Join us for a FREE outdoor performance in Prospect Park!
An evening of dance and story, land and sky, choice and possibility.

I've created a very special evening specifically crafted for sunset time together in Prospect Park. Gather, sit, or lay down with the ground, on and amongst 84 hand-stitched quilts—a 4,000 square-foot installation designed by Ojibwe artist Maggie Thompson. Created over the past decade by hundreds of volunteers over multiple geographies, these quilts reflect a collective vision toward better futures. They hold record of historic actions alongside personal histories, migrations, and dreams. You’ll be invited to take part—stitch with us, and add your ideas to this monumental project: what are your non-negotiable care actions? How do we defend land in a city? How do we disrupt the misuse of the terms: great, free, he, she, illegal, migrant, border?

We’ll listen to stories and provocations transmitted from artists across territories and First Nations. We’ll take in a little silence and also the booming sounds from famed Lower East Side DJ Dat Gurl Curly! You might decide to dance. You might decide to join Ashley Pierre-Louis near one of the park’s oldest trees, or take a guided tour with Prospect Park Alliance, along one of its paths. You might learn the backstitch from Korina Emmerich, Nishina Loft, or another audience member. Maybe you’ll teach the stitch, too. You’ll take home a bundle of herbs specially prepared to support the summer harvest and our nervous systems—and pollinator seeds from PECaN to support the human and more-than-human ecosystems of New York City.

Our time together is choreographed by Emily Johnson and held by the gorgeous contributions of DJ Dat Gurl Curly; dancer Ashley Pierre-Louis; authors IV Castellanos, Camille Georgeson Usher, Kai Recollet, and Emily Johnson; quilt care-takers Korina Emmerich and Nishina Loft; PECaN (seeds); twelve volunteer stewards from Celebrate Brooklyn, a pop-up nature activity center designed for young people by Prospect Park Alliance as well as their excellent trail guides.

We hope you’ll join us.

RSVP NOW!

This presentation is made possible with generous support from First Peoples Fund’s Performing Arts Production Grant.

Celebrate Indigenous resilience, cultural preservation, and creative collaboration in this two-part event presented by Relative Arts NYC. Co-founders Korina Emmerich (Puyallup) and Liana Shewey (Mvskoke) will lead a conversation exploring Indigenous fashion, community-building, and intergenerational knowledge-sharing through the lens of contemporary artistry, followed by a hands-on quilting workshop inspired by Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time.

The talk will highlight Relative Arts NYC’s representation of more than 50 Indigenous artists working in fashion, poetry, music, and visual art. Emmerich and Shewey will discuss Indigenous presence in urban spaces, intertribal solidarity, and how artists honor ancestral traditions while imagining Indigenous futures. Following the conversation, all are invited to hand-stitch fabric squares for inclusion in Then a Cunning Voice, an ongoing global community quilt project led by Yu’pik artist Emily Johnson / Catalyst.

Relative Arts NYC — Founded in 2023 by Emmerich and Shewey, Relative Arts NYC is a brick-and-mortar space in New York City’s East Village that uplifts Indigenous artists through collaboration, education, and celebration of Indigenous fashion and design.

Korina Emmerich (Puyallup) — Founder of EMME Studio and co-founder of Relative Arts, Emmerich is a fashion designer whose work has been featured at MoMA PS1, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of the City of New York. Her designs have also appeared on Project Runway and Vogue.

Liana Shewey (Mvskoke) — Director of Programming at Relative Arts, Shewey is an educator and activist focused on Indigenous liberation, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) awareness, and environmental justice, with extensive experience in music and event production.

Support provided by Art Bridges.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter

With IV Castellanos

Thursday, June 26, 6-8pm
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing collaboration between choreographer, writer, and organizer Emily Johnson and scholar, artist, and writer Kai Recollet. Coming into its eighth year, this season’s Kinstillatory fires organize us around extended time—with one another, with sound, provocation, action.

