Parsons Festival and More Things to Do this Spring at The New School
Parsons School of Design invites you to Parsons Festival, a celebration of the graduating Class of 2023. The festival showcases the creative and intellectual achievements of this diverse and exciting group of artists, designers, architects, photographers, filmmakers, technologists, scholars, and strategists.
Visit the 2023 Parsons Festival Hub for a full list of events and activities, and check back regularly for updates.
MORE SPRING EVENTS AT THE NEW SCHOOL
PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL
The World Voices Festival is PEN America’s celebration of international literature and writers. Honoring the organization’s hundred-year history of uniting writers and readers to celebrate creative expression and the freedom to write for all, the festival was founded in the wake of 9/11 to counter U.S. isolationism and broaden the channels of dialogue between the United States and the world.
This year’s festival will feature MacArthur Fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates who will deliver PEN America’s annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture.
How We Became/Become: Latinidad, Identity, & Love
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
6:30PM to 8:00PM (EDT)
2 West 13th Street, New York, NY
In a conversation moderated by PEN World Voices Festival Curator and poet Eloisa Amezcua, Zamora, Olivarez, and Ampuero explore how writing, in all genres, can help us grasp how we became the people we are, how giving words to our corrosive sociopolitical contexts can provoke deeper conversations about how we come to understand ourselves, and how, despite all the obstacles, we come to love. This event will be bilingual in English and Spanish.
Ottessa Moshfegh Presents: Why Write?
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
8:00PM to 10:00PM (EDT)
The Auditorium, 66 W 12 Street, New York, NY
Ottessa Moshfegh speaks with three very different novelists—Rachel Kushner (The Mars Room, Flamethrowers), Min Jin Lee (Pachinko, Free Food for Millionaires), and Akhil Sharma (Family Life, A Life of Adventure and Delight)—to discuss why they write, how they want their readers to read, and what responsibility they feel, if any, to promote or respond to the moral discourse of the day.
Matters of Offense: Ayad Akhtar and Eboo Patel
Thursday, May 11, 2023, 6:30PM (EDT)
2 West 13th Street, New York, NY
From the literary world to college campuses the relationships between art, identity, appropriation, and free speech are hotly contested. Increasingly the value of freedom of expression is ranked in opposition to the harm caused by certain forms of speech that are believed to undermine the dignity and humanity of marginalized communities. In an intimate dialogue, Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies), the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, novelist, and President of PEN America; and Interfaith America Founder and President Eboo Patel (We Need to Build) explore the climate of self-censorship facing writers, question whether marginalization is a useful category in art, and discuss the dangers of sacrificing freedom of expression to the shifting social and cultural mores of the day.
Arthur Miller Lecture 2023: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Thursday, May 11, 2023, 8:00PM (EDT)
Tishman Auditorium, 63 5th Avenue, New York, NY
PEN America’s annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture will be delivered by MacArthur Fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the United States seemed caught in a reckoning with the legacies of slavery and racial inequity. Yet, the backlash to critical discussions of America’s history and the history of African Americans was swift, with President Trump introducing an Executive Order in September 2020 barring discussion of so-called ‘divisive-concepts’ in government trainings and other settings. In the years since, we have seen a dramatic rise in efforts to ban books, and particularly the very books that have long fought for a place on the shelf – books by African Americans and authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors and women.
In the Festival’s keynote lecture, Coates will discuss this moment of attempts to erase African American history and Black intellectual thought in the context of the broader attacks on free speech and free expression. He will explore the historically cyclical nature of these backlashes, the power structures fortified by the assault on the free exchange of ideas and thoughts, and identify the stakes of the curtailment of free expression.
PERFORMANCES
JUPITER INVINCIBLE: Live Performance
Tuesday, May 2, 2023, 6:00PM to 7:00PM (EDT)
ROOM A-407, 66 W 12th Street, New York, NY
Join us for a live performance of the new radio play and comic book Jupiter Invincible by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, presented in collaboration with Stella Adler Center for the Arts. Jupiter Invincible is an augmented reality comic book series about an African-American enslaved person, Jupiter, who is suddenly given the power of immortality, set on a Southern plantation near Baltimore before the U.S. Civil War. The project is a mixture of pop-culture, history, innovative technology, and dynamic storytelling illustrated by Ashley A. Woods, Syd Fini and Neda Kazemifar and augmented reality by Ram Devineni.
