The Steve Circuit by Yuko Otomo & Matt Mottel: CBGB’s Gallery & 6 & B Garden with William Parker & Matthew Shipp

This Summer, 2020, ISSUE and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council present The Steve Circuit, an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist Matt Mottel. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Dalachinsky was an unforgettable fixture within particular strains of experimental music, poetry, and art—and at cultural happenings and gatherings of all kinds in Lower Manhattan and beyond. Dalachinsky was an important figure to many. He passed away September 16th, 2019.

Steve’s art was created in tandem with the public life he lived. The places he inhabited—arts venues, community gardens, the New York Public Library neighborhood branch, his Spring Street sidewalk store—were all part of his daily routine. He was influenced by the culture he witnessed. He created his art both in public and at home. Late at night, in his apartment, after returning from film screenings, art openings, and multiple concerts, he returned to his collage artwork and to type up the poems he had written by hand during the day out in the world.

Over the course of six events throughout the Summer, 2020, these historical sites will be revealed in a weekly online presentation. Each week, videos made by Otomo & Mottel will be streamed pairing Dalachinsky text, recordings, and artwork, with additional artistic collaborators who were part of the Dalachinsky orbit. The online cultural map and presentation will provide a “virtual polaroid snapshot” of Downtown New York’s cultural history.

In addition to Otomo and Mottel, the series will feature contributions from Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon, Andrew Lampert, Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, Tom Surgal & Lin Culbertson, William Parker & Matthew Shipp, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer, and Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille.

Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual poet of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays, travelogues, translates and keeps her cultural journal. She showed her visual work at Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128 and Vision Festival etc. She read at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Bowery Poetry Club, The Stone, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Cornelia St. Café, NYU, and NYPL in NYC and in France, Germany and Japan. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Small Poems (Ugly Ducking Press), The Hand of the Poet (UDP), Cornell Box Poems (Sisyphus Press), PINK (Sisyphus Press), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press), FROZEN HEATWAVE: a collaborative linked poem project with Steve Dalachinsky (Luna Bisonte Prods) and the most recent Anonymous Landscape (Lithic Press). She lives in New York City.

Matt Mottel enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures and music. Mottel’s comprehensive artistic foraging stems from his native New York upbringing. ‘Moonlight University’ was in session, with Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo, who he first encountered as a teenager on the downtown new york scene in the late 90’s. In 2010, Mottel was selected by the late ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiole as an Artist in Residence, and it was in this period that he developed an ongoing multimedia project that utilizes the cultural photography of his father, Syeus Mottel. He is currently researching the 18th century era of the keytar and is also inspired by the 24 hour format that was HnH Bagels…. ‘it's everything.’

William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City, heralded by The Village Voice as, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time.” In addition to recording over 150 albums, he has published six books and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. Parker’s current bands include the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, In Order to Survive, Raining on the Moon, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, and the Cosmic Mountain Quartet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore. Throughout his career he has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Milford Graves, and David S. Ware, among others.

With his unique and recognizable style, pianist Matthew Shipp worked and recorded vigorously from the late ’80s onward, creating music in which free jazz and modern classical intertwined. He first became well known in the early ’90s as the pianist in the David S. Ware Quartet, and soon began leading his own dates – most often including Ware bandmate and leading bassist William Parker – and recording a number of duets with a variety of musicians, from the legendary Roscoe Mitchell to violinist Mat Maneri, the latter another musician who began making a name for himself in the ’90s. Through his range of live and recorded performances and unswerving individual development, Shipp has come to be regarded as a prolific and respected voice in creative music into the new millennium.