Installations & Exhibits

CELEBRATING HUDSON YOUTH AND THE COMMUNITY LIBRARY OF VOICE AND SOUND

November 30th - January 15th

From November 30 - January 15, The Flow Chart Foundation presented a three-part installation. Hudson youth took part in a writing workshop by Oral History Summer School and Rebecca Borrer to make poems from oral histories from the Community Library of Voice and Sound. Participants include Olivr Rahman, Kameron Clarke, Rafael Rivera, Jaylon Nelson, Naomi Jackson, Kayla Hopwood, Lance Hopwood, Capri Cash McGriff and Gabe Smart.

The installation consists of a set of Amtrak Poetry placards, up through January 15th; a multi-media Incident Report installation including a scrolling LED, images, objects, and audio installation; and a one-night Tentacle projection from the Hudson Hall opera house as part of the 25th anniversary of Hudson’s Winter Walk.

The Community Library of Voice and Sound aims to preserve the widest possible range of experiences in the Hudson area, to document the communities’ complex history in the words and voices of its participants. The archive is comprised of oral histories conducted by Oral History Summer School students in conversation with residents from Hudson and the surrounding communities, with an emphasis on “everyday life” experiences, past and present. So far, the collection gives voice to themes including: architecture, industrial history, farming, gentrification, racism, civic spaces and institutions (the prison, library, and schools), churches, social clubs, preservation, use of space and small businesses. With this archive, we hope to promote and encourage dialogue, in the collaborative process of interviewing and in the process of sharing the interviews with listeners. We view interviews as opportunities for residents to reflect on their lives/experiences and as opportunities to envision individual and community futures.

The workshop was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Accelerating Promising Practices for Small Libraries grant. The installations were supported in part by Hudson Hall.

AMTRAK POETRY

WINTER 2021

We’ve been installing great poetry in the Hudson, NY Amtrak station (in collaboration with CREATE — Council for Resources to Enrich the Arts, Technology, and Education). Each installation features a set of three placards, which remain on view for two or more months. This latest selection of Amtrak Poetry features a trio of poems from Fence 37, Winter 2021: “ساوى” by Siwar Masannat, “Red Bird” by Elizabeth Robinson and Suzanne Dykman, and “Mundus” by Rodrigo Toscano.

Visit here to explore the entire series.

TENTACLE: We

This March, from March 20-28, The Flow Chart Foundation launched TENTACLE, our public series of pop-up poetry projection interventions, created in partnership with Hudson Hall. We began projecting from an upper floor of The Flow Chart Foundation across the street to the giant Nordic tent of Backbar in Hudson, NY. The series launched with “We,” from the Prague-based poetry and performance collective OBJECT:PARADISE (see details below).

The scrolling text featured a series of statements of hope and solidarity that, in the context of COVID-19 restrictions, could be read either positively or negatively.

Here’s the text:

We keep vacuuming the house. We sold our shoes because we do not need them anymore. We cooked our girlfriend breakfast after she yelled at us. We brush our teeth twice a day as an event. We are excited to go to the store, to eat vegetables. We have found hidden secrets of our homes, our bodies. We have developed habits we are not yet comfortable with. We feel sorry for the delivery driver. We call our mothers and tell them we are sorry for not calling. We wash our hands when we come home. We think about our childhoods and smile. We clean new places in old rooms. We want our friends to call us so we call them. We want to be looked at so we look close at ourselves. We get haircuts in the living room & pay for the inconvenience. We want to be better cooks so we call our mother in-laws. We cry secretly in the other room while our girlfriend sleeps to not wake her. We want to be more creative and we are excited for a moment. We make our beds and are not afraid anymore. We tell each other It is ok. We tell each other we are not alone. Tell each other. Tell ourselves. It is ok. We are not alone. It is ok. We are not alone.

TENTACLE: CORONAVIRUS HAIKU

In May 2021, TENTACLE — our series of pop-up poetry projections on the giant Nordic tent at Backbar, offered in collaboration with Hudson Hall — returned with a selection of haiku by frontline pandemic workers created through the Worker Writers School, which supports writers from one of New York’s most ubiquitous yet least-heard populations: low-wage workers. Mark Nowak, a writer and founding director of the school, presents a selection of haiku written by “frontline workers” during the Covid 19 crisis. The TENTACLE projection launch coincides with the release of Coronavirus Haiku, published by Kenning Editions on the occasion of Worker Writers School’s 10th anniversary year. Copies of the book will be available at our favorite local indie, Spotty Dog Books & Ale.

