Event

Outlooks  artist  Martha Tuttle and poet Gabriel Kruis invite you to a live performance by The HawtPlates and JJJJJerome Ellis which will be located at Tuttle’s site-specific installation at Storm King,  A stone that thinks of Enceladus.  

This program is free with admission to Storm King. Advanced tickets are required for all visitors (including Members). To arrive on time for the performance, we recommend purchasing tickets for a 2PM, 3PM, or 4PM timeslot. Check stormking.org/tickets to reserve.

 This program is part of Wanderings & Wonderings, which invites artists to share new and imaginative perspectives on Storm King.  

Bio/ About: 

More a performance trio than a band, The HawtPlates make conceptual vocal works by breaking down folk and vernacular musical forms and reconstituting them into other modes of performance. In hearing their work, there is a sense that the music is specific to them as a family, and that it can only be made by them. While they maintain that it is “soul music” to which they are true, they employ highly improvisational means, as well as their own sagacious formulas, to concoct curatives to the symptoms and traumas of being working-class citizens in the modern world.  By amassing a pantry of sights, persons, and places, they produce potent tonics and “one pots” hearkening the spirit of the family heirloom recipe. 

Together and individually, The HawtPlates have served as muses of sorts to various artists such as Meshell Ndegeocello, Abigail DeVille, Kaneza Schaal, Charlotte Brathwaite, and have collaborated with the likes of Ahrens and Flaherty, Helga Davis, Cauleen Smith, Steffani Jemison, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and The D.R.E.A.M. Ring, Lynn Nottage, Queen Esther and The Harlem Gospel Singers, National Black Theater, The Guthrie Theater, The Public Theater, Performance Space New York, Bruce Weber, and The Park Avenue Armory to name a few. 

JJJJJerome Ellis is a blk disabled animal, stutterer, and artist. Through music, literature, performance, and video, he explores blkness, disabled speech, and music as forces of refusal, possibility, reparation, and healing. His diverse body of work includes contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure historical archives. JJJJJerome’s solo and collaborative work has been presented by Lincoln Center, The Poetry Project, and ISSUE Project Room (New York); MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts); REDCAT (Los Angeles); Arraymusic (Toronto); and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), among others. He is a signed artist with NNA Tapes. His work has been covered by This American Life, Artforum, Black Enso, and Christian Science Monitor. JJJJJerome collaborates with James Harrison Monaco as James & Jerome or Jerome & James. Their recent work explores themes of border crossing and translation through music-driven narratives. They have received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.

Martha Tuttle, a multidisciplinary artist born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has shown her work throughout the U.S. and abroad. Natural materials of wool, silk, and dye are worked by hand, each resulting piece having undergone an immaterial transfer of energy through Tuttle’s physical and meditative touch. The artist’s relationship to materiality is revealed further by the inclusion of small “stones,” both actual and cast polished metal, and of fabricated steel weights. These elements add another layer of visual incident and mark-making, to further open a dialogue of possibility and substance, light and weight. Overall, the unification of immaterial energy with material form results in constructed canvases and loosely hanging paintings that vibrate with a felt, unseen force.  

Gabriel Kruis
Gabriel Kruis is a poet and educator living and writing in Brooklyn. He is cofounder and Development Director of Wendy’s Subway Reading Room and his work has been published in A Perfect Vacuum, PEN America Poetry Series, OmniVerse, The Brooklyn Rail, Atlas Review, Frontier Poetry, among others. He holds an MFA from Hunter College, was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center 2018-19, and his debut collection of poems, Acid Virga, is forthcoming in the fall from Archway Editions. 

Outlooks: Martha Tuttle is made possible by generous lead support from the Ohnell Charitable Lead Trust. Support is also provided by Roberta and Steven Denning. Artist Talks are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.