matters Foundation Award (2015). In 2022, he was featured on Art21’s New York Close Up digital-film series on artists living and working in New York City. Azikiwe Mohammed lives in New York, NY and has his studio in Newark as part of Project for Empty Space.