The poets included had already been studying examples of the form and its connection to political resistance from seventeenth-century Japan to the Black Arts Movement of the twentieth century, as well as its capacity to amplify voices of everyday life. These “coronavirus haiku” convey moments of protest, solace, wonder, certainty, love, and strife. The writers in the collection hail from the school’s worker center partners, including Domestic Workers United, New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Street Vendor Project, and Retail Action Project. The projections for this TENTACLE presentation were realized by Betye Arrastia Nowak. The featured haiku were written by:

Alando McIntyre

Alfreda Small

Christine Lewis

Davidson Garrett

Doreen McGill

Estabon Chimilio

Kelebohile Nkhereanye

Kerl Brooks

Lorraine Garnett

Nimfa Despabiladeras

Paloma Zapata

Seth Goldman

Thomas Barzey

Mark Nowak is a poet, cultural critic, playwright and essayist, from Buffalo, New York. Nowak is the author of three poetry collections: Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009), Shut Up Shut Down(Coffee House Press, 2004), and Revenants (Coffee House Press, 2000). A portion of his critical book, Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020), chronicles his work with the Worker Writers School.

Special thanks to Tyko Say of OBJECT:PARADISE, Hudson Hall and Sage Carter, and Mark Allen of Flow Chart for essential technical support in making this series possible and to Michael Davis Architects for allowing us to project onto their property. We’re delighted to be working with OBJECT:PARADISE and look forward to more projects, both here and there, in the future.

INCIDENT REPORT: “REPORTS”

Incident Report, the storefront display windows of The Flow Chart Foundation (located at 348 Warren Street, in Hudson, NY), offers an interface with the many publics of the street, showcases concepts and issues generated by artists and social thinkers. Incident Report has presented formally arranged projects as well as improvised situations for more than a decade. The current Reports series, launched in 2020, features an LED publication series displaying poetry, notation, transcription, weather reports, manifestos, public address, inventories, event scores, recipes, news, elegies, missives, codes, prayers, instructions, lyrics and more, sometimes paired with art or object installations. Complete details of this ongoing, regularly changing installation can be found here.

INCIDENT REPORT “REPORTS”: Prague Edition

A Transcontinental Collaboration with Object:paradise

In collaboration with the Prague-based poetry and performance collective Object:paradise, a selection of texts from the Incident Report REPORTS project were projected onto a screen viewable from Tower Park there. Beginning on April 11, the projections appeared from 7:30 – 9:00pm for a week at a time (weather permitting). The exact location was Ondříčkova 2385/32, 130 00 Vinohrady, Czech Republic. The series kicked off with a projected version of Marc Fisher’s “Chest Wound to the Chest” and continued with projected versions of other previous REPORTS LED texts by David Levi-Strauss, AST (Diann Bauer), Norman Douglas, Jason Geistweidt, and Michael Ashkin (full details on each installation HERE).

CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE

CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE is a free, participatory virtual series (taking place via Zoom) features some of our favorite poets leading intimate, virtual group thinking-and-reading-through workshops on single poems. These events were funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

FALL 2021

Featuring poets Harryette Mullen, Juliana Spahr, M. NourbeSe Philip, Pierre Joris, Cole Swensen, and Asiya Wadud (pictured left to right, top to bottom, below).

SPRING 2021

Featuring poets Mónica de la Torre, Eléna Rivera, Carl Phillips, giovanni singleton, Shane McCrae, and Edwin Torres (pictured left to right, top to bottom, below).

TEXT KITCHEN WORKSHOPS

For fall 2021, we’re bringing back the incredibly popular “Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems” Text Kitchen workshop with Lynne Sachs, through which participants create short video poems using only a smartphone and simple editing software (no tech experience required), and a new workshop, “Sequels 101: Writing Through Rewriting,” a poetry writing workshop using source texts to make new poems, with Paul Legault, and “Images In Between Images: writing poetry with photos as points of departure, arrival, or orbit.” with Silvina López Medin.

Each writing/making workshop is limited to a small group of participants and includes sharing work with others in the group.

Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems, with Lynne Sachs—Tuesday, September 14 & Tuesday, September 21st: 6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT)

Sequels 101: Writing Through Rewriting, with Paul Legault—Wednesday, October 6th: 6:00 – 8:30pm (EDT) , Wednesday & Thursday, October 20th & 21st: 6:00 – 8:00pm (EDT)

Images In Between Images: Writing Poetry with Photos as Points of Departure,Arrival, or Orbit, with Sylvina López Medin—Tuesdays, November 16th & 23rd: 6:30 – 8:30pm (EST)

Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs

Monday, September 13

Filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs shared a selection of short films and read selections from her poetry collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press). This free public event preceded an encore presentation of our Text Kitchen workshop—Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems.

On Year by Year: Poems:

“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit.  With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.”  —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre

“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.”  —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady

“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” —Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm

Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.

From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. 

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020.  In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

FRAMES AND STANZAS: Video Poems — with Lynne Sachs

Thursday, June 10 & Thursday, June 17
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT)
on Zoom

We launch a new series of workshops combining writing + other modes of creating/thinking with this two part workshop through which pairs of participants can create video poems using only their phones. More details and registration HERE.

PERFORMANCE

POP-UP SIDEWALK PERFORMANCES AT INCIDENT REPORT

On Friday, July 30th and Saturday, July 31, both at 6PM, artist and musician David Scher and the incomparable interdisciplinary artist Brian Dewan, appeared as The Lichtenberg Figures, performing two early-evening, pop-up impromptu concerts in front of David Scher’s INCIDENT REPORT installation.  Both performances were live-streamed on WGXC radio. Find more info on our INCIDENT REPORT page.

A NIGHT OF NEO BENSHI: Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema Returns

Featuring Davon, Brandon Downing, Michael Gottlieb, Aristilde Kirby, Jeffrey Lependorf, Stephin Merritt, Marianne Shaneen, and Edwin Torres.

Saturday, July 17th, 7PM

Hudson Hall

327 Warren St, Hudson, NY 12534

We returned to historic the Hudson Hall opera house with a new evening of one-of-a-kind neo-benshi fun. “Neo-benshi” is when poets and performers remove the dialogue from movie clips and replace it with their own—singing, dancing, reading right out loud in front of the screen! The evening of re-invented movies plus poetry from North by Northwest and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Gilda and Sissy Boy Slap Party sold out the opera house!. 

Ifetayo Cobbins with Ngounga Badila in an Outdoor Juneteenth Performance

LADIES IN POSITION / MY LITTLE PRAYER

Presented by The Flow Chart Foundation and HI-BEAM

June 19th @3pm — free

Outdoors on the HI-BEAM Stage, parked at 348 Warren St., Hudson, NY

Poet and artist Ifetayo Cobbins performed spoken word, accompanied by Ngounga Badila, on the HI-BEAM stage in front of The Flow Chart Foundation’s INCIDENT REPORT windows. The INCIDENT REPORT windows also featured art and text by Cobbins. HIGH-BEAM is funded by Hudson Tourism Board. Special thanks to Ále Campos for helping us make this special free performance possible!

Discussion & Gatherings

Parallel Movement of the Hands—A Discussion of the New Ashbery Poetry Collection

featuring Kamran Javadizadeh, Emily Skillings, and Rosanne Wasserman, moderated by Mandana Chaffa

July 28, 5PM (EDT)

via Zoom—free

On the occasion of the publication of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (edited by Emily Skillings, Ecco, 2021), on John Ashbery’s birthday, four scholars and poets discuss this momentous publishing release. The panelists will also present some short readings from the book. The audience will be invited to join the discussion.

Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, that showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, from children’s literature, cliffhanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny to the history of early photography.

Mandana Chaffa is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, and Editor and Senior Strategist at Chicago Review of Books. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in several anthologies, as well as in The Ploughshares online, Chicago Review of Books, TriQuarterly, The Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, Jacket2, and elsewhere. She was named a 2021-2022 Emerging Critics Fellow by the National Book Critics Circle. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

Kamran Javadizadeh is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University, where he works on the history of poetry and poetics. He is the author of the forthcoming Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury (Oxford UP), and his articles and essays have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, The Point, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Rosanne Wasserman’s poems appear widely in anthologies and journals, and her books include Apple Perfume, The Lacemakers, No Archive on Earth, Other Selves, and Sonnets from Elizabeth’s, as well as Place du Carousel and Psyche and Amor, collaborations with Eugene Richie, with whom she co-edited John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations. Both Ashbery and A. R. Ammons included her work in Best American Poetry, and as an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she helped create many books and exhibition catalogues.