Howl! Arts

The Full Moon Show with John PizzaHead Dread
2022-03-18 | NY
Visit Howlarts.org on Friday, March 18, 2022, from 12 AM to 11:59 PM to watch the Full Moon Show!
The Full Moon Show: A Tom Murrin/Alien Comic Invention Presents John Pizza’s Head Dread
I haven’t cut my hair for the whole pandemic. Well, I’ve shaved my beard and trimmed my ear hair. But my head hair, I just let it grow out. Down my back, all long and crispy, swirling it up like a big nest in a bun. Every day like a shield. Tonight though, I’m getting it cut, whether it’s a good idea or not…
John Pizza is a performer, builder, and drawer. He uses trash and thrift-store detritus scrounged in his Brooklyn neighborhood to tell stories and make his shows. He loves the macabre and the mushy sweet. His sculptures are performative, and his performances involve sculptures—an object theatre of weird surprises.

About Tom Murrin and the Full Moon Show
Performance is anything done with purpose and style—Tom Murrin
Howl! Happening is home to the archive of Tom Murrin, aka the Alien Comic and the Godfather of Performance Art. Every full moon—without fail, paid booking or not, in all seasons and whatever the weather—he performed his Luna Macaroona Full Moon Show. When he had a club date that fell on the full moon, he’d wrangle his friends to perform as guests—pushing the careers of such groundbreaking performers as David Cale, David Sedaris, Amy Sedaris, Blue Man Group, Ethyl Eichelberger, Lisa Kron, and many others. When he didn’t have a club date, he performed on the street for passersby, transforming the pedestrian atmosphere with his madness and magic.

Making Personal Mandalas With Ed Woodham
2022-02-25 08:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | NY

Janie Heath &Friends
2022-02-22 20:00, 2022-02-01 20:00 | NY
Every Tuesday in February on Howlarts.org!
February 1, 8, 15, and 22, 2022 at 8 PM
Expect the spontaneity of a party when Howl Arts gives Janie Heath an open channel to introduce her work and that of some of her fascinating friends. Heath hosts the &Friends series every Tuesday in February. Howl’s signature &Friends programs feature weekly shows curated by one notable creator—with the voices, commentary, music, art, films, and writing of friends they work with and admire.
I wish I could give out refreshments through the screen! Seriously, I think of this event like a party. I know Howl viewers are interesting, unconventional, talented people. It is as if I am saying, ‘You remember this person, and you have wanted to meet this person, and you will just love this person, and wait—look who just flew in from out of town!’
—Janie Heath
Like an old-fashioned TV variety show, Heath will showcase writers, musicians, and others who express their own unique qualities through a diverse but contemporary range of work. “The emphasis is on literature, but anything might happen with this crowd,” she says.
Joining her on the program are friends Rhona Bitner, Tom Cole, Maggie Dubris, Leah Hennessey, Wanda Phipps, Kid Congo Powers, Gregg Shapiro, Philip Shelley, and Dana Wachs.
We ask our &Friends resident artists to respond to the question, “What does collaboration mean to you?” Heath said:
Collaboration to me is a bit of shock at this time in my life. It requires me to gingerly crawl out of my cave—my isolated working life as a writer, which has been all the more isolated due to the pandemic. It’s a beautiful shock, and a gift from the very special team at Howl!, which for years has been like a home away from home to me. I get the precious and exciting chance to receive energy and inspiration from some of my many talented friends, and to have the privilege of sharing them with a new and wider audience. I am so grateful for the people I know. I have always thought myself lucky—I love people, but I also love solitude. I want it all! And I want to share it with my friends in Howl TV land.
Photo by Dorothy Shi.
Janie Heath’s writing has been published in Big Bridge, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Boog City, Brink, and Whiskey Tit Journal. An essay she wrote appears in the liner notes for the box-set G Stands for Go-Betweens Volume 2. She worked as a reporter for her hometown daily newspaper before moving to New York in the mid 1970s to get her BFA in film production at New York University. She worked on movies—a rock ’n’ roll-themed feature and a now-cult slasher—before her love of music led her to live in a London squat until she landed a job with an indie record label. She now lives back in New York, writing fiction and giving public readings.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rhona Bitner
Rhona Bitner is a native New Yorker. Her work has been widely shown in the United States and internationally. In the U.S., her work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College; and Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, Beaux Arts, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2020. She is on the faculty of the School of the International Center of Photography in New York.
Tom Cole
Tom Cole is a writer and artist living in the Lower East Side. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Le Petit Versailles, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Oni Gallery, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow, and a 2015 Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. Cole heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions, where he has commissioned new work by Heidi Schreck, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Craig Lucas, Nathan Alan Davis, and Sheila Callaghan, among others. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He has collaborated extensively with Anohni, most recently appearing in She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen.
Maggie Dubris
Maggie Dubris’s latest book, BrokeDown Palace (Subpress), is drawn from her work during the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s as a 911 paramedic in New York City and the hospital—now closed—she worked for. It is currently being adapted into an opera with the creative team of Dubris, composer Andy Teirstein, and choreographer Donald Byrd. She is also the author of Skels (Soft Skull) and Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press), and is a musician (Homer Erotic, Lulu Revue) and sound artist.
Jon Hammer
Jon Hammer is a painter and writer living in New York City. He also plays rhythm guitar in Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Co., arguably East 14th Street’s favorite purveyors of hillbilly boogie.

Leah Hennessey
Leah Hennessey is performer, writer, and filmmaker from the Upper West Side. Most recently, she debuted her film Byron & Shelley: Illuminati Detectives at the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in Geneva, a pilot episode for a show which imagines the romantic poets as undercover agents of the Enlightenment in a science-fiction-weird world. The film is a collaboration with her artistic partner Emily Allan, with whom she has performed the critically acclaimed play Slash at MX Gallery and Joe’s Pub, and Star Odyssey at MoMA PS1. Leah is currently working on her debut solo album, a collection of songs written under the influence of possession by Lord Byron.
Robert Leslie
Robert Leslie is an indie-folk artist known for performing on streets across Europe, North Africa, and New York City. His alluring voice, soaring melodies, dense poetic imagery, and freewheeling approach to life have garnered him a large and loyal following. Born in New York City, raised in London and Amsterdam, Robert left home at a young age and spent two years supporting himself as a traveling street performer, ping-ponging with the seasons between northern Europe and Morocco, finally winding up in Brooklyn. Since arriving stateside he’s made himself a well-known figure in both the venues and streets of New York, and has been featured in the New York Daily News, Time Out, Deli Magazine (voted upcoming artist of the month), and various other blogs and publications. He’s toured across three continents and yodeled his heart out to crowds large and small. Robert’s fourth LP, Halfway Home, is due for release in the spring of 2022, and is his first collaboration with industry heavyweights. Until his ship comes in, you’ll find Robert enjoying a desperate, hand-to-mouth existence in Brooklyn.
Wanda Phipps
Wanda Phipps is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the author of seven books, including the full-length collections Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems, and the recently released Mind Honey. Her poetry has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician, and Bangla. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia, and at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City. She has curated reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and written about the arts for Boog City, Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and others.
Kid “Congo” Powers
Photo by Luz Gallardo
The legendary Kid Congo Powers, the premier voodoo guitarist for seminal sexy swampy bands like Gun Club, Nick Cave and The Cramps, is a restless aesthete. He used his early solo efforts to explore vocals and mix genres. With DRACULA BOOTS, Kid came back to his roots as a crackerjack guitarist playing the primitive music that inspired him; the raw sounds of garage and early Chicano rock. He has written a soon-to-be-published memoir.
Gregg Shapiro
Gregg Shapiro is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming poetry collection Fear of Muses (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2022). Recent and forthcoming lit-mag publications include Exquisite Pandemic, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Impossible Archetype, Red Fern Review, Instant Noodles, Dissonance Magazine, and POETiCA REViEW, as well as the anthologies Moving Images: Poems Inspired by the Movies (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021), This Is What America Looks Like (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2021), and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America (Belt Publishing, 2021). An entertainment journalist whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
Philip Shelley
Photo by Meagan Maguire.
Philip Shelley is co-editor of Whiskey Tit Journal, an offshoot of the Vermont-based independent press, and his writing has been featured in publications including Pitchfork, Sad Girls Club, and Words & Images, and in the Word Portland anthology Ungatherable Things. He came of age as the guitarist and principal songwriter for influential New York City all-teenage art-pop band Student Teachers (recently the subject of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast). The first chapter of his upcoming novel, Willett, received the Andre Dubus Award for short fiction.
Dana Wachs
Dana Wachs is a Brooklyn-based composer and audio engineer who performs under the name Vorhees. She studied cello and electric bass from an early age, and joined the D.C. hardcore group Holy Rollers (Dischord Records) when she was 19. Audio engineering would define the following 20 years of her life while working at Greene St. Recording studio in New York, and then touring the world with St. Vincent, Grizzly Bear, and MGMT among many others. Vorhees’ debut EP, Black Horse Pike, was released in 2016 via Styles Upon Styles (Brooklyn). The EP was written, recorded, and produced by Dana Wachs in her Brooklyn home between tours. February 2019 saw the release of her latest work, Tracks for Movement, a compilation of scores for dance and film. Currently, Dana is in pre-production of her first score for a feature film, Confession, directed by Dayna Hanson (whose directorial credits include HBO’s Room 104 season 1, episode 6, “Voyeurs”).
Title Image by Barbara Lewis-Marco

