October 2, 2011

Above: Yoga Local Launch Party, New York, November, 2009

Yoga Local NYC has curated this Sunday morning outdoor yoga series for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Please join us for challenging and inspiring classes from a selection of local yoga studios. The heart of yoga is both physical and mental: residing in the dynamic, living tension created by challenging one’s self to grow while accepting our human limitations. Yoga practice can be seen as the embodiment of the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s mission in New York: confronting comfort. Yoga mats will be provided.

Event Video

Photo: courtesy Yoga Local by Kelly Guenther

There’s an old saying that goes, “You can never go home again.” This may mean the bookstore that you spent your childhood in has been replaced by another Trader Joe’s, or maybe those sweet old neighbors have moved away after 30 years. These types of changes are sometimes hard to bear when they happen in or around our homes. But what would it be like to grow up or grow old in a place where no two days are ever really the same? That is what thousands of people, of all backgrounds, are experiencing on the Lower East Side. Amidst all the topographical, cultural, demographic, and economic changes, they remain firm in calling these streets home. “Growing Up and Old on the Lower East Side” will bring together locals who will share five-minute stories about how and why they call the Lower East Side home. This event is organized by PenTales, an international project that brings together people and their stories through live events. Share your story at pentales.com.

Photo: courtesy Stephanie Ursula Hodges

The term “urbanism” typically calls to mind the material condition of our built metropolitan environments. However, Vincent Appel and Everett Hollander, two young urbanists and architects, have started to identify a group of developing practices that exceed the limits of typical urban nomenclature but which are purely urban in nature nevertheless. In an afternoon conversation, Appel and Hollander introduce and ask PlayLab, Public Workshop, Tattfoo, and Marion Wilson to engage the public to help define the notion of "urbanism" as a creative process. Join them for a series of workshops and help redefine our evolving definition of urbanism from those who are actively realizing alternative ambitions for our urban environment through play, crowd sourcing, emergence, collective intelligence, and extradisciplinarity.

Image: courtesy Vincent Appel

Above: Left to right: Daniel Levin, Clayton Patterson, Ben Solomon, Albert Maysles, and Jenner Furst, Maysles Theater, Harlem, 2010

Clayton Patterson has created a series of five Sunday Salons for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. This week, join Patterson, documentarian, artist, and archivist of the Lower East Side since 1978, and moviemakers Jenner Furst, Ben Solomon, and Daniel Levin for an intimate talk. Furst produced and Solomon and Levin directed the documentary Captured: A Film History of the Lower East Side (2008), an historical account of drag, punk, heroin, and gentrification in the Lower East Side.

Ben Solomon was born and raised in downtown Manhattan. A child of the 1980s, son of a poet father and photographer mother, he grew up surrounded and inspired by the arts and the streets of New York. Captured (2008) was Ben’s first feature film, and since then has continued to express himself in a multitude of mediums, working as a filmmaker, a DJ, and always resourceful member of the local and international creative community.

Daniel Levin lives and works in New York. Captured (2008) was his first feature documentary. He is the director of photography for the second season of the Emmy Award–nominated Sundance Channel docu-series Brick City. He has shot films for HBO (Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, 2009) and Sony Music (This Is Jim Jones, 2009). He shot and co-directed his first feature narrative, Dirty Old Town, which is being released this fall.

Jenner Furst began making narrative films in his early teens. Captured (2008) was his first feature documentary. Soon after the film’s release, Furst began collaborating on Brick City (2009), his early work on the series helping to elevate the vanguard concept, and the series went on to garner a Peabody Award, an Emmy nomination, and critical praise around the world. While co-producing the second season of Brick City, he directed his first feature narrative, Dirty Old Town.

Clayton Patterson’s hand on the history of the Lower East Side over the past 30-plus years is undeniable. As an artist, filmmaker and photographer, Patterson’s unending political, cultural, and at times illegal documentation of Lower East Side life has captured everything from drag queens and tattoo artists to police brutality. As a gallery owner, Patterson has shown work ranging from Dash Snow to Charles Gatewood. With Captured, his documentation of the last free period of the Lower East Side became a documentary. In the 1980s he became a happenstance cap-maker, and his embroidered jackets and caps soon found their way to Hollywood (Mick Jagger and Matt Dillon were fans).

Links:
http://www.capturedmovie.com/site.html

http://patterson.no-art.info/memo-en.html

More Dates:
Sunday, October 16, 2011

Bogotá Change is the story of two charismatic mayors, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, who, using unorthodox methods, in less than ten years turned one of the world’s most dangerous, violent, and corrupt capitals into a peaceful model city populated by caring citizens. With Mockus and Peñalosa and key members of their staff as firsthand witnesses, the film uncovers the ideas, philosophies, and strategies that underlie the changes in Bogotá and are now being exported to cities worldwide.

6 pm open seating
6:15 pm screening

Text: courtesy Upfront Films

Image: courtesy Andreas Møl Dalsgaard

Above:  Alan Vega of Suicide, during a 1980 performance

From 1975 to 1980 video artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong spent their nights documenting the punk rock music scene in nightclubs around New York and playing the performances on their TV show Nightclubbing. Modern Music, culled from their archive of more than one hundred performances, presents a range of cutting-edge music styles, including no wave, art rock, new wave, jazz fusion, and all their combinations. Featuring performances by the Talking Heads, Lounge Lizards, DNA, Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Contortions, John Cale, James Blood Ulmer, and Sun Ra.

Followed by a Q&A with Emily Armstrong, Max Blagg, Juliette Campbell, Legendary Damon, Lynda Garcia, Pat Ivers, and Pebbles van Peebles.

www.gonightclubbing.com
 
Photo: courtesy Pat Ivers