(New York, NY, September 27, 2010) Beginning on October 27, New York City Opera will present Parallel Perceptions, a contemporary art exhibition that features the works of six visual artists that have been paired with productions from City Opera’s 2010-11 season, including Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place; Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo; Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love; three one-act operas (Monodramas) by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg, and Morton Feldman; and Stephen Schwartz’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon.  Curated by accomplished artist and photo editor Naomi Ben-Shahar, the exhibition will take place during the fall and spring seasons and includes a series of additional paintings, sculptures, and photographs by Charles Ray, Pipilotti Rist, Tina Barney, Isaac Julian, Dash Snow and Kehinde Wiley.

 

The fall exhibition will be accessible to ticket holders from October 27 through November 21 in the David H. Koch Theater, featuring additional works by Kehinde Wiley, Tina Barney, and Charles Ray.  A free public viewing will be held on Wednesday, November 3 from 6 to 9pm.

 

The exhibition will return in the spring, this time featuring additional works by Isaac Julian, Pipilotti Rist, and Dash Snow.

 

“The visual arts are central to City Opera’s mission to serve as a meeting place for all the arts. Opera needs artists from every discipline to redefine what it is and what it can be,” said City Opera General Manager and Artistic Director George Steel.

Untitled Sculpture, 1997. At a salvage yard, Ray purchased a vehicle that had been involved in a fatal crash. Made by pure chance, the form was created by speed and impact, through the collision of material, space, and time. After dismantling the wreckage and casting each piece in fiberglass, he rebuilt it as one would a hobby kit. The color lends a flatness and stillness despite the violence of the incident that produced the original. Haunting and silent, Untitled Sculpture is a frozen memory of a dramatic life changing           event, dissected and revealed to the public eye. Leonard Bernstein’s final stage work, A Quiet Place, examines the impact of a similar catastrophe on the lives of an entire family. 

Homo Sapiens, 2005. Addressing themes of gender and feminine sensibility, Rist’s Homo Sapiens captures a young woman in a moment of introspection. She is sprinkled with grass clippings, alluding to her environment and her connection to nature. Although her gaze seems to be cast toward the viewer, her expression shows that she is searching within herself. In much the same way, Monodramas explores realms of the subconscious made visible in these groundbreaking pieces of work.  

 

The Brocade Walls, 2003. Barney’s photography captures a vanishing world of upper-class Anglo-American life within a closed society, revealing private moments to the viewer, often focusing on the tension between appearance and reality. The Brocade Walls is at once an intimate and candid slice of life. The subjects, like Richard Strauss’s characters in the lighthearted opera Intermezzo—a renowned conductor and his hotheaded wife— are both distinguished and comical. At the time it was written, Intermezzo exemplified a new genre of opera that celebrated everyday — even bourgeois — scenes like the one captured in amber in Barney’s photograph.

Love, 2003. Preoccupied with questions of history, memory, and displacement, Julien’s photography and film installations speak to topics of race, class, culture, desire, and memory, either bringing people together or setting them apart. His image evokes the overwhelming force of love, which inspires the timid hero in Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love to overcome barriers and win the object of his desire.

 

Untitled, 2007. Snow’s photograph suggests a sense of loss, a connection with the supernatural, fragments of memory, and hopeful vigilance, all key elements in Schwartz’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Himself an unschooled, self-made artist obsessed with notoriety, Snow catapulted into the spotlight of the New York art scene with his rebellious antics.  Both his body of work and his career reflect a burning desire for recognition shared by the opera’s ambitious psychic. 

Portrait of Andries Stilte, 2005. Referencing imagery from the streets of Harlem and  other urban centers, Wiley is a master of updating time-honored medium and subject matter. His larger-than-life figures blur the boundaries of traditional and contemporary modes of representation, creating new rules in the context of portraiture and historical painting.  His portrait captures perfectly New York City Opera’s role of infusing traditional  grand opera with New York swagger. 

