The Kitchen, a performance space located in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, has announced two new projects for the upcoming 2025 season.
Lisa Alvarado and Gordon Hall will bring their performance installations to the space, while The Kitchen’s first traveling exhibition continues to distribute the organization’s work outside of New York and expand its approach to being “without walls.”
The Kitchen‘s 2025 season will be transformed by these two monumental installation works that become new platforms and frameworks for explorative performance, while simultaneously continue to work 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 Winter/Spring 2025 Season Schedule
Lisa Alvarado: Shape of Artifact Time
The Kitchen at Westbeth | Feb. 27–Apr. 12, 2025 | Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm,
Performances: Feb. 28 and Mar. 1, 2025, 5pm
Opening Reception: Feb. 28, 2025, immediately following the performance
Tickets: $10-30 sliding scale
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.”
Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art at MOCAD
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit | May 2–Aug. 10, 2025 | 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).
Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees
The Kitchen at Westbeth | May 1–31, 2025 | Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10, 2025, 4–6pm
Performances: May 9, 10, 17, 24, and 31
Tickets: 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.
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