It’s with real delight that Velvetpark announces our first reading series.
It’s with real delight that Velvetpark announces our first reading series. This monthly event will launch next Monday, April 8th, at The Dalloway (525 Broome St, New York, New York 10013). Doors open at 7, performances will begin promptly at 8 and will conclude by 9 pm. The night will be short, sweet, and jam packed.
Our inaugural reading is entitled “Visual Artists Read,” and, as the name says, will include visual artists who will perform or read text-based works during the night’s event, as a way of thinking about how visual artists think in words.
Here is a preview of our group of artists:
A New York based interdisciplinary artist, Sofia Varino has been producing live performance events both solo and in collaboration with other artists. She has performed at Performa ’11, MoMA PS1, the Leslie Lohman Gallery, Bond Street Theater, WOW Café Theater, Art in Odd Places and the Storås Music Festival in Norway, among many others. Varino is Associate Director at Harmattan Theater, a New York City environmental theater ensemble, and curates the ongoing digital installation Chronocorpus, an archive of oceanic histories in real time. In addition to creating art, Varino is currently a doctoral research fellow in cultural studies with a concentration in art and philosophy in the Department of Cultural Analysis & Theory at Stony Brook University in New York.
Patricia Silva, in collaboration withLaura Turley
Patricia is our resident arts editor who has been ensconced in an MFA program at Bard College for the last two years. Patricia originally studied photography at SVA, upon leaving her undergraduate she worked in publishing as a photo editor, creating artist books, curating art shows, writing critical and creative works—keeping up her photography all the while. And she will graduate from her MFA program as an interdisciplinary artist as evidenced from her recent thesis show. Patricia will be performing “Slow-Burning Nightwood” with Laura Turley, a piece from her thesis project at Bard.
Dannielle Tegeder 
A conceptual poet and visual artist living in Brooklyn, Tegeder’s recent writing endeavors include projects created with found text from gravestones at Woodlawn Cemetery, a compilation of directions from taxi drivers created into a book of small poems and then distributed in the back of taxis, and a collection of things that have fallen in from the NYC sky which was published on Ubu Web’s The Unpublishable series. Her work has been shown widely in over one hundred exhibitions and at institutions in the United States and abroad. She is an Associate Professor of Art at CUNY’s Lehman College.
Schiff works at the intersection of art and language: she has been an English professor, graphic designer, calligrapher, songwriter, wedding singer, and all-around wordsmith. In her current art project about writing, she traces the contours of each line of writing and then blots out the words so they become illegible shapes. Her presentation last month to the Society for Textual Scholarship about her art project about the rendering geometric sky patterns in medieval manuscripts will be published in that organization’s journal. She is looking forward to a return visit to Yaddo in early 2014. Schiff’s visual art and critical writings can be found on her website: www.karen-schiff.com.
Man of Mystery Hiroshi Schafer was born in Tokyo and was encouraged by his grandfather (a secret agent) to become an air force pilot. That never happened. Instead Shafer found himself in New York creating performances and art objects that investigate “soft and misty people” and “new and unknown worlds of familiar surfaces and pink atmospheres.”
And there you have it! See you on Monday! Check our facebook event page for more details.