These kinstillatory fires centering anti-colonial Indigenous, feminist, and gender-expansive care ethics and practices are hosted, held, and lightly curated by Johnson and Recollet, along with invited guests and community partners. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as we articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. It is a place to bring practices, grammars, and needs forward and through the portals that fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now and into the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. A provocation, and an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

This season, gestures toward our abundant futures guide the thinking as we gather toward necessary making, skill-sharing, body, and land/attention with artists Nathan Young, Marcela Torres, Maria Bauman, and IV Castellanos.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter will take place outside at Abrons Arts Center, located at466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking. The fire gatherings are free and open to all.

About IV Castellanos
IV Castellanos is a Mx Indigenous Bolivian/American, an abstract performance artist, sculptor, land defender and water protector in training. Their practice prioritizes skill sharing and creating space for Queer, Trans* and diasporic Indigenous communities and people of color. They create stand-alone sculptures, wall works installations, wearables, and objects for performance. Their studio practice involves a convergence of techniques to create sculptures that highlight labor and effort as meaningful actions. They received the Braiding Seeds Fellowship (2023), an IndieSpace grant (2023), City Arts Corps grant (2021), Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2019), The manage the Land Back Hub Brooklyn for artists and activists along with Build And Reworld Now, in collaboration with choreographer/multidisciplinary artist Emily Johnson of the Yup'ik Nation, which is a space to make, rest, and reflect, situated on Haudenosaunee lands. Continuous projects include the Performance Art Delivery Service and editing books to the correct pronouns of the reader as ongoing forms of resistance and care.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter

With Marcela Torres

Thursday, April 17, 6-8pm
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing collaboration between choreographer, writer, and organizer Emily Johnson and scholar, artist, and writer Kai Recollet. Coming into its eighth year, this season’s Kinstillatory fires organize us around extended time—with one another, with sound, provocation, action.

These kinstillatory fires centering anti-colonial Indigenous, feminist, and gender-expansive care ethics and practices are hosted, held, and lightly curated by Johnson and Recollet, along with invited guests and community partners. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as we articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. It is a place to bring practices, grammars, and needs forward and through the portals that fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now and into the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. A provocation, and an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

This season, gestures toward our abundant futures guide the thinking as we gather toward necessary making, skill-sharing, body, and land/attention with artists Nathan Young, Marcela Torres, Maria Bauman, and IV Castellanos.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter will take place outside at Abrons Arts Center, located at466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking. The fire gatherings are free and open to all.

About Marcela Torres
Marcela Torres is an artist, organizer, and educator who uses strength-building exercises and community rituals, to propose forms of reparations. They were born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and residing nomadically between Chicago, IL and Brooklyn, NY. Their physical research builds on methods of transcendental rituals, racial struggles within the United States and contemporary Latinx diaspora.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter

With Nathan Young

Thursday, March 6, 6-8pm
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing collaboration between choreographer, writer, and organizer Emily Johnson and scholar, artist, and writer Kai Recollet. Coming into its eighth year, this season’s Kinstillatory fires organize us around extended time—with one another, with sound, provocation, action.

These kinstillatory fires centering anti-colonial Indigenous, feminist, and gender-expansive care ethics and practices are hosted, held, and lightly curated by Johnson and Recollet, along with invited guests and community partners. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as we articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. It is a place to bring practices, grammars, and needs forward and through the portals that fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now and into the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. A provocation, and an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

This season, gestures toward our abundant futures guide the thinking as we gather toward necessary making, skill-sharing, body, and land/attention with artists Nathan Young, Marcela Torres, Maria Bauman, and IV Castellanos.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter will take place outside at Abrons Arts Center, located at466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking. The fire gatherings are free and open to all.

About Nathan Young
Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is an artist, scholar, and curator working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, and experimental music. Young’s work often draws upon the spiritual and the political to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. He co-founded the artists collective Postcommodity and holds an MFA in music/sound from Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts. Young is a PhD candidate in the University of Oklahoma’s innovative Native American Art History Doctoral program where his scholarship is focused on Indigenous sonic agency. He is the founder and curator of The Intertribal Noise Symposium Series, Tulsa Noise, Tulsa Noisefest and the Peyote Tapes record label. Young’s work has been supported by The Native Arts + Culture Foundation, The Terra Foundation for the Arts, The Thoma Foundation, Creative Capital, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation as well as the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sundance Institute. Young is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and is also a direct descendent of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe.

