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Public Forum Solo with Sarah Lewis, José Rivera, and Carrie Mae Weems April 7

Posted by:	Official_Press_Release 02:19 pm EDT 03/10/14

THE PUBLIC THEATER ANNOUNCES PUBLIC FORUM SOLO SARAH LEWIS: PICTURES AND PROGRESS MONDAY, APRIL 7 Evening Includes Sarah Lewis Discussing Frederick Douglass’ Seminal Lecture Along With Insights From Playwright and Screenwriter José Rivera and Artist and Photographer Carrie Mae Weems The Public Theater (Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis; Executive Director, Patrick Willingham) will continue its Spring Public Forum series with an exciting new Public Forum Solo, SARAH LEWIS: PICTURES AND PROGRESS, on Monday, April 7 at 7:00 p.m. at Joe’s Pub at The Public. Member tickets are on sale now. Single tickets, starting at $25, go on sale Wednesday, March 12 and can be purchased at (212) 967-7555, www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at 425 Lafayette Street. In this one-night-only Public Forum Solo event, Sarah Lewis, cultural historian, curator, and author of the acclaimed new book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, will deliver a talk about Frederick Douglass’s seminal lecture “Pictures and Progress.” It argued that before any social progress is possible, we must be able to imagine what a better world could look like. Then, two of America’s most celebrated and insightful creative talents, the playwright and screenwriter José Rivera and the photographer and visual artist Carrie Mae Weems—who has a major exhibition at the Guggenheim this spring—will join her to discuss what lessons contemporary artists should take from Douglass’s lecture, and how a better world looks to them. “’Do artists make social progress possible?’ It was a great question when Frederick Douglass asked it, and the brilliant Sarah Lewis is the perfect person to renew it for our times,” said Public Forum Director Jeremy McCarter. “I can’t wait to see how she and some of America’s leading artists answer it.” PUBLIC FORUM presents the theater of ideas. This series of conversations that include Public Forum Drama Club, Public Forum Duets, Public Forum Solos, and the Public Forum Podcast feature discussions and performances with leading voices in politics, media, and the arts. Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Cynthia Nixon, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, David Brooks, David Byrne, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, Wynton Marsalis, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Christine Baranski, Matt Damon, Holly Hunter, Wendell Pierce, and Vanessa Redgrave, among others. The next Public Forum this spring will be An Evening With Tevye and Chava on Monday, March 17, inspired by Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders, a new cultural history of Fiddler on the Roof, featuring Harvey Fierstein, Sheldon Harnick, Austin Pendleton, Jenny Romaine, and Alisa Solomon. The spring Drama Club season concludes on Sunday, May 18 with a reading and discussion of Susan Glaspell’s timely one-act play, The People, featuring a special cast will be comprised entirely of our leading political journalists, including David Brooks (The New York Times), Christopher Hayes (MSNBC), and many more. SARAH LEWIS has served on President Barack Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, been selected for Oprah’s “Power List,” and is a faculty member at Yale University, School of Art in the MFA program. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, and will receive her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2014. Her book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster, 2014) is a layered, story-driven investigation of how innovation, discovery, and the creative progress are all spurred on by advantages gleaned from the improbable, the unlikely, even failure. Her second book on Frederick Douglass, photography and the Civil War, will be released by Harvard University Press in 2015. She has held positions at both the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is currently a board member of The Andy Warhol for the Visual Arts, the CUNY Graduate Center, and The Brearley School. She lives in New York City. JOSÉ RIVERA’s screenplay, The Motorcycle Diaries, was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2005. His film, On the Road, premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival . Rivera has won two Obie Awards for Marisol and References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot. His additional plays, Cloud Tectonics, Boleros for the Disenchanted, Sueño, Sonnets for an Old Century, School of the Americas, Massacre (Sing to Your Children), Brainpeople, The House of Ramon Iglesia, and Adoration of the Old Woman have been produced in theatres across the country. The film Celestina, based on his play Cloud Tectonics, will mark his debut as a feature film director. CARRIE MAE WEEMS earned a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1981), and an M.F.A. from UC San Diego (1984), continuing her studies in the Graduate Program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley (1984–87). With the pitch and timbre of an accomplished storyteller, Weems uses colloquial forms—jokes, songs, rebukes—in photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and expose pernicious stereotypes. Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms: social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans of more than a century. She has received honorary degrees from Colgate University (2007) and California College of the Arts (2001). Awards include the MacArthur Fellowship; Anonymous Was a Woman Award; Skowhegan Medal for Photography; Rome Prize Fellowship; and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography; among others. ABOUT THE PUBLIC THEATER AT ASTOR PLACE Under the leadership of Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Patrick Willingham, The Public Theater is the only theater in New York that produces Shakespeare, the classics, musicals, and contemporary and experimental works in equal measure. The Public continues the work of its visionary founder, Joe Papp, by acting as an advocate for the theater as an essential cultural force, and leading and framing dialogue on some of the most important issues of our day. Creating theater for one of the largest and most diverse audience bases in New York City for nearly 60 years, today the Company engages audiences in a variety of venues—including its landmark downtown home at Astor Place, which houses five theaters and Joe’s Pub; the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, home to its beloved, free Shakespeare in the Park; and the Mobile Unit, which tours Shakespearean and other classic productions for underserved audiences throughout New York City’s five boroughs. The Public’s wide range of programming includes free Shakespeare in the Park, the bedrock of the Company’s dedication to making theater accessible to all, new and experimental stagings at The Public at Astor Place, and a range of artist and audience development initiatives including its Public Forum series, which brings together theater artists and professionals from a variety of disciplines for discussions that shed light on social issues explored in Public productions. The Public Theater is located on property owned by the City of New York and receives annual support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and in October 2012 the landmark building downtown at Astor Place was revitalized to physically manifest the Company’s core mission of sparking new dialogues and increasing accessibility for artists and audiences, by dramatically opening up the building to the street and community, and transforming the lobby into a public piazza for artists, students, and audiences. Key elements of the revitalization included infrastructure updates to the 158-year old building, including changes to the main entry, expanded lobby, additional restrooms, and the addition of a new lounge, The Library at The Public, designed by the Rockwell Group. The LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust provides leadership support for The Public Theater’s year-round activities. www.publictheater.org

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