THE KITCHEN ANNOUNCES WINTER/SPRING 2025 SEASON

Two Projects This Season—from Lisa Alvarado and Gordon Hall—Bring Performance into Installation in The Kitchen at Westbeth, While The Kitchen’s First Traveling Exhibition Continues to Distribute the Organization’s Work Outside New York and Expand Its Approach to Being “Without Walls”

The Kitchen today announces its Winter/Spring 2025 season. Throughout the first half of the year, The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft) will be transformed by two monumental installation works that become new platforms and frameworks for explorative performance, while The Kitchen simultaneously continues working within new modes of distribution in its first-ever traveling exhibition. The latter represents a momentous step forward in the organization’s “Without Walls” programming, which harnesses the potentials of locational and institutional porousness and has presented work in dynamic sites ranging from a gas station and a park to radio and web broadcasts, often in bold cross-institutional collaborations.

The Kitchen Executive Director & Chief Curator Legacy Russell said, “We are delighted to welcome new voices and visions across geographies and generations to The Kitchen’s program in a complex moment of art and life, with artists showing us the way as we uplift our mission, holding space for innovation, experimentality, and creative freedom.”

Visual artist and musician Lisa Alvarado ’s work traverses thresholds of material and conscious experience, revealing new methods to explore notions of memory and time. Her first-ever solo institutional exhibition in New York, Shape of Artifact Time (February 27–April 12), begins The Kitchen’s Winter/Spring 2025 season. Drawing from American muralism, music, woven technologies, and her family’s history as Mexican-Americans in the south Texas region, Alvarado imbues socio-political cues into suspended abstractions and atmospheric orchestration. Here, paintings, textiles, and a multi-channel sound piece transform the organization’s temporary home at Westbeth Artists Housing into a communal space for visual and auditory contemplation. Though physically contained within the loft space, the work visually transcends its walls: visible both within and outside the space, hues and patterning from color-based window installations shift the environment of the gallery with the movement of sunlight throughout the day.

Alvarado and acclaimed Chicago music ensemble Natural Information Society, of which Alvarado is a member, have conceived two site-specific performances for the exhibition’s opening weekend (February 28 and March 1), and will perform their album Mandatory Reality into the sunset on February 28 and March 1, 2025.

The Kitchen’s season continues in another city entirely: Detroit. In partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) (4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201), The Kitchen’s multi-sited exhibition Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art deepens its exploration and redefining of the history of “Black data” (May 2-August 10, 2025). The first part of the multi-sited exhibition Code Switch opened on October 15 at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, NY 10037), where it continues through December 19. This iteration of the exhibition recognizes contributions of visionary Black interdisciplinary artists, thinkers, engineers, programmers, composers, and creative technologists to catalyzing discourses that were precursors, between 1960-1990, to ideas and methods central to what would, in the rise of cyber cultures, be deemed new media and time-based practices. At MOCAD, the second part of Code Switch is a contemporary group exhibition that brings together over 45 artists to explore the engagement and vast circulation of Black affect, thought, performance, and visual culture across a range of mediums, featuring works made between 1990 and the present day.

Back in The Kitchen at Westbeth is Gordon Hall ’s Hands and Knees, a newly commissioned body of work that furthers the artists’ practice in sculpture and performance (April 30–May 31, 2025). At variable, unannounced times each Saturday—May 3, 7, 14, 24, and 31 between 12–6pm—performers interact with Hall’s sculptures in ways that challenge the norms of embodied life.

The Kitchen Winter/Spring 2025 Programming Schedule

Lisa Alvarado: Shape of Artifact Time

The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft) February 27–April 12, 2025

Performances: February 28 and March 1, 2025, 5pm

Opening Reception: February 28, 2025, immediately following the performance

Tickets: $10-30 sliding scale

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm, Free

Lisa Alvarado’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in cultural tradition and social history. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas and based in Chicago, Alvarado works as a visual artist and musician with the ensemble Natural Information Society. Alvarado is inspired by the “timing and processes of slow transformation within the ground — transforming minerals, elements, and landscapes.” She calls this pace geologic time and understands these changes as “a metaphor for our internal shifts, such as in how we carry memory, loss, and inherited struggle.”

Her first solo institutional exhibition in New York City, Shape of Artifact Time, explores modes of experience with space and light, creating an environment that considers metaphors and poetics between vibration, assemblage,and translation. The work is inspired by gradual paths of transition — the shifts between sunlight and shadow throughout the day, and the generational movements within the earth metamorphosing and realigning inner and outer landscapes.