Join Jane Anderson and Emily Johnson at the Leslie Lohman Museum, as part of Andrea Geyer's Salon Series. We'll be discussing the what, why, present, and future of the Decolonization Rider; how it can be best utilized as a tool for artists and institutions; Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property training and agreements; and future decolonial actions.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the American Indian Community House on 9/9 for a successful sewing session. It was a pleasure to to share stories, meet long time community house members, and laugh as we worked steadily on quilt #7.

Gather with Korina and Anangookwe from Emily Johnson/ Catalyst in partnership with Urban Indigenous Collective at their midtown location from 1 to 4 PM on 12/5 as we work together on completing Quilt #7 and Quilt #10. Each is an integral part of our 84-quilt project, designed by Maggie Thompson. Help us out by stopping by for a stitch or all day

For the consideration of everyone's health, masks are highly encouraged!

•••

Made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire, the last of 2024.

Thursday, November 21, 6-8pm at Abrons Arts Center. 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking.

You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire, the last of 2024. An evening of radical listening to readings, dream sharing, and collective mourning. We come together with artists from Palestine and Lebanon to meditate on the loss we have been witnessing from afar and commune in our grief and our celebration of lives that resist erasure. With Raneem Ayyad, Leil Zahra Mortada, and Ibtisam Azem.

Curated by Tania El Khoury.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing project of Emily Johnson and Kai Recollet. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Please join us.

Tania El Khoury is a live artist who creates interactive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity.

Raneem Ayyad is an architect, artist, and a researcher interested in the correlation between the built environment, socioeconomic histories, and health in Palestine and Jordan.

Leil Zahra Mortada is a transfeminist queer political organizer, multidisciplinary artist, and researcher from South Lebanon. Their video and sound work focus on decolonization, anarchism, oral history, abolition, and border violence.

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist based in New York. Her latest novel The Book of Disappearance has been translated into English, Italian, and German.

•••
Made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Please join me in the Starr Foundation Hall (in the lower level of the University Center) at Parsons Fine Arts for my contribution to their Visiting Artist Lecture Series

*The Lecture Series is free and open to the public*

Sounds of De/Composition is the Fall 2024 conference organized by the Music Department of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Science. We invite participants to consider and create sonic traces of mutually constituted biological and social breakdown, uneven distributions of environmental violences across social categories, and (re)new(ed) futurities emerging from discarded or underground sites.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Marisa Solomon (Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University) and a keynote performance by myself, as well as paper presentations, performances, sound art, and audiovisual installations.

Projections from Cheyenne Rain LeGrande, ishkwaazhe Shane McSauby, Razelle Benally, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Laura Ortman, Mato Wayuhi, Korina Emmerich, Emily Johnson & Jeffrey Gibson, curated by Relative Arts.

“Kintecoying Now” is a series of free public arts events to be held in two plazas at Bowery and East 4th Streets.  This site and the area of Astor Place, according to modern day sources, was originally known as Kintecoying (“Crossroads of Nations”) and served as a place for meeting, trade, diplomacy, and games by Munsee Lenape, Canarsie, Sapohannikan, Manhattan, and other Nations.

“Kintecoying Now” is intended to activate the site with work by Indigenous/Native American artists, artisans, and culture bearers in order to honor and recognize its history.

Whale Story is a method of paying attention to another scale, another form, another knowledge.

Written and performed by Emily Johnson
Edited and filmed by IV Castellanos on Haudenosaunee lands

Created with support from Aywaa Storyhouse.

Join us on Thursday October 3rd, 6-8pm at Abrons Arts Center for a fire curated by Yanira Castro with artists Marcela Torres, Kristel Baldoz, and Ayano Elson.