 

Charles Ray was born in 1953 and is widely regarded as one of the most significant artists of his generation. He is best known for his sculptures of altered and refashioned familiar objects. In 1993 Ray made Firetruck, a 12-by-47-feet replica of a toy fire truck, which he "parked" in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art during that year's biennial exhibition. In 2007 the artist completed a ten-year project—a re-creation in Japanese cypress (Hinoki) of a fallen and rotting tree he had found in a meadow, hand carved by Japanese master woodworkers. Most recently, Ray installed Boy with Frog, his first outdoor commissioned work, at the Punta della Dogana, Venice. Grand in size and realized with a smooth white finish that references the important tradition of marble sculpture in Italy, it depicts a boy holding a goliath frog above the Grand Canal. Ray has exhibited at Documenta IX (1992), Venice Biennales in 1993 and 2003, and four Whitney Biennials, and he has had one-person museum exhibitions in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Berne, Vienna, and Oslo, among other cities. Ray lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

Pipilotti Rist was born in 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland. She studied graphic design, illustration and photography at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna, as well as audiovisual communications and video at the School of Design in Basel. After working as a graphic designer in her native Switzerland, Rist gained a following in the mid-1980s as a member of the experimental post-punk pop group Les Reines Prochaines, for which she made some of her earliest video works. Rist's burgeoning interests in all forms of electronic media production made her well suited for the wave of video installation that emerged in the art world of the early 1990s. Over the next ten years, she developed a video aesthetic that takes its cues from television and advertising, as well as from a rich history of feminist video work. The results have been successful and influential; Rist has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary video art, crafting a body of work that explores the intersection of sexuality, technology, and pop culture through playful and provocative remixes of fantasy and the everyday. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fundació Juan Miró, Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York; AROS - Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Museo Nacinal de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Musee des Beaux Arts, Montreal; Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others. She has been in numerous international group exhibitions, at venues including the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; New Museum, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Guggenheim Museum, New York amd Bilbao; P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; and Venice Biennale; among many others. Rist lives in Los Angeles, CA, and Zurich, Switzerland, and teaches at the University of California/Los Angeles (UCLA).

Tina Barney was born in New York City in 1945. In 1971, she began collecting photographs, and from collecting she moved to the study of photography. Barney is best known for her ongoing documentation of the lifestyles and relationships of her family and close friends, many of whom belong to the social elite of New York and New England. Barney’s style is part candid, part tableau; her subject matter raises in equal measure issues of privilege and the interaction of family members. While striving for the candidness of a snapshot, Barney became one of the first artists working in the 1980s to explore a “directorial” mode of making pictures. Her decision to direct her subjects stems in part from her choice to sacrifice the nimble freedom of a 35 millimeter camera (with which she began her photographic career) for the large format camera’s ability to deliver a more detailed rendering of the trappings of wealth so integral to depicting her subjects and their environment. Her direction ranges from posing her subjects to simply asking them to repeat a spontaneous gesture, and her style of working often includes careful lighting and the help of an assistant. The effect is an unexpectedly intimate access to her subjects. Barney's work is in many public and private photography collections, including George Eastman House in Rochester, The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her work continues to be exhibited both nationally and internationally.  Barney has also had a prolific career shooting editorial work for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph (UK), W Magazine, The Fashion, Vogue Homme, Nest Magazine, and Homme +.  Barney currently lives and works in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

 

Isaac Julien was born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works. After graduating from St. Martin's School of Art in 1984, where he studied painting and fine art film, Isaac Julien founded Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1983–1992), and was a founding member of Normal Films in 1991. Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for his films The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), made in collaboration with Javier de Frutos and Vagabondia (2000), choreographed by Javier de Frutos. Earlier works include Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), Young Soul Rebels (1991) which was awarded the Semaine de la critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year, and the acclaimed poetic documentary Looking for Langston (1989). Isaac Julien was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies and is currently a visiting professor at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also a research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a Trustee of the Serpentine Gallery. Julien was the recipient of both the prestigious MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts (2001) and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award (2002). His work Paradise Omeros was presented as part of Documenta XI in Kassel (2002). In 2003 he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunstfilm Biennale in Cologne for his single screen version of Baltimore and the Aurora Award in 2005. Most recently, he has had solo shows at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2005), MoCA Miami (2005) and the Kerstner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2006).

 

 