Impromptu Reading by Edgar Oliver
2022-02-17 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Howl Arts is pleased to present a reading of various works selected by renowned poet and playwright Edgar Oliver.
“Edgar is, without doubt, the greatest raconteur in the world,” says George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth.
Edgar Oliver (b. October 31, 1956) is a legend of the Lower East Side and has lived there since 1977. Oliver made his debut in New York City’s Pyramid Club in the mid 1980s and is a mainstay at La MaMa. He has written at least a dozen plays, including The Poetry Killer, The Ghost of Brooklyn, When She Had Blood Lust, The Master of Monstrosity, I Am a Coffin, My Green Hades, and Chop Off Your Ear. Oliver has published two poetry collections, A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There, Summer, and the novel The Man Who Loved Plants.

Janie Heath &Friends
2022-02-15 20:00 | NY
Every Tuesday in February on Howlarts.org!
February 1, 8, 15, and 22, 2022 at 8 PM
Expect the spontaneity of a party when Howl Arts gives Janie Heath an open channel to introduce her work and that of some of her fascinating friends. Heath hosts the &Friends series every Tuesday in February. Howl’s signature &Friends programs feature weekly shows curated by one notable creator—with the voices, commentary, music, art, films, and writing of friends they work with and admire.
I wish I could give out refreshments through the screen! Seriously, I think of this event like a party. I know Howl viewers are interesting, unconventional, talented people. It is as if I am saying, ‘You remember this person, and you have wanted to meet this person, and you will just love this person, and wait—look who just flew in from out of town!’
—Janie Heath
Like an old-fashioned TV variety show, Heath will showcase writers, musicians, and others who express their own unique qualities through a diverse but contemporary range of work. “The emphasis is on literature, but anything might happen with this crowd,” she says.
Joining her on the program are friends Rhona Bitner, Tom Cole, Maggie Dubris, Leah Hennessey, Wanda Phipps, Kid Congo Powers, Gregg Shapiro, Philip Shelley, and Dana Wachs.
We ask our &Friends resident artists to respond to the question, “What does collaboration mean to you?” Heath said:
Collaboration to me is a bit of shock at this time in my life. It requires me to gingerly crawl out of my cave—my isolated working life as a writer, which has been all the more isolated due to the pandemic. It’s a beautiful shock, and a gift from the very special team at Howl!, which for years has been like a home away from home to me. I get the precious and exciting chance to receive energy and inspiration from some of my many talented friends, and to have the privilege of sharing them with a new and wider audience. I am so grateful for the people I know. I have always thought myself lucky—I love people, but I also love solitude. I want it all! And I want to share it with my friends in Howl TV land.
Photo by Dorothy Shi.
Janie Heath’s writing has been published in Big Bridge, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Boog City, Brink, and Whiskey Tit Journal. An essay she wrote appears in the liner notes for the box-set G Stands for Go-Betweens Volume 2. She worked as a reporter for her hometown daily newspaper before moving to New York in the mid 1970s to get her BFA in film production at New York University. She worked on movies—a rock ’n’ roll-themed feature and a now-cult slasher—before her love of music led her to live in a London squat until she landed a job with an indie record label. She now lives back in New York, writing fiction and giving public readings.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rhona Bitner
Rhona Bitner is a native New Yorker. Her work has been widely shown in the United States and internationally. In the U.S., her work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College; and Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, Beaux Arts, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2020. She is on the faculty of the School of the International Center of Photography in New York.
Tom Cole
Tom Cole is a writer and artist living in the Lower East Side. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Le Petit Versailles, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Oni Gallery, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow, and a 2015 Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. Cole heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions, where he has commissioned new work by Heidi Schreck, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Craig Lucas, Nathan Alan Davis, and Sheila Callaghan, among others. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He has collaborated extensively with Anohni, most recently appearing in She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen.
Maggie Dubris
Maggie Dubris’s latest book, BrokeDown Palace (Subpress), is drawn from her work during the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s as a 911 paramedic in New York City and the hospital—now closed—she worked for. It is currently being adapted into an opera with the creative team of Dubris, composer Andy Teirstein, and choreographer Donald Byrd. She is also the author of Skels (Soft Skull) and Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press), and is a musician (Homer Erotic, Lulu Revue) and sound artist.
Jon Hammer
Jon Hammer is a painter and writer living in New York City. He also plays rhythm guitar in Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Co., arguably East 14th Street’s favorite purveyors of hillbilly boogie.

