IMAGINARY FRIENDS
Alexandra Ripp and Daniel Sack, Odradek ProjectsJune 22 - 28
SPECIAL EVENTS
TUE June 23, 4-6pm • Opening reception
GALLERY OPEN HOURS
WED June 24 - FRI June 27, 12-6pm
SAT June 27, 10am-4pm
Imaginary Friends is a multi-day gallery installation with accompanying programming for all ages that fosters rigorous experimental arts collaboration between parents and their children. The represented projects, which span media, have been co-created by local artist-parents—and one grandparent—and their children (ages 1-12), led by child collaborators’ imagination and play.
The project seeks to challenge the binary between “kids” and “adult” art, and explore new modes of intergenerational artistic collaboration. Taking seriously the creative potential of children’s play, the artists use their children’s imagination and play as the prime source for collaborative experimental art practice. The children involved range in age from 1 to 12 years. Media represented include textile, sculpture, film, participatory art, and installation, with additional offerings still unfolding.
The inaugural cohort of artists features Hallie Bahn, Christina Balch & Nora De La Cour, Lisa Iglesias & Bodhild Iglesias, Sarah Marcus, Lucia Monge, Katie Richardson, Daniel Sack, Dante Sepúlveda & Aleksandra Ponomareva, and Marianna Dixon Williams & Amy Nicole Buckley. Additional artist participants will be announced in the coming weeks.
CURATOR/ARTIST BIOS
Alexandra Ripp is an arts administrator, dramaturg, translator, and producer. She has held positions at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Carolina Performing Arts, Theater Magazine, and Five College Dance. She has worked with performing artists such as nora chipaumire, Deborah Goffe, Culture Mill, Ant Hampton, and 600 Highwaymen, and with institutions such as the UMass Fine Arts Center, the Mount Holyoke Art Museum, and the Black Feminist Film School. She is currently an arts development consultant for Surala Consulting and producer for Spirits Go Blah, a theater company dedicated to developing the work of composer/playwright César Alvarez and visual artist Emily Orling. She holds an MFA and DFA in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.Daniel Sack is a writer and educator with a background in performance making. He has published five books on contemporary performance, including most recently, Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying, a semi-autobiographical investigation into how we cry in the theatre, and (with Bonnie Marranca) The Theatre of Drawing, which gathers drawings by forty-two performance makers and asks them to reflect on how the practice figures into their artistic process. He is the editor of the book and online journal Imagined Theatres, featuring impossible or improbable performance works by several hundred artists from around the world that test the limits of the stage. He holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of English and the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst.
Imaginary Friends is funded in part by a grant from the Northampton Arts Council, the South Hadley Cultural Council, and the Hadley Cultural Council, local agencies which are supported by Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
photo by Alexandra Ripp, Daniel Sack, and Thalia Sack