Exhibition Dates: May 3 - 15, 2024

Open daily* Mon - Sun, 12-6pm

*by appointment only on May 6, 7, and 13

Press Opening: Thursday, May 2nd, 3pm-6pm

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 2nd, 6-9pm

Special performance event Jo Andres: Liquid TV Saturday, May 11th, 7:30pm

Closing Reception: Wednesday, May 15th, 6-9pm

The OLD SCHOOL

32 Prince Street

New York, NY, 10012

Curated by Stephanie Acosta, Laurie Berg, and Christina Massey 

Produced by Anna Adams Stark 

Production Support by the HandyQueers 

Artworks courtesy of the Jo Andres Archive and Estate 

Presented by the Jo Andres Archive + SPRING/BREAK Art Show 

Jo Andres was a visionary artist, filmmaker and choreographer working in the downtown New York scene in the 1980’s/90’s and later in Brooklyn until her passing in 2019. Andres created interdisciplinary performances, films, and studio works that tackled the magical, symbolic and ephemeral. 

In this 2 floor exhibition titled Before Your Eyes, a compelling selection from the artists' archive brings together multiple bodies of her work spanning over 40 years. Guests are invited to reflect and discover the multiple through lines of Andres' work.

The exhibition takes place at The OLD SCHOOL, the original home of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, located at 32 Prince Street in NoLiTa, Manhattan. The location highlights the collaborative nature of Andres’ wide body of work, whose decades-long collaborations with fellow Downtown New Yorkers like DANCENOISE, Mimi Goese of Hugo Largo, Tom Murrin and her partner, actor and director Steve Buscemi, all fit the neighborhood focus of the Prince Street space.

For this exhibition, SPRING/BREAK Art Show and the Jo Andres Archive present a solo exhibition of Andres’ work which delved heavily into symbolism and the iconography of nature, spiritualism, religion, and the divine feminine. The multi-room space allows for contemplative moments between the various stages of her career where repeated symbols, themes, and techniques can be observed.

The vibrant east village scene of the 80s/90s set the stage for her early career, focusing on a melding of dance, punk, music and experimental theater. The exhibition highlights this self described “perceptual mischief” aesthetic through a curated series of projections and rarely seen performance documentation.

There is a particular alchemy in Andre’s work. Transforming an object the size of a penny into a large scale photographic portrait. Then transformed once again via a 150 year old photographic process to create a deep blue cyanotype. Andre’s work buzzes like just the right crystal in your hand. You can feel the movement through the illusion of stillness. It invites you to slow down, relax your mind and enter a liminal space between knowing and naming.

Before Your Eyes showcases the long career and narrative of an immensely creative spirit as she navigated life as a multidisciplinary artist and mother, the technological changes that completely changed in her field. Evoking dusk, Andres creates a sense of the nonlinear nature that both dissolves time and simultaneously captures a fading moment. 

This exhibition is a SPRING/BREAK ‘Secret Show’ following the success of past programs curated by or featuring the work of neighborhood cultural figures like producer Arielle de St. Phalle, LES artist and photographer Toyo Tsuchiya, filmmaker Sara Driver, writer Luc Sante, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, artist/filmmaker Noah Kloster and more. 

The first iteration of this exhibition showed at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2023 in Manhattan last fall, featured in Artnet news by Sarah Cascone.

About the Artist: Jo Andres

Jo Andres (1954-2019) first became known on the kinetic downtown New York performance scene of the 1980s for her film/dance/light performances, shown at the reigning venues of the era, among them The Performing Garage, La Mama E.T.C., P.S. 122, St. Marks Danspace, and the Collective for Living Cinema.

Andres was a dance consultant to the acclaimed experimental theater company, The Wooster Group. She had been an artist in residence at leading universities, museums and art colonies, including Yaddo and The Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. 

Andres directed music and art videos, as well as her own film performance works including the 1996 award-winning film, Black Kites, which aired on PBS, RAI Italian TV and screened in Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, London and Human Rights Watch Film Festivals. She also directed music videos for musicians such as Diana Krall and Mimi Goese of Hugo Largo.

About the Curatorial Team

The curatorial team is a collaborative group of artists and art workers who connect to Jo Andres in various ways, by working with her directly, through artistic lineages, and who are sincerely invested in her work and making sure that Jo’s work continues to be part of the conversation. 

“We are battling the erasure of multi-disciplinary makers who work both at the foreground and the edge, who are often omitted in the framing of art movements and histories, and who changed the forms they touched. Protecting the legacies of artists who are hard to categorize is key to the future generations of radical makers. We need to see ourselves.”  -  Stephanie Acosta

The curatorial team is: Christina Massey, a visual artist and independent curator, worked closely with Jo on her studio practice for nearly 8 years. Laurie Berg, a dance artist, curator and organizer, worked with Jo to initiate the creation of her archive in 2015  and is the director of Before Your Eyes Inc. Stephanie Acosta joined the team as an experimental archivist and is a multidisciplinary artist interested in lost legacies. 