Leah Hennessey
Leah Hennessey is performer, writer, and filmmaker from the Upper West Side. Most recently, she debuted her film Byron & Shelley: Illuminati Detectives at the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in Geneva, a pilot episode for a show which imagines the romantic poets as undercover agents of the Enlightenment in a science-fiction-weird world. The film is a collaboration with her artistic partner Emily Allan, with whom she has performed the critically acclaimed play Slash at MX Gallery and Joe’s Pub, and Star Odyssey at MoMA PS1. Leah is currently working on her debut solo album, a collection of songs written under the influence of possession by Lord Byron.
Robert Leslie
Robert Leslie is an indie-folk artist known for performing on streets across Europe, North Africa, and New York City. His alluring voice, soaring melodies, dense poetic imagery, and freewheeling approach to life have garnered him a large and loyal following. Born in New York City, raised in London and Amsterdam, Robert left home at a young age and spent two years supporting himself as a traveling street performer, ping-ponging with the seasons between northern Europe and Morocco, finally winding up in Brooklyn. Since arriving stateside he’s made himself a well-known figure in both the venues and streets of New York, and has been featured in the New York Daily News, Time Out, Deli Magazine (voted upcoming artist of the month), and various other blogs and publications. He’s toured across three continents and yodeled his heart out to crowds large and small. Robert’s fourth LP, Halfway Home, is due for release in the spring of 2022, and is his first collaboration with industry heavyweights. Until his ship comes in, you’ll find Robert enjoying a desperate, hand-to-mouth existence in Brooklyn.
Wanda Phipps
Wanda Phipps is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the author of seven books, including the full-length collections Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems, and the recently released Mind Honey. Her poetry has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician, and Bangla. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia, and at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City. She has curated reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and written about the arts for Boog City, Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and others.
Kid “Congo” Powers
Photo by Luz Gallardo
The legendary Kid Congo Powers, the premier voodoo guitarist for seminal sexy swampy bands like Gun Club, Nick Cave and The Cramps, is a restless aesthete. He used his early solo efforts to explore vocals and mix genres. With DRACULA BOOTS, Kid came back to his roots as a crackerjack guitarist playing the primitive music that inspired him; the raw sounds of garage and early Chicano rock. He has written a soon-to-be-published memoir.
Gregg Shapiro
Gregg Shapiro is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming poetry collection Fear of Muses (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2022). Recent and forthcoming lit-mag publications include Exquisite Pandemic, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Impossible Archetype, Red Fern Review, Instant Noodles, Dissonance Magazine, and POETiCA REViEW, as well as the anthologies Moving Images: Poems Inspired by the Movies (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021), This Is What America Looks Like (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2021), and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America (Belt Publishing, 2021). An entertainment journalist whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
Philip Shelley
Photo by Meagan Maguire.
Philip Shelley is co-editor of Whiskey Tit Journal, an offshoot of the Vermont-based independent press, and his writing has been featured in publications including Pitchfork, Sad Girls Club, and Words & Images, and in the Word Portland anthology Ungatherable Things. He came of age as the guitarist and principal songwriter for influential New York City all-teenage art-pop band Student Teachers (recently the subject of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast). The first chapter of his upcoming novel, Willett, received the Andre Dubus Award for short fiction.
Dana Wachs
Dana Wachs is a Brooklyn-based composer and audio engineer who performs under the name Vorhees. She studied cello and electric bass from an early age, and joined the D.C. hardcore group Holy Rollers (Dischord Records) when she was 19. Audio engineering would define the following 20 years of her life while working at Greene St. Recording studio in New York, and then touring the world with St. Vincent, Grizzly Bear, and MGMT among many others. Vorhees’ debut EP, Black Horse Pike, was released in 2016 via Styles Upon Styles (Brooklyn). The EP was written, recorded, and produced by Dana Wachs in her Brooklyn home between tours. February 2019 saw the release of her latest work, Tracks for Movement, a compilation of scores for dance and film. Currently, Dana is in pre-production of her first score for a feature film, Confession, directed by Dayna Hanson (whose directorial credits include HBO’s Room 104 season 1, episode 6, “Voyeurs”).
Title Image by Barbara Lewis-Marco.

Janie Heath &Friends
2022-02-08 20:00 | NY
Every Tuesday in February!
February 1, 8, 15, and 22, 2022 at 8 PM
Expect the spontaneity of a party when Howl Arts gives Janie Heath an open channel to introduce her work and that of some of her fascinating friends. Heath hosts the &Friends series every Tuesday in February. Howl’s signature &Friends programs feature weekly shows curated by one notable creator—with the voices, commentary, music, art, films, and writing of friends they work with and admire.
I wish I could give out refreshments through the screen! Seriously, I think of this event like a party. I know Howl viewers are interesting, unconventional, talented people. It is as if I am saying, ‘You remember this person, and you have wanted to meet this person, and you will just love this person, and wait—look who just flew in from out of town!’
—Janie Heath
Like an old-fashioned TV variety show, Heath will showcase writers, musicians, and others who express their own unique qualities through a diverse but contemporary range of work. “The emphasis is on literature, but anything might happen with this crowd,” she says.
Joining her on the program are friends Rhona Bitner, Tom Cole, Maggie Dubris, Leah Hennessey, Wanda Phipps, Kid Congo Powers, Gregg Shapiro, Philip Shelley, and Dana Wachs.
We ask our &Friends resident artists to respond to the question, “What does collaboration mean to you?” Heath said:
Collaboration to me is a bit of shock at this time in my life. It requires me to gingerly crawl out of my cave—my isolated working life as a writer, which has been all the more isolated due to the pandemic. It’s a beautiful shock, and a gift from the very special team at Howl!, which for years has been like a home away from home to me. I get the precious and exciting chance to receive energy and inspiration from some of my many talented friends, and to have the privilege of sharing them with a new and wider audience. I am so grateful for the people I know. I have always thought myself lucky—I love people, but I also love solitude. I want it all! And I want to share it with my friends in Howl TV land.
Photo by Dorothy Shi.
Janie Heath’s writing has been published in Big Bridge, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Boog City, Brink, and Whiskey Tit Journal. An essay she wrote appears in the liner notes for the box-set G Stands for Go-Betweens Volume 2. She worked as a reporter for her hometown daily newspaper before moving to New York in the mid 1970s to get her BFA in film production at New York University. She worked on movies—a rock ’n’ roll-themed feature and a now-cult slasher—before her love of music led her to live in a London squat until she landed a job with an indie record label. She now lives back in New York, writing fiction and giving public readings.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rhona Bitner
Rhona Bitner is a native New Yorker. Her work has been widely shown in the United States and internationally. In the U.S., her work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College; and Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, Beaux Arts, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2020. She is on the faculty of the School of the International Center of Photography in New York.
Tom Cole
Tom Cole is a writer and artist living in the Lower East Side. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Le Petit Versailles, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Oni Gallery, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow, and a 2015 Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. Cole heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions, where he has commissioned new work by Heidi Schreck, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Craig Lucas, Nathan Alan Davis, and Sheila Callaghan, among others. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He has collaborated extensively with Anohni, most recently appearing in She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen.
Maggie Dubris
Maggie Dubris’s latest book, BrokeDown Palace (Subpress), is drawn from her work during the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s as a 911 paramedic in New York City and the hospital—now closed—she worked for. It is currently being adapted into an opera with the creative team of Dubris, composer Andy Teirstein, and choreographer Donald Byrd. She is also the author of Skels (Soft Skull) and Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press), and is a musician (Homer Erotic, Lulu Revue) and sound artist.
Jon Hammer
Jon Hammer is a painter and writer living in New York City. He also plays rhythm guitar in Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Co., arguably East 14th Street’s favorite purveyors of hillbilly boogie.

Leah Hennessey
Leah Hennessey is performer, writer, and filmmaker from the Upper West Side. Most recently, she debuted her film Byron & Shelley: Illuminati Detectives at the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in Geneva, a pilot episode for a show which imagines the romantic poets as undercover agents of the Enlightenment in a science-fiction-weird world. The film is a collaboration with her artistic partner Emily Allan, with whom she has performed the critically acclaimed play Slash at MX Gallery and Joe’s Pub, and Star Odyssey at MoMA PS1. Leah is currently working on her debut solo album, a collection of songs written under the influence of possession by Lord Byron.
Robert Leslie
Robert Leslie is an indie-folk artist known for performing on streets across Europe, North Africa, and New York City. His alluring voice, soaring melodies, dense poetic imagery, and freewheeling approach to life have garnered him a large and loyal following. Born in New York City, raised in London and Amsterdam, Robert left home at a young age and spent two years supporting himself as a traveling street performer, ping-ponging with the seasons between northern Europe and Morocco, finally winding up in Brooklyn. Since arriving stateside he’s made himself a well-known figure in both the venues and streets of New York, and has been featured in the New York Daily News, Time Out, Deli Magazine (voted upcoming artist of the month), and various other blogs and publications. He’s toured across three continents and yodeled his heart out to crowds large and small. Robert’s fourth LP, Halfway Home, is due for release in the spring of 2022, and is his first collaboration with industry heavyweights. Until his ship comes in, you’ll find Robert enjoying a desperate, hand-to-mouth existence in Brooklyn.
Wanda Phipps
Wanda Phipps is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the author of seven books, including the full-length collections Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems, and the recently released Mind Honey. Her poetry has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician, and Bangla. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia, and at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City. She has curated reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and written about the arts for Boog City, Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and others.
Kid “Congo” Powers
The legendary Kid Congo Powers, the premier voodoo guitarist for seminal sexy swampy bands like Gun Club, Nick Cave and The Cramps, is a restless aesthete. He used his early solo efforts to explore vocals and mix genres. With DRACULA BOOTS, Kid came back to his roots as a crackerjack guitarist playing the primitive music that inspired him; the raw sounds of garage and early Chicano rock. He has written a soon-to-be-published memoir.
Gregg Shapiro
Gregg Shapiro is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming poetry collection Fear of Muses (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2022). Recent and forthcoming lit-mag publications include Exquisite Pandemic, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Impossible Archetype, Red Fern Review, Instant Noodles, Dissonance Magazine, and POETiCA REViEW, as well as the anthologies Moving Images: Poems Inspired by the Movies (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021), This Is What America Looks Like (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2021), and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America (Belt Publishing, 2021). An entertainment journalist whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
Philip Shelley
Photo by Meagan Maguire.
Philip Shelley is co-editor of Whiskey Tit Journal, an offshoot of the Vermont-based independent press, and his writing has been featured in publications including Pitchfork, Sad Girls Club, and Words & Images, and in the Word Portland anthology Ungatherable Things. He came of age as the guitarist and principal songwriter for influential New York City all-teenage art-pop band Student Teachers (recently the subject of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast). The first chapter of his upcoming novel, Willett, received the Andre Dubus Award for short fiction.
Dana Wachs
Dana Wachs is a Brooklyn-based composer and audio engineer who performs under the name Vorhees. She studied cello and electric bass from an early age, and joined the D.C. hardcore group Holy Rollers (Dischord Records) when she was 19. Audio engineering would define the following 20 years of her life while working at Greene St. Recording studio in New York, and then touring the world with St. Vincent, Grizzly Bear, and MGMT among many others. Vorhees’ debut EP, Black Horse Pike, was released in 2016 via Styles Upon Styles (Brooklyn). The EP was written, recorded, and produced by Dana Wachs in her Brooklyn home between tours. February 2019 saw the release of her latest work, Tracks for Movement, a compilation of scores for dance and film. Currently, Dana is in pre-production of her first score for a feature film, Confession, directed by Dayna Hanson (whose directorial credits include HBO’s Room 104 season 1, episode 6, “Voyeurs”).
Title Image by Barbara Lewis-Marco.