Always thrilled to open this space of the otherwise. A site for furthering, for participation, a night to prepare for: steady self, ready community, forms to incite wonder. We are so thankful to Marcela, Kristel, Ayano, Yanira, and are reminded of the understory - what grows beneath the trees.


Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing project of Emily Johnson and Kai Recollet. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

•••
Made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

And on Sunday, join me for part show and tell, part discussion, part activation to utilize the Decolonization Rider - a tool for artists and cultural workers to usher cultural institutions to equitable, justice-centered working practices.

On Saturday I'll be leading a Lunchtime Care Activation guided with questions, What are your non-negotiable care actions? How do you defend land in a city? How can you disrupt the misuse of these terms: great, migrant, he, she, illegal, free, border? What other terms would you add to the list?

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Relative Arts on 8/12 for a successful sewing session. Stories and laughter was shared and quilt #4 is nearly completed!

Gather with us in partnership with the American Indian Community House as we work together on completing quilt #4 and quilt #5. Each is an integral part of our 84-quilt project, designed by Maggie Thompson.

Help us out by stopping by for a stitch or all day For the consideration of everyone's health, masks are highly encouraged!

•••
Made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Thank you to everyone who has checked in on our missing quilts. We appreciate your support and ideas! Since the quilts have not been located, we are remaking them! Each is an integral part of our 84-quilt project, designed by Maggie Thompson.

Gather with us in partnership with Relative Arts as we work together on quilts #4 and #5. Help us out by stopping by for a stitch or all day 💕

For the consideration of everyone's health, masks are highly encouraged.

✨

•••
Made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Don’t miss our Kinstillatory Summer Fire 🔥 July 11, 6-8 pm in the back garden at Abrons Arts Center with unrelentingly gorgeous offerings from Danielle Olana Jagelski, Ty Fierce Metteba, and Ms.Josephine. Gather with us, the honey locust, evening light, sonic poems, viola callings, song. The fires this spring and summer have been inspiring, tender, familial, remedying. This is the fire before our summer pause. See you there!

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Ms.Josephine former name known to some as Henu Josephine Tarrant, is a lifetime NYC native community member descending from the Rappahannock, Ho-Chunk, and Kuna nations. She will be sharing her newest original songs created for her EP SERPENT set to record in 2024. The songs she will be sharing are what she hopes becomes the soundtrack of the life of a spiritual indigenous femme surviving the urban landscape . Speaking to death, rebirth, empowerment, sexuality, and native cosmologies in the ever changing metropolis of New York City. Her debut single 'don't miss the sunshine' can be found on all music streaming apps & platforms and she encourages everyone to listen to her newest summer release 'SkyRockets' written & performed with Jayden Avery Love. She also encourages anyone who enjoys her tunes to check out her music video for 'don't miss the sunshine' on YouTube directed by Mi'kMaq New York Native Frankie Pedersen.

Danielle Olana Jagelski is a composer, conductor, and creative producer. She is the Artistic Director of Renegade Opera, Producer for First Nation Performing Arts, and Faculty at Manhattan School of Music Pre-College Division. 

A fierce advocate for equity in artistic spaces and citizen of the Oneida Nation/Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, Danielle is especially passionate about Decolonization through collective creation and performance. 

Her performances have been described:

“At once timeless and of its time, it expands your heart and mind with every note, telling a story of grief and love that is as honest as it is hopeful.” (Oregon ArtsWatch, 2021)

An avid composer of song, opera, choir, and music for theatre, recent premieres have been by New Native Theatre, Voices of Ascension, Hear Us Hear Them Ensemble, Artemis Singers, and American Patriots Project among others. Her works have been performed throughout  the country including at Roulette Intermedium, Performance Space New York, The Green Room 42, and Shaking the Tree Theatre.

As a conductor she is sought out for her execution of contemporary works, and has worked with companies such as Opera Theatre Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Opera Ithaca, and City Lyric Opera. She has received grants from The Plimpton Foundation, Oregon Regional Arts and Cultures Foundation, and Opera America as well as receiving awards from the National Opera Association for her passionate work in contemporary opera.

