Featured Event
DEMO2024
06/05/2024
11AM
New Museum Block Party 2012
Join the New Museum for the sixth annual Block Party in Sara D. Roosevelt Park! Spend the afternoon participating in hands-on workshops for all ages and enjoying live performances. Afterwards, head over to the New Museum to participate in family-friendly tours of “Ghosts in the Machine,” an exhibition about the shifting relationship between humans, machines, and art.
The New Museum Block Party is free and open to the public. All Block Party guests will receive complimentary admission to the New Museum on the day of the event.
Highlights:
Performances
1:15 p.m. – Chris Giarmo/Boys Don’t Fight
2:00 p.m. – Yvonne Meier
2:45 p.m. – Sxip Shirey
4:00 p.m. – High Priest of Antipop Consortium
Activities
Bowery Poems
Discover the rich history of literature and the Bowery with the Bowery Artist Tribute as you remix and recontextualize poems by artists who have celebrated and lived in this ever-changing neighborhood.
My Mini-Catalogue
Explore past exhibitions, publications, and public programs through images from the New Museum Digital Archive—then collect your favorites in your own exhibition catalogue!
Spinning Op Art
Inspired by the exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine,” discover how artists from the 1960s were inspired by science to develop a new visual language—Op art! Create your own optical illusions with handmade tops and layered drawings.
Reimagining the LES
Explore the history of the Lower East Side through photographs of the renowned neighborhood and its architecture then reconstruct the changing landscape through historical images and collage.
Paper Exercises
Join artist Nicolás Paris in a series of interactive exercises exploring the many ways paper can be transformed then share your creations in a collaborative showcase in Sara D. Roosevelt Park.
Color Play
Find a world of bright beautiful colors as you discover what the world would look like if it were all red, green, or blue!
Free interactive public tours for all ages at the New Museum
12:15 p.m., 1:15 p.m., 2:15 p.m., 3:15 p.m., 4:15 p.m.
Performer bios
Chris Giarmo is an artist and designer living in Brooklyn. He has composed music and sound design for theater companies including Half Straddle, Big Dance Theater, Faye Driscoll, and Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company. Boys Don’t Fight is his new solo music project.
Sxip Shirey is a composer and performer who lives in New York City. Ecstatic melodies, unimaginable sounds, and deep beats are played using industrial flutes, bullhorn harmonicas, regurgitated music box, triple-extended pennywhistles, a miniature hand bell choir, obnoxiophone, glass bowls with red marbles, human beatbox, and a handful of curious objects.
Yvonne Meier is originally from Zurich, Switzerland, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. Here she became a member of the original group around Performance Space 122, regularly collaborating with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson, and many others in the US and Europe. After a life-long commitment to improvisation, she has developed her own improvisation technique known as Scores. The resulting performances range from the absurd to the shockingly somber while actively engaging the audience’s sense of play within a formal context that tests the limits of improvisational scoring.
High Priest is known for “Evoking images of Sun Ra and Afrika Bambatta at once” (Jesse Sewer, XLR8or). As the founding member of the critically acclaimed Antipop Consortium, Priest has consistently challenged the boundaries of traditional hip-hop, winning the praise of tastemakers across the globe.
Sponsors
Volunteer support is made possible through Goldman Sachs Community Team Works.
Special thanks to: 
The New Museum Block Party is also funded, in part, by Con Edison, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and New York State Council on the Arts. Generous endowment support is provided by The Keith Haring Foundation School and Youth Programs Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David and Hermine Heller.