The Seven Year VacationBy Edgar Oliver
2022-02-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
A reading of a play by Edgar Oliver with sets by Helen Oliver
“Edgar is, without doubt, the greatest raconteur in the world,” says George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth.
Howl Arts is pleased to present a reading of The Seven Year Vacation, by renowned poet and playwright Edgar Oliver, starring Carine Montbertrand, Angela Rogers, Michael Laurence, Alexandra Wolkowicz, and Edgar Oliver.
Edgar Oliver (b. October 31, 1956) is a legend of the Lower East Side and has lived there since 1977. Oliver made his debut in New York City’s Pyramid Club in the mid 1980s and is a mainstay at La MaMa. He has written at least a dozen plays, including The Poetry Killer, The Ghost of Brooklyn, When She Had Blood Lust, The Master of Monstrosity, I Am a Coffin, My Green Hades, and Chop Off Your Ear. Oliver has published two poetry collections, A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There, Summer, and the novel The Man Who Loved Plants.

Helen Oliver The Open Road
2022-01-22 - 2022-02-20 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
There is a theatrical quality to Helen Oliver’s paintings, their scale and earthy palette recalling, in one glance, those eerily charmed circus or movie marquee posters of yesteryear. This feels especially true of her portraits, which loom large enough to engulf the viewer in the formal contortions of their often-nude subjects. —Tom Breidenbach

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Helen Oliver: The Open Road

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project is pleased to present The Open Road, a newly curated exhibition of paintings by Helen Oliver that takes off from her show which was cut short in 2019 by the pandemic. Known for her large-scale, vivid portraits and nudes, she delves below the surface of her subjects to uncover inner mysteries, emotions, and tensions.
The expressivity of Oliver’s paintings might appear to be part of a long tradition of psychological portraiture—from that of Otto Dix to Alice Neel. There is a humanistic quality to Oliver’s endeavor that she shares with those artists. There is, however, a consistent ambiguity in her work. . . This singularity might best be observed in Oliver’s nude portraits. —David Ebony
On view will be a selection of portraits and intimate nudes that combine her eccentric, gestural line with the deeply felt presence of the sitter to create “images [that] vacillate between the hallucinatory, bordering on Surrealism, and a raw pragmatic quality that makes them appear utterly truthful,” says Ebony. Oliver’s blithe, bohemian character imbues her paintings with an imaginative inner narrative, and style that goes beyond any affiliations to contemporary art trends, schools, or movements. An air of whimsy permeates the portrait of her brother Edgar as harlequin, while languid nudes stare frankly at the viewer.
Since the late 70s, Helen Oliver has been an integral part of the artistic and performance-art scene of the Lower East Side, tapping into the personalities of the vanguard and rendering oil paintings of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers including Penny Arcade, Lenny Kaye, Mary Lou Wittmer, Louie Cartwright, Kembra Pfahler, Samoa, and Brian Damage. She is also well known for her stage-set design, especially for her brother Edgar Oliver’s plays, many of which premiered at La MaMa.
She was a founder of Pompeii Gallery on 10th Street (and later Forsyth Street) in New York City in the mid 80s. She has exhibited in New York, Paris, and Lucerne, and has painted three rooms at the Carlton Arms Hotel. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, she moved to New York City in the late 70s after studying in Paris and receiving a B.A. from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She now divides her time between New York and Tarquinia, Italy, where she makes her home.

Icons, Iconoclasts, and Outsiders
2022-01-02 - 2022-03-20 | HA/HA, 250 Bowery, 2nd Floor, New York, NY, 10012, United States
September 19, 2021 – March 20, 2022
Inaugural Exhibition at Howl! Arts/Howl! Archive (HA/HA)
Grand Opening: Sunday, September 19 / 11 AM–6 PM
Howl Arts is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at its new space, Howl! Arts/Howl! Archive (HA/HA). Icons, Iconoclasts, and Outsiders presents works by artists, writers, musicians, scenesters, performers, icons, iconoclasts, outsiders and other creators from the 1960s to the present whose life and work energized the underground and are now entering mainstream cultural discourse. HA/HA is located at 250 Bowery, just down the block from Howl! Happening. The exhibition continues through December 23, 2021 and is co-curated by Howl executive director Jane Friedman with Sean Mellyn and Maynard Monrow.
Icons, Iconoclasts, and Outsiders unveils previously undocumented aspects of downtown life and culture—the atmosphere of a wildly diverse neighborhood that has influenced successive generations. A refined collection of works of art, cultural history, and ephemera, the exhibition presents the early Ramones banner Gabba Gabba Hey (1977) and the paintings by artist and founding spirit of the gallery Arturo Vega; Candy Darling’s the worst years of my life: a five year diary, from the collection of her longtime friend Jeremiah Newton; David Wojnarowicz’s Saint Sebastian (1981), a portrait of Brian Butterick from his personal collection; costumes, props, and videos from The Alien Comic Tom Murrin’s archive; an exquisite photographic portrait by George Dureau and explosive paintings by Richard Hambleton from the Arturo Vega estate; a signature portrait by Helen Oliver Adelson; graphite portraits by John Kelly of gifted individuals who were part of his life and creative circles; cultural chronicler and photographer Marcia Resnick’s color portrait of William Burroughs (1980); and Scooter LaForge paintings that explore contemporary social issues through humor, lavish decoration, and exaggerated cartoon-like figures.
Also from the collection are works of art and archival materials from the 60s to the present including Philly Abe; Richard Bernstein; Don Herron; Mark Morrisroe; Dustin Pittman; Jamie Reid; Walter Stedding; Patti Smith; Tabboo!; Gail Thacker; Toyo Tsuchiya; Guy Woodard; as well as Mudd Club doorman extraordinaire Richard Boch’s personal papers; and materials from the estate of Clark Render, known for his collaboration with David Ilku in The Dueling Bankheads.
In the new screening room, Howl draws from its video archive of work by Merrill Aldighieri as the first VJ and early documentarian of the legendary 80s nightclub Hurrah; the archives of Efrom Allen, host of the early public-access television show Underground TV, featuring a range of unconventional guests including Sid Vicious, the Ramones, Marilyn Chambers, Blondie, Steve Allen, Buddy Rich, Stiv Bators, Brooke Shields, and William Shatner; and selections from the vaults of Howl TV including live performances, readings, panel discussions, and happenings with artists, writers, musicians, and thought-leaders who have enlivened the gallery since its inception in 2015.
Howl’s Permanent Collection comprises over 3,000 objects, including art, rare digital and analog media, performance-art ephemera, and personal archives from the 1960s onward. The Collection documents the origins and growth of local cultural and social movements that have had far-reaching impact—offering a myriad of opportunities for new interpretations of the punk, new-wave, and no-wave movements; performance art; drag; street art; public-access television; nightlife; LGBTQ activism; the AIDS epidemic; and urban gentrification.
Image: Richard Hambleton, Untitled (Leaping Shadowman), ca 2000
Visitation Guidelines