Ty Fierce Metteba has accumulated an assortment of skills in pursuit of what sparks passion not only in the themselves but in community to motivate and galvanize sustainable solutions to intergenerational poverty and trauma. As a Diné speaker at qualms with reclamation, revitalization, and renewal, the responsibility to demonstrate reciprocity for the continuation of my culture and community has brought far from my homelands but with trust to find my strengths and weaknesses in how to best help community. In being at odds with language, polyglots have inspired me to at least understand the universal languages of math and music, so I can bridge further concepts with the other languages I speak and learn…

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire ✨June 20, 6-8 pm, in the backyard at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, LES, Lenapehoking.

Gather with a fire for our futures.
Curated by Ashley Pierre-Louis with artists Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos of gushes), Ke’ron Wilson & friends, Kimiko Tanabe, Muyassar Kurdi, and a sharing from Eve Tuck.

Eternal Oyster is perpetually moved and held by site-and-community specificity. Ke’ron Wilson & friends transmute through music and poems. Kimiko Tanabe offers us a possibility toward communal remembering, a meditation on the relationship between eroticism, decay, and transformation. In the spirit of resistance, Muyassar Kurdi forwards a meditative embodiment with sounds from the Palestinian sound archive. Eve Tuck will attend to new intentions for collaborative Indigenous research in NYC, with and beyond the university, always for communities and lands and waters.

This special Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet, and is centered practices of rewording in celebration of Catalyst’s newest land-based project Build And Reworld Now. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

FREE! No registration required!

Ashley Pierre-Louis (she/her) is a dance artist and creator freelancing and exploring choreography in New York City. When making, she asks herself and audiences to imagine what our physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us is, and how we can share them collectively in order to create a sense of freedom in the mind and body.

Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos of gushes) is a Filipinx Bay Area-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist building tactile mythos through eco-erotic performance, love and liberation song, and decolonized social practice.

Fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, the feminist occult, plant medicine, coastal ecologies, and animal architecture, their practice flows into three art containers: progressive art-rock project, gushes, earth-body research-response play, Eternal Oyster, and sensory installation partnership with Ana Vásquez, Tree+Oyster. 

Eternal Oyster’s work encompasses chamber prog ensemble, dance music, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, ritual, video, sound sculpture and other intermedia incarnations as unbound, eternal expressions of liberation. They are perpetually moved and held by site-and-community specificity. They believe in food and climate justice, landback, and a Free Palestine.

Ke’ron J. Wilson (she/they) is a healing-centered transfemme movement artist, choreographer, model, actor, musician, and poet based out of New York City. Born in Lakeland Florida, Ke’ron began training at Harrison School for the Arts and Florida Dance Theater. After graduating with a BFA in dance from Sam Houston State University, her career began as a founding member of Social Movement Contemporary Dance Theater and as a recurring guest choreographer for the Pilot Dance Project in Houston, TX.

Ke’ron’s current creative research is deeply rooted in the spiritual possibilities that are born from art-making within queer community, aiming to decentralize singular perspectives and to expand understandings of queer/trans identity. In this process, she prioritizes care as the bridge to generative collaboration, and compassion as the key to rigorous self and social reflection. Ke’ron’s research has recently been supported by MNE’s Emerging Choreographer’s Series (2022-2024). In addition, she has also appeared on the Tamron Hall Show with Sonya Renee Taylor; on the New York Fashion Week runway as a model for Bad Binch Tong Tong’s SS24 collection; and continues to lead wellness/meditation portals, mostly in collaboration with the Angelito Collective, for the NYC Trans community when and where she can.

Ke’ron is now receiving support through Movement Research’s Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, which is supported by the New York Community Trust through the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund.

Kimiko (she/her) is a yonsei dance artist creating surreal performance art that is both playful and haunting. Her work wanders into the afterlife of Japanese American internment where she wrestles with the joys and failures of the body as a site of remembering.

Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. She currently focuses on interweaving electronic instruments into her embodied voice performances, stirring a plethora of emotions from her audience members through ritualistic chants, meditative movements, and sonic sound explorations.