About the producers: Anna Adams Stark, a producer and performer, produced the first iteration of the Jo Andres exhibition as part of SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2023. HandyQueers has been the day job and business project of performers / creatrixes lily gold and opal ingle since 2018. 

“There were countless days working with Jo where she and I ended up with tears in our eyes due to laughter. While putting together this exhibition, it was very important to us to make sure that the themes that prevailed through Jo’s work over the years were represented, but to also make sure her unique sense of humor also had moments to shine.”  -  Christina Massey

About SPRING/BREAK Art Show:

SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York City and Los Angeles’ curator-driven art fair, resumes its mission to offer free and low-cost exhibition space in order to foster exploratory exhibitions in atypical art environments. By keeping overhead costs for independent curators low, their focus can be on emerging and mid-career artists, as well as installation, performance, interactive and video work. www.springbreakartshow.com

About the Jo Andres Archive:

The archive for Jo Andres consists of film, posters, objects, cyanotypes, paintings in addition to meticulous notes, programs, photographs, slides and more used by the artist over the course of her 40 year career. Before Your Eyes is a 501c3 that Andres created in 1988 and serves currently as the archiving organization for her work. The archive is seeking permanent placement for Andres’ work through both establishments that can handle the delicate nature of film technology and individual collections for her artworks.  www.beforeyoureyes.org

Works in the exhibition will be for sale through the SPRING/BREAK website. 

Curatorial/Producer Bios:

Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her practice, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations.  Acosta blends performance with practice-based research, making work in response to, while also creating, site and space.  Acosta works extensively with unseen histories, performance, experimental radio, and film and is currently working on the AUNTS and Jo Andres Archives. Acosta has produced and presented works with and for Museum of Art and Design, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Knockdown Center, Miami Performance International Festival, IN>Time Symposium, the Chicago Park District, the Performance Philosophy conference, and has long time collaborations with many artists including Miguel Gutierrez, Alexis Wilkinson, Isaac Pool, and Alexa Grae. stephanieacosta.org @wakingstphanie

Laurie Berg creates performances that feel like living collages. Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, Roulette Intermedium, Times Square Arts, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, Beach Sessions Dance Series, and Movement Research among others. Berg was a 2020-2021 Movement Research Parent Artist Resident supported by The Sustainable Arts Foundation, a 2016-17 LMCC Workspace Artist-In-Residence, the 2016 recipient of the Tom Murrin Performance Award, a 2013 New York Live Arts Studio Series Artist and a 2010 Movement Research Artist-In-Residence. Berg was co-organizer of the performance platform AUNTS (2009-2021), and is now working on an AUNTS archive. Berg is the director of the nonprofit organization Before Your Eyes, Inc. lauriemberg.com @lbergyberg

Christina Massey is a mixed media artist and independent curator who worked for Andres between 2009 - 2015. Her practice spans sculpture to painting and installation, centering on issues that concern the environment and consumer waste. Massey’s work has won several awards including a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, Brooklyn Arts Fund Grants, an FST StudioProject Fund Grant, SIP Fellowship at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and a Puffin Foundation Grant. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Art Cake, with exhibitions on view at the MOCA-LI and MAPSpace gallery. Massey is the founder of WoArt, a platform highlighting the work of contemporary female identifying artists. Her independent curatorial projects have shown at such locations as the Court Tree Collective, C24 Gallery, Pelham Art Center, BioBAT Artspace, Space776 Gallery and the Hunterdon Museum. 

Since 2018, HandyQueers has been the day job and business project of performers / creatrixes lily gold and opal ingle, who live and work with the occupied lands of the Munsee Lenape, Mohican, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. lily’s choreographic projects straddle the spiritual and material realms, and currently involve floor-to-ceiling looms and her mother. lily is also a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, working toward weaving an intact culture where everyone’s dignity and self-determination is honored. In addition to making art, dance, collaborative performance and queer family, some of opal’s current creative practices include communing with trees, growing and arranging flowers and writing queer speculative fiction. 

handyqueers.com // lilysgold.com

Anna Adams Stark is a performer, administrator, producer, and stage manager based in NYC. As a performer she has worked with Kim Brandt, Walter Dundervill & iki nakagawa, Londs Reuter, Laurie Berg & Bessie McDonough-Thayer, Ivy Baldwin Dance, Levi Gonzalez, Tara Aisha Willis, among others. Anna produced the Jo Andres: DREAMING OUT LOUD exhibit at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in September 2023. She has recently stage-managed for the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble, Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers, and at Harlem Stage. Anna was a founding producer of RoofTop Dance (2010-2013) and ROVE (2014). She worked in the Production Department at Dance New Amsterdam from 2009-2013 and was a member of the staff at Movement Research from 2014-2023. Anna was raised in Normal, IL and received her BFA in Dance from the University of Iowa.