Create the Gift Worth Giving: Holiday Collage Making Workshop
2021-12-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Join us for this fun, holiday themed collage making in-person workshop with Amon Focus! Some of us might be gathering with loved ones after time apart so this is the perfect place to make that one of a kind gift only you can make.
Holiday Collage Making Workshop workshop registration is available.
Click Here To Register
Create the Gift Worth Giving: Holiday Collage Making Workshop with Amon Focus encourages participants to make a thoughtful and creative collage for family and friends during the holiday season. Amon Focus will facilitate this workshop sharing some of his own techniques and strategies for engaging collage based art. Collages will be made using old magazines and can be decorated with an assortment of materials such as paint, buttons, paper and fabric. All materials will be provided and no previous experience in collage making is required. Proof of vaccination and masks are required to attend this workshop. This workshop is offered at no cost to participants. Seating is limited!
No previous experience in drawing is required and all skill levels in art are welcome! The workshop is free and all materials are provided. Prior registration is required to attend. All participants must be vaccinated to attend the workshop, and masks are required. Seating is limited and spots fill quickly!
Feel free to contact Howl Education Director, katherine@howlarts.org, with any questions about the workshop.
Visitation Guidelines

David MramorGay Green
2021-12-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Enid Ellen Performance
Howl! Happening and White Columns are pleased to co-host Gay Green, a performance by David Mramor. The event is organized in conjunction with Mramor’s new illustrated memoir Rainbow Lilies Gangrene Blues and his solo exhibition curated by Jeanette Mundt, on view at White Columns from October 30 through December 18, 2021.
Gay Green is the latest performance featuring Enid Ellen, artist David Mramor’s ongoing persona and musical project. Enid was born out of private performances from the artist’s childhood, which first took place in their mother’s closet, eventually with her as their audience.
Following his mother’s death, Mramor continued performing in drag, often with the makeup and clothing she left behind—discovering a way to recreate the freeing, compassionate space she provided in his youth. For Gay Green, Mramor steps into Enid, performing covers and original songs that bring together different time periods and people within queer history. With green makeup evocative of a wicked witch, and references to Hibiscus—the legendary founder of early-70s San Francisco drag-queen troupe The Cockettes—the performance pays homage to cinema, fashion, nature, and gay icons, with nostalgic nods to Mramor’s personal history and the history of drag.
Collaborating with Greg Potter on keyboards, Mramor writes original songs under the Enid Ellen guise—a post-gender feminist singer-songwriter. With a background in theater, the artist’s performances include singing, movement, improvisation, and Kundalini yoga elements.
Support for this program is kindly provided by Sotheby’s.

Photo by Shann Treadwell
About David Mramor
David Mramor lives and works in New York City. He received a BFA from Ohio University in 2006 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008, and was a Studio Immersion Project Fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in 2019. Mramor has exhibited and performed extensively throughout New York City, including presentations at Fierman, 47 Canal, Canada gallery, P·P·O·W, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen. He has also performed at the Serpentine Gallery (London), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf), and Museum Ludwig (Cologne). The artist is a member of the two-person band Enid Ellen, with singer-songwriter Greg Potter. Album releases include Cannibal Disease (2010) and Beyond Reality (FemmeKraft, 2018).
Event Photo credit: David Mramor, Gay Green (Sound Factory invitation, 1994, Gregory Homs). Inkjet, oil, and grommets on linen, 2021.

NYisOK: Bullet Space 1985–2021
2021-12-05 14:00 - 17:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Howl Happening is pleased to present NYisOK: Bullet Space 1985–2021, a special event to mark the closing of the exhibition Andrew Castrucci: 36 Years at Bullet Space. Join Andrew Castrucci and a group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers for an afternoon of readings from books, newspapers, and actions commemorating Bullet Space.
Participating guests include Lee Quiñones, street-art originator, downtown legend, musician, writer, and star of Charlie Ahearn’s influential film Wild Style; Rivington School artist, and writer; Rachelle Garniez, singer, songwriter, and accordionist; and Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Sarah Ferguson. Other guests include Renzo Castrucci, Pito Concepción, Carla Cubitt, A.O. Dolabi, Richard Dye, John Fekner, Frank Morales, Cheryl Pyle, Felice Rosser, and Stephan Said.

Andrew Castrucci: 36 Years at Bullet Space is an exhibition that pays tribute to Bullet Space and Andrew Castrucci—framed around the artist’s 36-year tenure leading the unique community space, and two mammoth artist books he produced with a myriad of collaborators: Your House is Mine (1988–1992) and Fracktured Lives (2010–2020). Threaded throughout are other artifacts including his paintings on steel as well as silk screens from the two books; newspapers; and ephemera produced between 1985 to the present. The exhibition is curated by Carlo McCormick and Alexandra Rojas and accompanied by a catalog with essays by McCormick and Tom McGlynn.
About Bullet Space
Located at East Third Street in Loisaida, Bullet Space is an act of resistance, a community-access center for images, words, and sounds of the neighborhood. Founded in the winter of 1985, it was part of the squatter movement and reconstructed with or without the formal sanction of the city—invisible officialdom. The ground floor of the building is open—like a bulletin. “Bullet” first originated from the name-brand of heroin sold on the block—which was known as the “bullet block”—encompassing the accepted American ethic of violence. “Bullet Americana” is art form as weaponry. .
About Andrew Castrucci
Andrew Castrucci was born in 1961 and raised in the proximity of West Hoboken and Cliffside Park, spanning New Jersey’s industrial expanses of the lower Hudson River. From 1984–86, he ran the A&P Gallery with his brother Paul. In 1986, Castrucci co-founded Bullet Space, an urban artist collaborative. Creating a print shop there, he was instrumental in producing over 10,000 silk screen posters by a wide range of artists, writers, and thinkers. Castrucci curates shows and publishes artist books—most recently the Bulletin newspaper edition #10, and the exhibition Shoot the Pump, co-curated with Lee Quiñones and Alexandra Rojas.
Image: NYisOK Castrucci/Fekner collab. 2021, enamel and spray paint on metal, 22″ x 17”

Collective Space/Embodied Resistance: 40 Years and Beyond of AIDS, Art and Activism
2021-12-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
WORLD AIDS DAY COMMEMORATION
“We have lost heroes in this multi-passing-the passage of brilliant minds who we have lost. We cannot access them through anything except digging far in and finding them living loud through our heart and psyche. I needed them then and need them now.” – Julie Tolentino from Debra Levine’s Essay – Another Kind of Love: A Performance of Prosthetic Politics
In her book The Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman struggles to understand and express the loss to AIDS and how “a certain urban ecology of queer subculture existence has been wiped out, through both AIDS and gentrification” and that this “ecoside” has resulted in less diversity. Almost without realizing it—one person at a time—we lost pioneering artists who challenged the status quo in performance, installation, improvisational live music, dance, drag, and the intersection of new technologies. Schulman says, “When they died, their practice of creating new paradigms outside of institutional structures was removed from sight.”
Howl is pleased to present Collective Space/Embodied Resistance: 40 Years and Beyond of AIDS, Art and Activism, a panel discussion in honor of WORLD AIDS DAY featuring; photographer Lola Flash, performer Rafael Sanchez, writer Pamela Sneed, performance artist John Kelly and historian, Aldo Hernandez. Each panelist will present and contextualize specific bodies of work made during and speaking to the height of the AIDS epidemic followed by a moderated discussion with the audience.
It is particularly fitting that Howl focuses on the continuum of AIDS history in our community as we struggle to counter the gentrified mindset that pretends that AIDS never happened or is not happening right now. The artists on the panel have firsthand, lived experience of those early days and all have made work dealing with its impact on their lives personally and the fabric of our city.
The artists on this panel defy the gentrified mindset discussed in Schulman’s book by reminding us that art as resistance can channel our collective rage into moments of remembrance for what we’ve lost and celebrate our survival. We honor our friends, family members and loved ones whom we’ve lost to HIV & AIDS while we grapple with the immense losses from COVID-19. As painful as it can be to unlock memories from our not too distant past, healing and wisdom can be derived from this looking back. Flash, Sanchez, Sneed, Kelly and Hernandez share with us their own ways of looking in hopes that we might see ourselves not separate but as a continuum of the ongoing history of HIV & AIDS irrespective of the identities we individually hold.