Kurdi was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023 as well as the American Composer Forum. She was awarded a Roulette Intermedium 2020 commission and 2022 artist residency (with support from Jerome Foundation), and is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC.

Performance highlights include Poetry Project, Roulette Intermedium, Center For Performance Research, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, Cafe OTO, Chicago Cultural Center, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia, Fridman Gallery, Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, and Judson Memorial Church as well as exhibitions and film screenings (solo and group works) at VIERTE WELT, Trieze Gallery, Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, Spectacle Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives. She taught workshops in movement and voice most notably in Portugal at Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, Bilgi University and Culture in Istanbul Turkey as well as a MoMA PS1 in NYC.

Eve Tuck is Professor of Indigenous Studies and James Weldon Johnson Professor at Steinhardt, in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, at New York University. She is the founding director of the new Provostial Center for Indigenous Studies at NYU.
Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska. She grew up outside of her community, living in Pennsylvania as a child, and New York City as a young adult. She earned a PhD in Urban Education from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2008.

Presented with support from Anonymous Was A Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts, and from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding..

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Really looking forward to this conversation with Mylène and Léuli; utilizing our Decolonization Rider—a tool for artists, cultural workers, and institutions - and discussing ways it can be used to usher equitable, justice-oriented working practices.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

You’re invited to the May 16 Kinstillatory Fire, curated by Relative Arts ✨ Join us alongside the sound, poetry and performace of artists Somah Haaland @coffeequeer , Rosa Bordallo @whoismanett , Mobēy Lola Irizarry @lola.machine , and DJ Leelander lelandparkerr ✨ This fire creates kin. These artists are Future making.✨

Thursday May 16th, 6-8pm outside at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Relative Arts is a new brick-and-mortar community space, open atelier, and shop displaying contemporary Indigenous fashion and design. Our mission is to provide a peer-run space in New York City to celebrate the advancement of Indigenous futurism in fashion through representation and education. We are Indigenous owned and operated by Korina Emmerich (Puyallup) and Liana Shewey (Mvskoke).

Mobéy Lola Irizarry (they/she) is a genderqueer cultural worker, composer, painter, poet, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and transdisciplinary performance artist. Based in Brooklyn, they hail from the Puerto Rican diaspora in Hartford, CT, and are a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She makes within the lineages of decolonial uprisings, collections of tiny mirrors at queer clubs, and the precolonial languages of the drum and the braid. Lola is the creative director and percussion section leader for Las Mariquitas, NYC’s Queer and Trans Salsa band. They play in the experimental performance trio Dendarry Bakery, in the Latin Rock group AVATAREDEN, and are a part of the music composition team for Samora La Perdida’s “Spanglish Sh!t” musical. Their work has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Denver Art Museum, and with the New York Theatre Ballet. Lola is quoted in Rolling Stone saying “I want to abolish patriarchy in Salsa… this is a duty to our lineage.”

Rosa Bordallo is a singer-songwriter and native Chamorro (CHamoru) from the island of Guam (Guåhan), an American colony in the Mariåna Islands. She now in lives in Lenapehoking where she has recorded several albums and EP’s under the moniker Manett and as a member of the rock band, cholo. Her music can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp. Her sophomore solo album, Isidro, will be released through Bad Auntie Records in July 2024.

Somah Toya Haaland (they/she) is a queer interdisciplinary artist and community organizer from the Pueblos of Laguna and Jemez in so-called New Mexico. They are passionate about radical healing, climate justice, trans rights, and empowering youth. Somah is a Media Organizer with Pueblo Action Alliance as well as a film & theater maker. This is their fourth year living as a guest in Lenapehoking.

Leland is Onöndowa'ga:' a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and is currently a student at The New School majoring in Culture & Media. During his time in school, he has developed a passion for DJ'ing and Mixing. Known as leelander behind the decks you can expect a blend of current tracks mixed through house-created beats, that work together to create a dancy and upbeat set. 

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Eileen and I worked alongside one another for years defending East River Park and that we get to share a night with Poetry Project gives me so much joy. I hope you'll join us. I imagine there may be some surprises.

