Bassist and composer James Ilgenfritz (2011 AIR) returns to ISSUE, joined by Joe McPhee and AC Diamond for their first performance as a trio. This event marks a new shared context for three artists deeply invested in improvisation as a mode of inquiry.
ISSUE presents the premiere of three audiovisual compositions by Matt Mottel (2010 AIR). These works bring Mottel’s distinct artistic sensibility into dialogue with formative figures in his life and in New York’s avant-garde, tracing a lineage that is both deeply personal and central to ISSUE’s history.
Monarch Butterfly by rocío sánchez (2026 AIR) features Melissa Almaguer (tap dance and percussion) and Kenneth Jiménez (double bass). Together, the trio explores the elusive monarch’s migratory journey through sound and movement, with each instrument articulating distinct states of motion.
Isabella Thorpe-Woods presents "Envelop/e," her second program as ISSUE’s 2026 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Bringing together choreographers Jade Manns and Ella Dawn W-S for site-specific duets, they navigate presence and absence, repetition and rupture, and the tension between inherited geometries and shifting landscapes.
"Spiriting Off" is a new solo work by luthier Webb Crawford (2026 AIR) for electric guitar, tenor banjo, and five-string banjo.
ISSUE closes the summer season with the return of Matana Roberts (2009 AIR). Opening the evening, Ben Vida (2013 AIR) will perform music from his 2026 release, "Oblivion Seekers" with vocalist Sara Magenheimer.
Rena Anakwe continues her residency with Fast Forward to Silence, an immersive sound and body collage that honors the air around us. Focusing on sequences shifting between the minute and the rigorous, the piece explores the duality that air possesses through a duet with Jonathan González + lighting from Kelley Shih.
2019 Artist-In-Residence Charmaine Lee premieres “Laminals II”, the second movement for a new long-form piece for solo voice. The evening also features a duo with Victoria highlighting their individual practices of physicality (of voice, body, and technology) in relation to performance and sound.
Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship 2019
2019 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Benedict Nguyen presents very peak summer solstice (vpss), featuring Fana Fraser, Jasmine Gibson, Annie Heath, and Sokunthary Svay. This is their second program in soft bodies in hard places, a platform of trans-disciplinary events circling planetary events over 2019.
ISSUE presents the debut NYC collaborative performance from Jennifer Walshe and San Francisco-based musician & composer Wobbly (Jon Leidecker). The artists perform solo & collaborative works ranging across their shared interest in the idiosyncrasies of digital sound and the outer reaches of online culture.
DeForrest Brown Jr. curates “Okonkwo Weeps In Exile,” a new rhythmic opera featuring producer Nicholas Dawson (Bookworms), drummer Donald Sturge Anthony Mckenzie II, poet and "enlightened educator" Rafael Sanchez, with text from Guerilla essayist His Triumphant Blackness: The Negro Subversive.
Philosopher and musician Henry Flynt performs Everlovin’ Game On, an evocation of his best-known work: You Are My Everlovin’. Featuring solo electric violin & pre-recorded tambura, the piece brings together disparate vernaculars: Southern blues, modal jazz, Appalachian fiddle & North Indian raga.
Red Bull Arts NY and ISSUE co-present two live audio-visual performances organized in response to Gretchen Bender’s unfinished work of media theater, which was to be entitled So Much Deathless, by post-industrial band Black Rain (with Philip Vanderhyden) & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (with Sean Hellfritsch).
