The tales of huge windows and wide-open lofts bringing a community of Abstract Expressionist painters to the Bowery are an integral part of this neighborhood’s history. In contrast, Rancid Nourishment intends to explore the reasons that artists working in less traditional mediums have come to the Bowery. Four artists—filmmaker Roddy Bogawa, conceptual artist Sandy Gellis, video artist Paul Tschinkel, and digital artist Annette Weintraub—will engage in a conversation about the unique ways in which the Bowery has impacted their work and how recent changes in the neighborhood have affected this relationship.

Roddy Bogawa has lived and worked on the Bowery since 1993. His work is distinguished by its lyrical lo-fi means and unorthodox narrative structures, and has engaged such diverse topics as assimilation, the genesis of the punk movement, and dystopian futures. The Festival Choice Award of the New York Underground Film Festival was given to Bogawa’s third feature I Was Born, But… and his work is a part of the film collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Moderna Museet.

Sandy Gellis has lived and worked on Bond Street (at Bowery) since 1970. Her public art installations engage scientific and personal studies of earth, air, and water in order to comment on the impermanent state of nature through the permanence of the art object. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Museum of Natural History, and the Library of Congress.

Paul Tschinkel first moved to the Bowery in the mid-1960s to pursue a career in painting. Soon after his arrival he turned to video as his primary medium, and in 1974 he became the first artist to produce a weekly program on New York cable access. In 1979 he founded ART/new york, a video series on contemporary art, which now numbers more than sixty programs and has been screened at the Carnegie International, the Museum of Modern Art, and in France, Germany, and Japan.

Annette Weintraub has lived and worked on Bond Street since 1974. She is a media artist whose work is an investigation of architecture as visual language; her projects explore the dynamics of urban space, the intrusion of media into public space, and the symbolism of space. Her projects have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, and at the ICP International Film Festival, Rotterdam.

Banner image:
Roddy Bogawa, film still from Some Divine Wind (detail), 1991