Panelists:
Photo by: Ajamu X
Lola Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. She received her bachelor’s degree from Maryland Institute and her Masters from London College of Printing, in the UK. Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4×5 film camera, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. In 2008, she was a resident at Lightwork and in 2015, she participated at Alice Yard, in Trinidad. Flash was awarded an Art Matters grant, which allowed her to further two projects, in Brazil and London. Flash has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her work is also featured in the publication Posing Beauty, edited by Deb Willis, currently on exhibit across the US. Most recently, she co-led a talk at the Bronx Museum with Sur Rodney Sur. They spoke to the glaring lack of women artists and POC, with respect to the Art AIDS America exhibition. Flash’s work welcomes audiences who are willing to not only look but see.

Aldo Hernandez; librarian, archivist, curator, music mixer and photographer was born in Cuba, raised in California and has lived in NYC since 1985. As a member the ART+POSITIVE collective within ACT UP, he curated the “Army of Lovers” exhibition at the PS 122 Art Gallery in November 1990 which included many artists that have since gained widespread recognition (among them Lola Flash, Nan Goldin, Hunter Reynolds, James Siena, Fred Tomaselli, David Wojnarowicz). After moving to NYC Aldo worked in Development at MoMA, and in 1987 became the Development Officer and a music/poetry curator at Creative Time. During this time Aldo began working with performer Julie Tolentino and Diamanda Galás – an urgent vital time in their lives as they and their friends became committed to AIDS activism through ACT UP. Recently, Aldo returned to archival projects, and is currently organizing the Brian Butterick collection at Howl. Aldo is also Howl’s first librarian and steward of the unique collection, which emphasizes New York City’s East Village neighborhood.

Photo by: Steven Menendez
John Kelly is a performance and visual artist. His performance works dramatize the lives of characters – whether actual or fictional – revealing their challenges, foibles, and humanity. Some of these works are directly autobiographical – others are inspired by the realities and hurdles of cultural outsiders, and political realities they navigate. His visual art is based in self-portraiture, and frequently relates to the subjects of his performance works, including drawing, painting, photography, and video. He recently completed his first graphic narrative ‘A Friend Gave Me A Book’, based his weathering a catastrophic trapeze accident. Kelly’s latest dance theatre work ‘Underneath The Skin’ (based on the life of the 20th century gay novelist and tattoo artist Samuel Steward) will have a multi-week run at New York’s La MaMa, in 2022.

Polaroid by: Mark Morrisroe, 1988 c. Estate of Mark Morrisroe, Collection Ringier; Fotomuseum Winterthur, CH
Rafael Sánchez is a Cuban-born visual artist and performer based in New York City. Sánchez’ work combines traditional fine-art practice with personal methods and associate ‘conductive’ materials which include makeup, barn paint, asphalt sealer, honey, dust, and sugar. His drawings, installations, and performances embrace site and context, often utilizing elements from a mixture of intuitive and universal cosmologies with themes of transformation and transcendence. He was a companion and caregiver to friends in New York and Paris during the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and ’90s. Sánchez became HIV+ in the fall of 2002. In the artist’s words, “seroconversion was devastating, but in time that journey strengthened my belief in the interconnectedness of all things and the transformative power of art.”
Recent solo and group presentations include A Gathering (HOUSING, New York, 2021), Life of a Flower / Rafael Sánchez with Ellen Cantor, Jim Fletcher, Mark Morrisroe, and Gail Thacker (Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, 2019), and Tree of Heaven (Viewing Room—Marlborough Contemporary, New York, 2018). Two exhibitions pairing the work of Rafael Sánchez and Kathleen White are forthcoming; at Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art in Massachusetts from November through April of 2022, and Rafael Sánchez, Kathleen White: Earth Works will open at Martos Gallery in New York on January 13, 2022.

Photo by: Rafael German
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. Sneed also teaches new genres in Columbia Universities’ School of the Arts. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum, MOMA, Broad Museum and the Toronto Biennale. Pamela appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems.” In 2018, she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in poetry and is widely published in journals including, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum Magazine, The Paris Review, and Frieze Magazine. She recently published an article for Harpers Bazaar U.S. and has upcoming work in The New York Times. She is the author of a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020 featured in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award. In 2021, Sneed was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School and NYU’s Center For Humanities. She currently has work on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

Event Image: Rafael Sánchez, 1993-94, “Bedtime Story”; Courtesy of the artist and Martos Gallery, New York. Performance still photograph by Rainer Behrens.

Amon Focus &Friends
2021-11-30 19:00, 2021-11-23 19:00, 2021-11-16 19:00, 2021-11-09 19:00 | NY
Every Tuesday in November at 7 PM
November 9, 16, 23, and 30, 2021
Continuing Howl’s &Friends series, we welcome AMON FOCUS, the founder and creative force behind New York Said, a multidisciplinary project with a mission to document and preserve the “writing on the wall” hidden in plain sight throughout the five boroughs. For over a decade, Amon has photographed over 2,500 statements written on every imaginable surface. His New York Said podcast boasts more than 200 long-form conversations with native and notable New Yorkers.
Howl’s &Friends series features weekly programs curated by one notable creator, featuring voices, commentary, music, art, films, and writing of friends they admire and work with.
Amon’s guests will include (among others):
Nov 9, 2021: Author and curator Lori Zimmer
Nov 16, 2021: Performance artist, lyricist, and experimental music producer Helixx C. Armageddon
Nov 23, 2021: Photographer Anthony Artis
Nov 30, 2021: Photographer and Filmmaker Destiny Mata
Collaboration to me is a meeting of the minds. It isn’t forced or even planned most times. It is when one or more people come together to make magic happen. Many of the collaborations I’ve participated in over the years are like a beautiful potluck. The food at a potluck is rarely the focus, but the stories that are attached to these dishes enhance the overall experience. If everyone is eating well and enjoying each other’s company, that to me is an indication that the creative collaboration was a success.
—Amon Focus
Amon’s photography and film projects have been featured in venues throughout New York City. Project highlights include an archival screening of his film Arturo Vega, The Last Interview at Howl! Happening; shooting for New York Fashion Week; and a New York Said fifth-anniversary photography exhibit. Amon is also a consultant for destination-marketing organizations throughout the country and has worked as creative producer and camera operator on hundreds of tourism-related productions.
About Lori Zimmer
Lori Zimmer is a New York-based author represented by the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. Her books include the forthcoming Art Hiding in Paris: An Illustrated Guide to the City of Light (Running Press, 2022), Art Hiding in New York: An Illustrated Guide to the City’s Secret Masterpieces (Running Press, 2020), The Art of Spray Paint: Inspirations and Techniques from Masters of Aerosol (Rockport Publishers, 2017), and The Art of Cardboard: Big Ideas for Creativity, Collaboration, Storytelling, and Reuse (Rockport Publishers, 2015). She has written text featured in the books Own Your Awkward: How to Have Better and Braver Conversations About Your Mental Health, by Michelle Morgan (Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), and Still New York: A Forced Slumber in the City That Never Sleeps, by Logan Hicks (Logan Hicks Studio, 2021). Zimmer consults as an artist liaison in copyright infringement cases for Kushnirsky Gerber PLLC, and spent 12 years as an independent art curator—curating over 50 exhibitions and projects before retiring to focus on writing.
About Helixx C. Armageddon
Helixx C. Armageddon is a storyteller intrigued with the human condition. She is a performance artist who weaves together poetry, music, and fashion to shift her audiences from observation to participation.
Known for impassioned performances, Helixx channels a space for community, connection, and dialogue. For her, words are powerful and create more than narrative: words create action and momentum towards a more just world.
Helixx has performed in New York City venues including Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Bowery Poetry Club, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre, Hammerstein Ballroom, Gene Frankel Theatre, Howl! Happening, Blue Note Jazz Club, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
About Anthony Artis
New Yorker Anthony Artis is a catalyst who empowers cultural and community-based collaborations that tell stories of excellence.
He’s an in-demand storyteller with clients including Disney+, The New York Times, Essence, Complex, Cultured Magazine, Pattern, the Apollo Theatre, and the Blue Note Jazz Club.
Anthony holds a BFA in photography from Parsons School of Design and is based in New York City.
About Destiny Mata
Destiny Mata is a Mexican American photographer and filmmaker based in her native New York City as she focuses on issues of subculture and community. After studying photojournalism at LaGuardia Community College and San Antonio College, she spent 2 years as Director of Photography Programs at the Lower East Side Girls Club Mata and has had work published and featured in Teen Vogue, Vice’s Noisey, Vibe, The Source, and Mass Appeal. Mata has recently exhibited La Vida En Loisaida: Life on the Lower East Side at Photoville Festival 2020. She has taken part in a group exhibition at ICP Concerned Global Images for Global Crisis at the International Center of Photography 2020, Mexic-Arte Museum, Young Latino Artists 21: Amexican@ 2016 and in 2014 she exhibited photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy at the Museum of New York City’s, Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy exhibition.

