Thursday, October 11, 2018

Laurie Anderson to be honoured as one of this year's "Friends of the Arts"



On Sunday October 21, at the Princeton Club, Town Hall will host its 97th Annual Gala, and will honor Laurie Anderson, Charlie Hall and Robert Hurwitz as this year’s "Friends of the Arts".

The event will include a concert, cocktails, dinner, and an awards presentation. Admission to the event is open to Town Hall Sustaining Members, contributors and guests. For more information, visit the website, here.


From the press release:

"One of America’s most renowned and daring creative pioneers. As diverse as she is prolific, Laurie has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. In the early ‘70s, Laurie burst onto the New York avant-garde/music/art/performance scene and quickly acquired a fervent following in the underground arts community. In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention with such counter-culture luminaries as William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. Her recording career took off in 1981, when her song “O Superman” rose to #2 on the British pop music charts, leading to a seven-album deal with Warner Brothers. A deluxe box set of her Warner Brothers output, Talk Normal, was released in the fall of 2000 on Rhino/Warner Archives. The following year, she released her first record for Nonesuch Records, “Life on a String.” A year later, Live in New York, recorded at Town Hall, was released. Laurie has toured the United States and abroad numerous times with shows that range from simple spoken word performances to highly elaborate multimedia events like United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995), and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999-2000), based on the Herman Melville novel.   Her visual work has been presented in major museums in the United States and Europe.

As a composer, Laurie contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme; dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, and Molissa Fenley; a score for Robert LePage’s theater production, Far Side of the Moon; and pieces for National Public Radio, the BBC, and Seville’s Expo ‘92. Laurie is recognized worldwide as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts. In the late ’90s, as a collaborator with Interval Research Corporation—a laboratory founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle—she created the Talking Stick, a six-foot-long MIDI controller that she used in the MobyDick tour. In 2002, she was appointed the first-ever artist-in-residence at NASA, a stint that yielded her 2004 solo piece, The End of the Moon.

In 2007 she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. In 2011, she was awarded Pratt Institute’s Honorary Legends Award. Her Habeas Corpus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in 2016 garnered Yoko Ono’s annual Courage Award for the Arts. Laurie’s film and visual projects include numerous videos, the high definition film Hidden Inside Mountains, a series of audio-visual installations, Heart of a Dog which was an official selection of both the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals and Chalkroom a virtual reality collaboration with Hsin- Chien Huang which received Best VR Experience at the Venice Film Festival 2017. Her virtual reality work is represented in many arts institutions, festivals and in the new wing at MassMoCa. Laurie has performed at The Town Hall over four decades. Laurie originally hails from Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She graduated from Barnard College (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with a B.A. in art history and in 1972, earned an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University. In 2008, she married singer/songwriter/musician Lou Reed, with whom she collaborated on several works. She lives in New York City."

No comments:

Post a Comment