Live! From The Kitchen Archives

Welcome to Live! From The Kitchen Archives, a special installation of archival material and ephemera from throughout The Kitchen’s rich 50+ year history, presented at The Armory Show 2022.

Since this founding in 1971, The Kitchen has been devoted to fostering a community of artists and audiences, offering artists the opportunity to make—and for audiences to engage with—work that pushes the boundaries of artistic disciplines and strengthens meaningful dialogues between the arts and larger culture.

This presentation at The Armory Show kicks off an exciting new chapter for The Kitchen as we embark on a renovation of our home in Chelsea and simultaneously launch a “Without Walls” period including exciting new programming to take place through partnerships and at our new temporary satellite space. Now more than ever, we are thrilled to celebrate the past, present, and future of the avant-garde. We invite you to explore this history and join us in making experimental art possible.

Click through to our newly launched digital guide to Kitchen programming on the Bloomberg Connects App for more about The Kitchen and the history on display in the Armory booth.

Click through for a checklist detailing the archival material on view in Live! From The Kitchen Archives.

The Armory Show of 1913—from which The Armory Show of today draws its name—was a complex and defining moment for avant-garde and modernist art. A thread spools from that point to when artists Steina and Woody Vasulka founded The Kitchen in New York in 1971, launching a new kind of art institution focused on video and other experimental art forms. ​​ 

The Kitchen is a non-profit institution dedicated to offering artists opportunities throughout their careers to create and present new work. It brings together, under one roof, a singular program of live performance in intersection with contemporary art exhibitions. Since its inception, alongside its mission to champion experimental art, The Kitchen has remained committed to thinking intimately with artists and collaborators about how to narrate, document, and disseminate their diverse practices to shape their work’s future lives and permutations. The records created through this process form the basis of The Kitchen’s archive—a vast and continually growing collection of audiovisual recordings, photographs, posters, calendars, and other printed matter generated and cared for by The Kitchen in dialogue with its creative community. 

As The Kitchen prepares this fall to begin a historic renovation of its current home at 512 West 19th Street in Chelsea, it extends its program beyond its walls. Here at The Armory Show, The Kitchen turns its archive outward to present a selection of live performance recordings made between 1976 and 1986. The recordings were originally released in the “From The Kitchen Archives” album series created in partnership with American composer and pianist Philip Glass’s label Orange Mountain Music between 2004 and 2015. In Live! From The Kitchen Archives, a digital jukebox features a selection of tracks by artists such as George Lewis, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Youth, Steve Reich, and David Tudor that span styles and movements, from experimental music known as “New Music” to jazz, No Wave, and rock.

These recordings are layered into an installation of related print ephemera, creating opportunities to discover connections between The Kitchen’s music programming in the ’70s and ’80s and the other disciplines and eras represented in the institution’s rich archive. A network of visual and conceptual associations emerges, illuminating a history of pioneering artists who defy categorization, and whose contributions to music, dance, design, film, literature, performance, theater, video, and visual art have shaped The Kitchen and expanded “the avant-garde.” The recordings and images here register at different frequencies, illustrating that an archive in active transmission is embodied and felt across time, a living material in constant motion.