Closed For The Thanksgiving Holiday
2021-11-24 - 2021-11-30 | NY

The Full Moon Show With John Pizza: Being Board
2021-11-19 | NY
12:00 AM–11:59 PM
Watch on www.howlarts.org

In the days before I had a phone and I was board, I would make up stories. Imagining stuff, like what it was like to have three wishes.
Except from the point of view of the genie.
A genie’s secret agenda is to punish you for your hubris. To spank you with a board for making a wish that is only about selfishness.
“I wish for a million bucks.”
“Your wish is my command.”
Join John Pizza for another Full Moon Show called Being Board. A poetic examination of the endless chain of memories – like railroad ties, like floorboards, like a tree trunk.
John Pizza is a performer, builder, and drawer. He uses trash and thrift-store detritus scrounged in his Brooklyn neighborhood to tell stories and make his shows. He loves the macabre and the mushy sweet. His sculptures are performative, and his performances involve sculptures—an object theatre of weird surprises.
About Tom Murrin and the Full Moon Show
Performance is anything done with purpose and style—Tom Murrin
Howl! Happening is home to the archive of Tom Murrin, aka the Alien Comic and the Godfather of Performance Art. Every full moon—without fail, paid booking or not, in all seasons and whatever the weather—he performed his Luna Macaroona Full Moon Show. When he had a club date that fell on the full moon, he’d wrangle his friends to perform as guests—pushing the careers of such groundbreaking performers as David Cale, David Sedaris, Amy Sedaris, Blue Man Group, Ethyl Eichelberger, Lisa Kron, and many others. When he didn’t have a club date, he performed on the street for passersby, transforming the pedestrian atmosphere with his madness and magic.

Short Films Curated by Andrew Castrucci
2021-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Howl! Happening is pleased to present an evening of films in conjunction with the exhibition Andrew Castrucci: 36 Years at Bullet Space. The event will present a selection of films created over the last 20 years by Castrucci, his collaborators Dave Fasano and Kevin R. Frech, and Italo Zamboni—an alias of Castrucci’s.
The evening’s program will include 82nd Street Steps Manifesto by Italo Zamboni (2000), Cliffs / Rivers / Skyscrapers by Castrucci and Frech (2002), $4 a Pound (2003) and America Berserk (2008) by Castrucci, and Ninety Degrees North (2018) and Gone (2021) by Castrucci and Fasano.
About Andrew Castrucci
The artist was born in 1961 and raised in the proximity of West Hoboken and Cliffside Park, spanning New Jersey’s industrial expanses of the lower Hudson River. From 1984–86, he ran the A&P Gallery with his brother Paul. In 1986, Castrucci co-founded Bullet Space, an urban artist collaborative. Creating a print shop there, he was instrumental in producing over 10,000 silk-screen posters by a wide range of artists, writers, and thinkers.
Castrucci curates shows and publishes artist books—most recently the Bulletin newspaper edition #10, and Shoot the Pump, co-curated with Lee Quiñones and Alexandra Rojas.
He has been working on a film, The River Speaks: Urban Angling in the East River, where life becomes art. His other films include Struck by the Hand (2000) and The Resistance of Memory (2005).

Local Knowledge Reading Series
2021-11-14 14:00 - 16:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
With Ron Kolm and Annabel Lee
Howl! Happening is pleased to announce a monthly Local Knowledge reading series—live and In person at Howl. Each monthly event features the work of poets, prose writers (fiction and non-fiction) and visual artists. The series is curated by Local Knowledge Magazine, a literary and art journal published by Sanjay Agnihotri and will be hosted by Agnihotri and Jeff Wright, publisher of LiveMag! This week features writer, editor, and artist Ron Kolm and publisher, editor, writer, educator, and musician Annabel Lee.
Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Duke & Jill, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift, A Change in the Weather, Welcome to the Barbecue and Swimming in the Shallow End. He’s had work in Abwarts, And Then, Feuerstuhl, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, NYSAI, The Opiate, the Poets of Queens anthology, the Riverside Poets Anthology, Stadtgelichter, Var Ucca Muhely #63, the Brownstone Poets anthologies and The Red Wheelbarrow.
Annabel Lee is the author of Basket, At the Heart of the World (translations of Blaise Cendrars, portions of which have been set to music by composer Garrett List) and Continental 34s. Her poetry, prose and essays have appeared in Dodgems, Saturday Morning, Little Caesar, Exquisite Corpse, DianeRavitch.net and in other journals and anthologies, including Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical edited by Sherri Mitchell, Richard Grossinger and Kathy Glass (2020).

About Ron Kolm
About Annabel Lee
About Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
About Local Knowledge

FeMaLe GEniUs Performance and Record Release Party
2021-11-13 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Howl Arts is pleased to announce the release of a limited-edition vinyl LP by FeMaLe GEniUs. The self-titled album captures the raw intensity of this Brooklyn estrogen band, the trio of multi-instrumentalists Julie Hair, Marnie Jaffe, and Nikki D’Agostino. With their unique arrangements; minimal, vocal-driven music; and bass loops layered with harmonies, keyboards, percussion and sax; they seem to have found the sonic equivalent of “outsider art.”
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE
The lyrics speak to personal politics and authentic experiences. Musical virtuosity is not the endgame. If one were to try to assign FeMaLe GEniUs a genre, music-writer Kyle Gann’s view of what he describes as “post-minimalism (a pulsing, droning, hypnotic non-traditional tonality)” might be most analogous.