Dash Snow was born in 1981 in New York.  He ran away from home and began living on the streets at 13 or 14, where he began taking photographs as a record of places he might not remember the next day.  Largely self taught, his art would eventually include photography, drawing, collage, installation, zines, film and video. But he began, in his teens, as a graffiti artist as part of the Irak Crew using the tag "Sace" or "Sacer." Snow began taking Polaroids of the sex- and drug-fueled young bohemian circles in which he moved, recording his life and times in a style similar to that of his close friend Ryan McGinley and older artists like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. Instances of sex, drug taking, violence and art-world pretentiousness are documented with disarming frankness and honesty, offering insight into the decadent lifestyle associated with young New York City artists and their social circles.  Several of these images were included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.  By then, Mr. Snow had become close with a group of artists that included Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, and Dan Colen, all of whom were experimenting with appropriation, or found-image art in various mediums. He began using newspapers in different ways, making large collages out of headlines and strange, delicate, sexually suggestive pieces that evoked the medium’s Dada origins. Sexuality, violence and life’s fragility were frequent themes in Mr. Snow’s work, but there was also an air of exuberant misbehavior. Snow's collage-based work was characterized by the controversial practice of using his own semen as a material applied to or splashed across newspaper photographs of police officers and other authority figures. Snow exhibited in galleries and museums such as The Royal Academy, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006 Biennial), New York; Rivington Arms, New York; Peres Projects, Berlin and Los Angeles; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Deitch Projects, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; Pergamon Museum, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway.  His works have been acquired by influential collectors such as Charles Saatchi, Anita Zabludowicz, and Dakis Joannou, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Snow was a controversial and somewhat mythical figure of New York’s downtown art scene.  He died of a drug overdose in 2009 in New York City at the age of 27. 

Kehinde Wiley was born in 1977 and has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. 

In his representation of urban, black, and brown men found throughout the world, Wiley’s figurative paintings and sculptures quote historical sources and position young black men within the field of power. His work applies the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth, and prestige to subjects drawn from the urban fabric, using models from the international urban landscapes of Harlem to Mumbai, Senegal to Rio de Janeiro. Wiley’s larger-than-life figures are dressed in everyday clothing representing Western ideals of style yet assume poses found in traditional paintings and sculptures. The artist’s subjects disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary, referencing paintings by Titian and Tiepolo, but also drawing from other styles ranging from the French Rococo to contemporary urban street.  Wiley received his MFA from Yale University in 2001.  Shortly after he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.  His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at the The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Portland Art Museum, OR; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C; Whitney Museum, New York; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tema Celeste, Verona, Italy; The Zabludowicz Collection, London, England; and Marella, Milan, Italy.  His subjects have included players from the World Cup 2010 for Puma and the honorees from the VH1 Hip Hop Honors.  Wiley is a Los Angeles native who currently lives and works in New York.

A Quiet Place
The final stage work of Leonard Bernstein makes its long-awaited New York premiere, in its first performance on any stage in 22 years. The work portrays the estranged members of an American family—mother, father, daughter and gay son–as they reunite at a funeral after twenty years. This story of people adrift in their search for serenity carries forward the characters from Bernstein’s short youthful satire “Trouble in Tahiti” (which he conducted at City Opera in 1958).  Perfectly capturing the jazzy heartbeat of 20^th century America, “Trouble in Tahiti” is incorporated into the second act of A Quiet Place as flashbacks.

Richard Strauss’s lighthearted opera creates domestic comedy out of an incident from the composer’s own marriage. While a renowned conductor is away on tour, his hot-headed wife jumps to conclusions after intercepting a misdirected love note that she believes was meant for her husband.  In crafting the libretto for this rarely-performed work, Strauss championed a new genre of opera in which everyday events become the subject matter. Episodes are set on the ski slopes, at a ball, in a city park, and at a card party, as well as in the intimacy of the couple’s home. This fast-paced series of short vignettes with orchestral interludes is presented in a witty production by director Leon Major. 

The Elixir of Love
In his reimagining of Donizetti’s beloved classic, Jonathan Miller’s production relocates the story to the American Southwest during the 1950s, complete with soda jerks, pompadours, a Ford Fairlane and a dusty roadside diner.  A poor country boy, Nemorino, falls in love with Adina, the most eligible bachelorette in town. He knows he needs to improve his chances with her—and he does it by downing an “Elixir of Love” that a fast-talking salesman assures him will make him irresistible. The potion may or may not be real, but Nemorino ultimately gets his girl.

Monodramas: “La Machine de l’être”, “Erwartung” and  “Neither”
Three women sing at their outer limits, each of them alone on stage with her demons and her angels. None of them has a name; they have left all that behind. They exist in worlds apart, each of those worlds the creation of a major musical innovator.

Carrying the pioneering spirit of Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman into the present day, prolific New York composer John Zorn created “La Machine de l’être”, in which the soprano’s hair-raising trajectory is inspired by the drawings of the visionary theater artist Antonin Artaud. Heard in 2007 at City Opera’s VOX, this wordless monodrama now receives its world stage premiere. 