You are invited to the coming Kinstillatory Fire ✨ Thursday April 18, 6-8pm ✨

A collective, urging action. Through our hands, our labor, our arrival. Join us, gather alongside and with famed LES DJ Dat Gurl Curly, deft instigator Andrea Haenggi, and land based poet Anangookwe Wolf.

Thursday April 18, 6-8pm in the backyard garden at Abrons Arts Center. Free. All are welcome.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Born in a Swiss farming village and residing half of their life in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, andrea haenggi (she/they) is a body-based transdisciplinary artist who cultivates a research-based “ethnochoreobotanic” practice. Rooted in co-creating dance with the land-sea, plant life, and more-than-human kin, their work seeks to foster multispecies communities in the present and shape questions around decolonization, climate change, feminism, liberation, and care.

Anangookwe Wolf is an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Fort Peck Assiniboine, and Dakota descent. They utilize forms of craft and storytelling to interweave familial narratives concerning cultural inheritance and present-day afflictions. Their focus is to create a visual story of the interpersonal lives of those they’ve known and have never met. 

In 2019, Anangookwe obtained their BFA focusing on Jewelry Design from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since graduating, Anangookwe’s visual work has been exhibited across the United States in galleries such as All My Relations Gallery (Minneapolis, Minnesota); The New Gallery (Clarksville, Tennessee); and Form & Concept (Santa Fe, New Mexico). Anangookwe is the recipient of residencies, grants, and awards through Vermont Studio Center, First Peoples Fund, and Alaska State Council on the Arts. As of 2024, they are an Indigenous Nations Poets fellow.

DJ Dat Gurl Curly is a Lower East Side legend. Her music parties, gatherings, pop ups, and radio shows are vibrantly known and always make a good time for her community and relatives.

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The Kinstillatory Fire welcomes us back ✨

The next six months of fire are lightly curated by an incredible collection of individual and collective artist warriors.

March 28, 6-8 pm in the backyard garden at Abrons Arts Center.

Curated by Sugar Vendil with work from Melinda Faylor, Sarah Galdes, treya Iam, Shane Larson ✨

We gather to listen. To fire, to the reverberations of radical empathy, chamber-protest, song. Until we understand solidarity into our bones, under our feet, within our moves, our gatherings - daily, urgent, recurring, mournful, celebratory.

Gather with us✨

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Sugar Vendil (she/they) is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist who is forging new creative pathways as a second generation Filipinx American and future ancestor.  She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into making music and performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and toddler, who she hopes will pursue dance and volleyball but will not force him/them.

Vendil’s work germinates from a kinesthetic and improvisatory approach rooted in lived experiences. Her sense of physicality and artistic autonomy is evident in her work, whether it is music, performance, or visual scores.

Pianist-composer Melinda Faylor weaves together dense and mercurial sound worlds using field recordings, synthesized sound and piano.

For Kinstillatory, Ms. Faylor will be working with recordings of fire, exploring it as a symbol of rebirth, destruction and protection.

Sarah Galdes is a drummer, composer, and music producer born in Australia to Indian / Maltese parents, Sarah is currently based in NYC and engages with a wide variety of artists. She has delved into traditional South Korean Samul Nori drumming and North Indian music traditions to further enrich her rhythmic syntax. 

Sarah performs as a soloist using Sensory Percussion sensors to explore texture, groove, and leafy found sounds.

treya lam is a multi-instrumentalist composer and multidisciplinary creator whose atmospheric voice, fluency on guitar, piano, looped viola, percussion and found sounds culminates in liberation orientedsongwriting and scores throughout their solo work as well as collaborations across mediums. 

otherland is an interdisciplinary grief and regeneration ritual rooted in chamber-protest songs that explores grief as a catalyst for radical empathy, intersectional solidarity and repairing our relationship to the earth.

Shane Larson is a NYC-based movement and video artist, focused on sense memory. 

listening #1 is a two-person exploration about being and seeing inside of the beast—the city and its people, its movements, and its coincidental events.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter was created with funding from The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.