Alvarado will debut a series of translucent textile works, with sewn paintings and printed fabric that extend to the ceiling. These expansive works will also feature hand-sewn bells and reflective surfaces. The fabrics within the new work will have an overlapping characteristic that mimics the act of mending, showing the visual conjoining of disparate parts that reveal slow healing or repair over time. The artist sees this new direction of material integration as a means to connect with Chicano theorist Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's writing on rasquache– a Mexican-American makeshift assemblage aesthetic–that furthers her own investigation into transitory and migratory considerations of liminal space. Alvarado will continue her sustained engagement with atmospheric orchestration that involves a multi-channel sound piece specifically created for Shape of Artifact Time and floor- based works that expand the pictorial plane with sand and dried pressed flower works throughout the installation. Alvarado’s ongoing interest in the relationship between interior and exterior space is central to the exhibition. Here, she expands her visual language to the architectural contours of Westbeth’s building with color-based installations across a bank of thirty windows within the exhibition space. In creating this landscape of color and form, Alvarado’s work will be visible from within and outside The Kitchen’s loft. The hues and patterning will thus activate and mediate The Kitchen’s gallery as the sun shines and sets throughout the day. Shape of Artifact Time will also serve as a stage for Alvarado and the Natural Information Society who have conceived a site-specific performance for the exhibition opening and will perform their album Mandatory Reality into the sunset on February 28 and March 1, 2025.

Lisa Alvarado: Shape of Artifact Time is organized by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Lisa Alvarado (b. 1982, San Antonio, TX) is an artist and musician based in Chicago. Her practice gravitates towards creative traditions of overcoming and exuberant forms of resilience. She plays harmonium in the band Natural Information Society and uses her free-hanging paintings as mobile stage sets for their performances. Alvarado’s perspective is rooted in the under-represented American history of the Chicanx/ Mexican American diaspora. Her recent solo exhibitions include Spiral Yellow at The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2024); Spinning Echo at Bridget Donahue, New York (2023); Lisa Alvarado / MATRIX 192 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2023); Pulse Meridian Foliation at RedCat, Los Angeles (2023). She has been included in the recent group exhibitions Resonant Earth at the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2024); Calling at Kunstverein Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2023); Contemporary Cartographies at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville (2023); File Under Freedom at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022); Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022). Alvarado played harmonium on ten albums released on Eremite, Aguirre, and Drag City records. She has recently performed at Inhotim Museum, Brazil (2024); Knockdown Center, New York (2024); Le Guess Who Festival, Utrecht (2023); Jazzfest Berlin, Germany (2023); Pioneer Works, New York (2023); Jazz em Agosto, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2023); Jazztopad, Poland (2022); Vision Festival, New York (2022); Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago (2022).

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art at MOCAD

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201)

May 2–August 10, 2025 Public Programs to be Announced

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm (Thursdays and Fridays 11am–8pm)

The first of its kind internationally, Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is a multi- sited exhibition exploring and redefining the history of “Black data,” centering and celebrating contributions by artists of African descent to the rapidly advancing field of new media art and digital practice. Drawing its title from André L. Brock’s groundbreaking text Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), the exhibition explores the relationship between Black cultural production and the legacy of computation as a mode of machinic engagement and creative inspiration. This exhibition will take on two components—the first part, a historic archival timeline as presented by The Kitchen in collaboration with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Fall 2024 (October 15–December 19, 2024); the second part, a contemporary group show, to take place Spring 2025 (April 25–September 7, 2025) in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, with contributed research by Tsige Tafesse, 2023-2024 Curatorial Fellow and Kyla Gordon, (2024-2025 Curatorial Fellow, The Kitchen; and by Jova Lynne, Co-Director and Artistic Director, and Isabella Nimmo, Associate Curator, MOCAD. Exhibition design by Pacific.

Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees

The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft) May 1–31, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10, 2025, 4–6pm

Performances at variable, unannounced times during gallery hours on May 9, 10, 17, 24, & 31

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm, Free

For this newly commissioned body of work, Gordon Hall continues their practice in sculpture and performance with an installation of functional furniture-like sculptures that support reclining bodies in unexpected ways. Animated by a transgender politics that question the norms that govern embodied life, Hands and Knees extends Hall’s investigation into the politics of vulnerability and corporeal support. Performers demonstrate possible uses of the sculptures in weekly performances that emerge from Hall’s inquiry into the paradoxical interplay of vulnerability and liberation in moments of waiting.

Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator.

Gordon Hall (1983, Boston) is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and writing. Hall has had solo presentations at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; among other venues. Gordon Hall is represented by DOCUMENT in North America and Hua International in Europe and Asia, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College.

Funding Credits

The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Cowles Charitable Trust, The James and Judith K. Dimon Foundation, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, New Music USA, The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, Ruth Foundation For The Arts, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Teiger Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; and in part by public funds from the Manhattan Borough President, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The Kitchen acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York.

For more information about CANNY, please visit https://can-ny.org/.