March 28, 2017
Please join me and the fellow comrades of Comrade Truebridge for LaTasha Diggs at Comrade Truebridge NYC coming up on April 10th. I’ll be facilitating our shenanigans, LaTasha will be sharing her sensational work, and multidisciplinary artists of Comrade Truebridge will be discussing projects and collaborations. We are co-hosted by Millay Colony and Caroline Crumpacker will be on hand to discuss residency opportunities. Sponsored by Some Serious Business, and Thanks to our friends at Howl Happening!!!
See Invite HERE: https://www.facebook.com/events/596400220550334/
COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE / NYC
a project of Some Serious Business
co-sponsored by Howl Happening and Millay Colony
faciliated by Quintan Ana Wikswo
Monday, APRIL 10th
http://
https://www.facebook.com/
And if you are wondering, what is Comrade Truebridge? What should I expect? Why me? Who are Some Serious Business? You can find details on everything as you scroll down below.
Since our founding by Quintan Ana Wikswo in NYC in 2011, Comrade Truebridge has been supported by Creative Capital, the @Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and is now a sponsored project of Some Serious Business in both NYC and Santa Fe.
ABOUT OUR APRIL PRESENTER:
LaTASHA N. NEVADA DIGGS
https://
https://
Interdisciplinary poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in Harlem. She studied at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and earned an MA at New York University and an MFA at California College of the Arts.
Diggs’s work is truly hybrid: languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. In a review of TwERK for the online literary site Montevidayo, poet Joyelle McSweeney writes, “Language is not a neutral tool, and the history of the peoples who belong to these language[s] and the hegemonic forces that would distress, suppress or obliterate both the languages and their peoples is what makes these poems so fierce, fraught, bladey and mobile. The showiness and flaunt of these poems are like the fierceness of the drag balls Diggs salutes in one poem: a visible weapon, a tactic simultaneously offensive and defensive, a wargame for the whole body. Diggs’s poems truly work the whole body of the poem, the whole body of sound, the whole body of history, the whole body of voice and ear, the whole body of language and the ability of the page to be its own sonic syntax; they articulate and rotate joints that seemed fixed; they are bawdy and triumphant and they more than work. They TwERK.”
In her contribution to the online self-interview project The Next Big Thing, Diggs addresses the many inspirations for TwERK, including “the overall desire to communicate with other tongues. The fact that most of the world is at the least bi/tri-lingual and … a number of Americans still think English is best and fail to hear the Bengali being spoken just feet away from them in the 7-Eleven.”
Diggs is the author of the poetry collection TwERK (2013) and several chapbooks, as well as the album Television (2003). She has been a poetry editor for the online arts journal exittheapple and, with writer Greg Tate, is a founding editor of YoYo/SO4 magazine. Diggs’s interdisciplinary work has been featured in exhibits at several New York museums, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Her additional honors include scholarships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Harlem Community Arts Fund, the Jerome Foundation, the Eben Demarest Trust, Caldera Arts, Black Earth Institute, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation. She lives in New York City.
(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_
ABOUT COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE
A very good day to you from Comrade Truebridge, an artist-driven, rhizomatic braintrust, kitchen table, laboratory, and brain trust for artists only. This is a private event, and you have been invited because we are especially interested in what you’re pondering, exploring, and perplexing around these days – Comrade Truebridge is gathering in which artists with an active professional practice can commune with fellow travellers on the enigmatic and unpredictible path of artmaking. We invite artists who we see as creating visionary work, while also valuing reciprocity, generosity, curiosity, collaboration, cooperation, and resource sharing..
Presented by Some Serious Business, and directed by multidisciplinary artists Quintan Ana Wikswo and Matthew Contos, COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE is an artist-driven, rhizomatic workgroup, braintrust, and salon. We are a kitchen table, a laboratory, and a hive mind. At our lively, supportive, and kinetic gatherings, invited artists come together to (a) share works in progress, (b) discuss their project’s preoccupying puzzles, experiments, failures, mysteries, messiness, challenges, and vision, and (c) collaboratively identify strategies, insights, resources, and possible avenues for exploration and invention.
COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE’s underlying ethic is reciprocity and generosity. The gatherings yield a wealth of collective knowledge and expertise as expressed by eagerness to both give and receive assistance from our colleagues and peers. COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE is delighted by all disciplines of artmaking, especially hybrids and chimeras who move between and beyond performance, literature, visual art, film and other practices that include social justice, launching organizations, and utopian collectives.
The community of COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE is comprised of artists with professional practices that welcome uncertainties, challenges and questions, mysteries and mistakes, risks and ignorances, the awkward and unknown—and are themselves passionately committed to true generosity of collaboration, cooperation, and resource sharing with artistic fellow-travellers.
By providing an opportunity to share the challenges and conundrums of works in progress within an environment of supportive peers, COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE offers artists an opportunity to engage deeply with their own and others’ work during various phases of development. Rather than a place to present polished, formal, completed works with pressures of perfection or prestige, Comrade Truebridge is truly an incubator and sanctuary for artists to step outside the realm of marketplace and gatekeepers within a space and time that celebrates the more intimate aspects of artmaking, both absurd and sublime.
COMRADE TRUEBRIDGE was founded in 2013 by multidisciplinary artists Quintan Ana Wikswo and Cat Tyc, with the partnership of Creative Capital, NYFA, and LMCC. Artists came from an eclectic range of artistic disciplines and communities, with a special focus on those whose practices adventure beyond the traditional boundaries of form and discipline. The first participants were NYC-based interdisciplinary alumni of Creative Capital, NYFA, LMCC, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Millay Colony. Since that initial gathering, Comrade Truebridge has expanded in a rhizomatic manner, as comrades bring other comrades.
Today, as a program of Some Serious Business, Comrade Truebridge is space in which artists with an active professional practice can commune with fellow travellers on the enigmatic and unpredictible path of artmaking. Emerging and mid-career artists are invited because they value reciprocity, generosity, curiosity, collaboration, cooperation, and resource sharing.
(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_
WHAT TO EXPECT
Please prepare three or four sentences about your artistic preoccupations, any outstanding needs you have, and any skills or talents you can offer to the group. We will go round the round and share and discuss these as a collective.
Accompanied by snacks and camaraderie, each gathering lasts approximately three hours. During the first phase, artists introduce themselves and share a brief glimpse into their practices. During the subsequent phase, one or two artists share a 15-20 minute presentation of a current work in progress, reveal conundrums, and then question, chat, plot, strategize, and adventure through the work with their fellow artists. Lastly, we all have time to chatter amongst ourselves.
Rather than a crit group, networking gathering, or a mutual admiration society, these gatherings offer an opportunity for artists to address practical, tangible needs, from prosaic resource-gathering and problem-solving to more esoteric conceptualizing and philosophizing – helping each other connect to necessary resources, knowledge and expertise but also simply discover rhyzomatic possibilities within our midst.
There are familiar and unfamiliar faces at each gathering. Over time, artists follow each others’ projects throughout development, helping out along the way, while simultaneously discovering new projects and unexpected ideas as new artists become involved. As a comrade: think of how you can be of active service to this artist’s articulated vision and project?
(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_)(_
SOME SERIOUS BUSINESS
Founded at the height of the Conceptual 70s, Some Serious Business incubates emergent expression in the arts, germinates intrepid new works and ideas, and presents diverse projects that celebrate the unexpected. Our collaborative partnerships and core artist-driven programs – SSB Presents and SSB Away—are a “space” of curiosity and risk-taking, experimentation and invention, reciprocity and collaboration without a fixed location.
SSB presents events and happenings by visionary creators and thought-leaders—producing hybrids andchimeras that traverse performance, literature, theater, dance, visual art, moving image, music, architecture and design, social practice, and fields of unimagined possibilities.
Guided by eggheads and free spirits, SSB is more about process than outcomes. We revel in the process of creation—happy to embark with artists and fellow-travellers on a journey exploring the puzzles, mysteries, messiness, challenges, and joy along the way to points unknown, from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Some Serious Business supports projects in three core program areas – incubation, generation, and presentation – each of which offers responsive, tangible, and expansive resources, services, and strategic partnerships. SSB’s programs are a uniquely mobile experience, with work and presentation spaces located in a variety of sites from Amtrak trains to museums, from open fields to town centers. Our programs include strategic partnerships with diverse organizations and yield cross-pollinization of artists and communities, widen marketing and publicity opportunities, and create mutually rewarding collaborative networks.