 

In Arnold Schoenberg’s ground-breaking “Erwartung” (or Expectation), a terrified woman gropes through a dark forest searching for her lover, only to find that the darkness dwells within her. Written in Vienna in 1909 and premiered in 1924, the work now has its New York City Opera premiere.  This quintessential Modernist opera uses fragmented text and atonal musical language to explore perception and the unconscious, registering the shockwaves of fear and the great arcs of desire. The libretto was written by the young doctor Marie Pappenheim, who was likely related to Anna O., subject of one of Freud’s famous case studies.  

 

A 1976 meeting between American composer Morton Feldman and playwright Samuel Beckett yielded “Neither”, a stream-of-consciousness monodrama that investigates altered states of mind and awareness. In Beckett’s only libretto—just eighty-seven words, hovering in a troubled stillness—the protagonist is seeking not her lover but herself, as she moves with the ethereal music through landscapes of memory.  Feldman’s haunting, glacial composition challenges the highest extremes of the soprano range, evoking hypnotic visions and creating an unsettling sense of time and place. This unique work had its premiere in 1977 at the Rome Opera and will receive its first U.S. staging with orchestra at City Opera.    

 

Séance on a Wet Afternoon
City Opera presents the New York premiere of the first opera by Oscar and Grammy-winning composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz, whose previous credits run from Godspell to Wicked and Enchanted. Based on the novel by Mark McShane and its 1964 film noir adaptation, the opera focuses on Myra Foster, a trance medium who involves her passive husband in a plot to kidnap the daughter of a neighboring family. Myra intends to find the girl through psychic communication with her own dead son, and so gain the fame she craves—but the plot goes awry, as her fragile sanity begins to break down. 

 

Imaginative, adventurous, accessible, American and young, New York City Opera was founded with the purpose of making great opera available to a modern, popular audience, and of keeping opera great by maintaining a modern, popular touch. For more than sixty years, since Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established its reputation as “The People’s Opera,” the company has stayed true to its original promise: introducing generation after generation of young singers who are stars in the making, bringing the public exciting new works and compelling, fresh interpretations of classics, acting as a champion for American composers and performers and ensuring that today’s opera, and tomorrow’s, can be a part of everyone’s life. City Opera’s expansive repertoire spans five centuries, from the Baroque operas that have become signature productions to commissioned works by some of today’s most important composers. The company has given its audiences 29 world premieres to date, as well as 61 U.S. or New York premieres. City Opera also helps to generate future repertoire through its annual VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab, presenting free public readings of previously unproduced works performed by City Opera’s soloists, orchestra and chorus.

 

A pioneer in restoring dramatic urgency and theatrical flair to opera performance, City Opera is celebrated for its marriage of first-rate acting and singing, in stagings that bring new insights and new life to the repertoire. An advocate for emerging directors and designers and extraordinary new singers, City Opera is the place where opera engages the heart, the mind and the imagination. And with its innovative programs—such as concert series that explore the non-operatic works of composers represented during the season—City Opera is breaking new ground in the way opera is brought to audiences. Audiences throughout the world have learned to look to New York City Opera as a showcase for young artists. To date, the company has helped launch the careers of more than 3,000 singers, including stars such as José Carreras, Phyllis Curtin, David Daniels, Plácido Domingo, Lauren Flanigan, Elizabeth Futral, Jerry Hadley, Catherine Malfitano, Bejun Mehta, Sherrill Milnes, Samuel Ramey, Gianna Rolandi, Beverly Sills, Norman Treigle, Tatiana Troyanos and Carol Vaness.

 

More than one-quarter of City Opera’s tickets cost $25 or less. City Opera does not just reach a diverse and committed audience by being affordable, but the company also builds tomorrow’s audiences by being a national model in arts education: presenting lectures and workshops, offering family programs and conducting an in-school education program that serves thousands of students each year throughout the New York metropolitan area.

 

City Opera makes its home at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, in the recently renovated David H. Koch Theater. The company is proud to be a part of the world’s greatest campus for the performing arts, and to perform in a landmark Philip Johnson-designed theater with state-of-the-art performance capabilities and comfort.

New York City Opera gratefully acknowledges the following institutions for their leadership support of our 2010-2011 season: The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Estate of Ruth Klotz, Lincoln Center Corporate Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Inc., in memory of Theodore and Caroline Newhouse, and The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation.

 

The 2010-2011 season is made possible, in part, with corporate and public support from Target, American Airlines Official Airline of New York City Opera, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.