Schneider Concerts Presents WindSync Wind Quintet
Sunday, May 7, 2023, 2:00PM to 4:00PM (EDT)
The Auditorium , 66 W 12th Street, New York, NY
WINDSYNC Wind Quintet:
Garrett Hudson, flute
Emily Tsai, oboe
Graeme Steele Johnson, clarinet
Kara LaMoure, bassoon
Anni Hochhalter, horn
Program:
Mark Mellits: Wind Quintet “Apollo”- New York Premiere
Akshaya Avril Tucker: Hold Sacred – New York Premiere
Jean-Philippe Rameau/arr. Kara LaMoure: Pastoral Suite
Valerie Coleman: Wind Quintet “Umoja”
Miguel de Aguila: Quinteto Sinfónico – New York Premiere
Miguel de Aguila: Sambeada – New York Premiere
Nathalie Joachim: “Stumble, Fall, Fly” (2023) – East Coast Premiere
This concert will be approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes in length, including intermission.
Global Music/Dance Traditions Presents Inkarayku Live!
Tuesday, May 9, 2023, 5:00PM to 6:30PM (EDT)
Wollman Hall, 65 W 11th Street, New York, NY
Join us for a lively celebration of New York City’s Peruvian cultures and community with traditional Andean music ensemble INKARAYKU! Led by founder Andres Jimenez, the group seeks to link the past, present and future of Andean arts, through the performance of indigenous music forms that have evolved into the contemporary mestizo music heard today. Inkarayku’s sound blends traditional Quechua folk songs with the energetic aesthetics unique to New York City.
Continuous Replay: Lang Dance Spring 2023 Production
May 12–13, 2023
New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, New York, NY
Join us for Continuous Replay, a seminal work in the legacy of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, performed by Eugene Lang College students under the tutelage of members from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. The Eugene Lang College contemporary dance program has been called the “home to one of the more progressive collegiate dance departments in New York” by The New York Times. The program also includes new works created by Rebecca Stenn (Lang faculty) and Nami Yamamoto (guest artist), along with student-created work.
FILMS
Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square – Documentary Screening and Thursday, May 4, 2023, 5:30PM to 8:00PM (EDT)
2 West 13th Street, New York, NY
Join us for screening of the film Rabble Rousers, documenting activist Frances Goldin and her 50-year fight against the gentrification of Cooper Square in the Lower East Side Manhattan. In 1959 New York City announced a “slum clearance plan” by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working-class and immigrant families and dozens of businesses from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit – not displace – residents, Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee (CSC) and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades, they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with residents, planners, scholars, and elected officials focused on the power of community organizing.
Panelists
Tom Angotti, Professor Emeritus of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Jessica Fielding, Vice-president, shareholder, and organizer of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association II
Marcela Mitaynes, New York Assemblymember
Carlina Rivera, New York City Council Member Council District 2
Julie Won, New York City Council Member Council District 25
Moderated by Gabriela Rendón, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development, School of Design Strategies, The New School
(Un)Silent Film Night: Sherlock Junior
Friday, May 5, 2023, 7:30PM to 8:45PM (EDT)
Tishman Auditorium, 63 5th Avenue, New York, NY
The College of Performing Arts is thrilled to present a special (Un)Silent Film Night. Under the baton of Mark Gould, the CoPA Theater Orchestra will perform a live score to Sherlock Junior. The (Un)Silent Film series has been critical in advancing the resurgence of film screenings with live music. (Un)Silent Film Nights have presented the world premieres of works composed for The Birds and The Immigrant (by Nathan Kamal and Alexis Cuadrado respectively), and Charlie Chaplin’s original scores for Gold Rush and other Chaplin classics.
This concert will be live-streamed via YouTube.
A View from the Field: The Visions of Erna Brodber
Saturday, May 13, 2023, 3:00PM to 5:00PM (EDT)
Starr Foundation Hall, 63 5th Avenue, New York, NY
The documentary A View from the Field explores the life’s work and the political era of Jamaican literary laureate, historian, fiction writer, sociologist and community activist Erna Brodber. Brodber, one of Jamaica’s great literary figures of contemporary times, is best known for such novels as Myal and Louisiana, and for a number of historical and sociological studies. She has received the Jamaican Order of Distinction, multiple Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Musgrave Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for her works.
Truth Be Told 16th Annual Documentary Film Festival
Tuesday, May 23, 2023, 7:00PM to 10:00PM (EDT)
Tishman Auditorium, 63 5th Avenue, New York, NY
The Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies is proud to present Truth Be Told, the sixteenth annual festival of original short films made by students in the class of 2023. Each work is the result of a year of intensive study in documentary cinema – production, history, theory, and aesthetics. Hosted by Lana Lin, Director of the Documentary Media Studies Graduate Certificate Program at The New School.
Rite of Passage by Talha Jalal
Screendance by Ruby Dietz
Let’s Not Talk About Politics by Ekaterina Zapletina
Through a Glass Eye by Lola Granger-Jourdan
The screenings will be followed by a faculty-led Q & A with the filmmakers and a light reception.