The cover art, red vinyl, minimal label, and graphic score included in the package indicate that this album is both a recording project and an art object. The hand-numbered limited-edition of 300 begins on the front cover with a collage of a fractured face by New York artist Douglas Landau. The back cover and record labels are photographs by artist and band-member Julie Hair. The back cover imagery, a collection of objects ranging from a vintage ceramic dog and religious icon from Hair’s childhood to a sculpture by Philadelphia artist Paul Bearer, represents the three band members.
The 11 x 22” graphic score by band member Nikki D’Agostino uses visual symbols outside of the realm of traditional notation to represent music. Modern graphic notation relies heavily on the imagination of each performer. “Removing traditional performance practice leaves the performer with a kind of exclusive power to act as an improvising interpreter as well as an inspired spontaneous composer,” says D’Agostino. “These concepts are inherent in FeMaLe GEniUs, as elements of the work are indeterminate in nature—leading to performances which are highly nuanced.”
FeMaLe GEniUs is the groovin’est band without a drummer you’ve ever seen. Based on genius bass lines, the trio plays a tangent to different styles that arose from the early NYC punk/experimental scene. Their songs will stick with you stealthily. The vocals are honest with in(genius) harmonies that are spot-on primal, yet fresh. Top that with a techno-genius sax player and psychedelic moods, and you’ve got FeMaLe GEniUs.
—Michael Jung (Alice Donut, Um)
Julie Hair and Marnie Jaffe blasted out of the Lower East Side underground rock scene of the 1980s and are still creating. Julie’s experience in the legendary art-rock band 3 Teens Kill 4 and Marnie’s Live Skull footprint inform their musicality. (The video for “Madeline” features deep-fake versions of the two when they were in their twenties lip-synching to the song.) Nikki D’Agostino, an avant-garde composer who teaches music technology at CUNY City Tech, moved from being a fan to an integral member of the group. Her free improv, skronk, and lyrical sax lines add gravitas to the electric and effected instrumentation. Experienced performers, they are at home playing in an art gallery, nightclub, or someone’s home. FeMaLe GEniUs was included in the December 2020 edition of Emergency Index: An Annual Document of Performance Practice.
The record is produced in association with Some Serious Business, who hosted the group for an SSB Away artist residency in 2019 and presented performances by the trio in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Abiquiu.

Aesthetic Archaeology: Urban Arts Drawing Workshop with Andrew Castrucci
2021-11-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Aesthetic Archaeology: Urban Arts Drawing Workshop with Andrew Castrucci marks the return of the beloved Vega Arts Workshop Series. We are back to our in-person workshops and grateful that we can have Andrew Castrucci lead this hands-on experience. Castrucci utilizes artistic mediums including automatic drawing and writing, graffiti, infographics, silhouettes, and figure drawing to build his unique pieces. In this workshop, Castrucci will facilitate an interactive workshop where participants complete a drawing using paper, charcoal, pencil, and pen to produce an original work incorporating these techniques. Castrucci will also share his extensive knowledge about urban-arts practices and highlight some pieces from the show currently on exhibition at Howl that reflect the artistic mediums explored during the workshop.
No previous experience in drawing is required and all skill levels in art are welcome! The workshop is free and all materials are provided. Prior registration is required to attend. All participants must be vaccinated to attend the workshop, and masks are required. Seating is limited and spots fill quickly!
Aesthetic Archaeology workshop registration is no longer available
Feel free to contact Howl Education Director, katherine@howlarts.org, with any questions about the workshop.
Andrew Castrucci: 36 Years at Bullet Space is currently on view at Howl! Happening gallery on 6 East First Street, New York, NY, from October 23–December 4, 2021.

Readings from Fracktured Lives and Your House is Mine
2021-11-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Howl! Happening is pleased to present an evening of readings and performances in conjunction with the exhibition Andrew Castrucci: 36 Years at Bullet Space. A diverse group of creative personalities will draw from two of Castrucci’s artist books, Your House is Mine and Fracktured Lives. Participating artists include Lee Quiñones, Pito Concepción, Carl Watson, Carla Cubit, Richard Dye, Katharine Dawson, Michael Carter, Frank Morales, Cheryl Pyle, Rachelle Garniez, Sarah Ferguson, John Fekner with Free Humanity, Nadia Coen, and Andrew Castrucci.
Your House is Mine, edited by Castrucci and Nadia Coen, is an oversized artist book with 33 signed silk-screen prints. A collection of images and texts defining and expressing the broad and essential issue of housing on the Lower East Side, the work as a whole creates a statement about the force of “art as a means of resistance.” The book is critical of the status quo. Provoking or inciting the public, it offers objective statements or alternative solutions to authoritative city planning.
An amazing array of groundbreaking artists worked with Castrucci to make silk screens for the book, including David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Lady Pink, and Lee Quiñones. From each silk screen, 150 prints were made to be wheat-pasted on city walls, and 150 were printed on 50-pound Mohawk vellum for Your House is Mine, which was designed by Castrucci, his brother Paul, and Coen. The book also presents contributions from figures like Miguel Algarín, Chris Burden, Martha Cooper, Daze, John Farris, Allen Ginsberg, David Hammons, Hettie Jones, Cookie Mueller, Public Enemy, Adam Purple, Bimbo Rivas, and Andrés Serrano.
Fracktured Lives is a massive 25-pound book, bound in sheet metal, which comprehensively takes on the subject of fracking. The project was created to protest and ultimately ban this polluting practice that forcibly extracts natural gas.
The book features 50 screen prints by a diverse and intergenerational selection of artists—a veritable exhibition in codex form. Produced between 2010–2020, 177 artists, writers, and “fracktivists” contributed, notably including Joseph Beuys, Andrew Castrucci, Sue Coe, John Fekner, Yoko Ono, Alexandra Rojas, David Sandlin, and Walter Sipser.
Deploying a range of aesthetics between high and lowbrow art forms, the posters and the ideas behind them were collectively brainstormed and came to fruition at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where Castrucci and his students started the Dirty Graphics collective.

Littérature: Readings by Mike DeCapite, Luc Sante, and Adele Bertei
2021-10-24 15:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Howl Arts is pleased to present an afternoon of interlocking and deeply personal readings that pay homage to people, places, and times that remain touchstones of genius and inspiration. All three authors transmit the experience and feelings of “being there now” with rare urgency and intimacy. Memoir, autobiography, and novel, Bertei, Sante, and DeCapite tell stories of becoming, creating, and loving—bolstered by the wisdom of lived experience. Howl! Happening, 6 East First Street, New York.

Adele Bertei
Peter and the Wolves
In her vibrant and brave memoir, Bertei recounts her friendship and musical collaboration with Peter Laughner (Pere Ubu), Cleveland’s answer to all things underground and punk in the 1970s. The pair’s musical collaborative work appears in the Peter Laughner 5-LP box set (also out now on Smog Veil Records). For the Los Angeles Review of Books, music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus posits, “For the first time Bertei felt unformed, innocent, clear-seeing, and unjudged: as if she had a life to make.”
Appearing tonight with Bertei, author and friend Luc Sante says, “Peter Laughner was a secret inventor of punk rock, a dazzling songwriter and guitarist who should by all rights have become a star. But he died suddenly, in the crucial year 1977, and instead became a ghost, haunting the corridors of rock and roll. Adele Bertei’s tender evocation restores him to flickering life, and her account of the complex education he gave her is inspiring and sobering at once.”
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley of Bull Tongue describe the book in visceral terms, calling it “…a long gestating, touching and tear-swallowing memoir of [Bertei’s] time as Peter’s roommate, speed-snorting buddy and young kid dyke discovering EVERYTHING…”

Luc Sante
Maybe the People Would Be the Times
A tour-de-force essay collection of fifty-one brief essays written over nearly three decades…capturing scenes and sentiments from 1970s and 1980s New York City: record shops, concerts, subway snoozes, dance clubs, block parties, tabloids, most-wanted lists, drug trips, underground economies, drink tickets, apartment dramas, visual cultures, unsent letters…Sante meditates on what it’s been like to see and feel the world change—to come of age through music, photography, literature, and film, and to be growing older and wiser still. —Jonathan Leal, The Rumpus
In his second collection (after Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005), Luc Sante pays homage to Patti Smith, Rene Ricard, and Georges Simenon; traces the history of tabloids; surveys the landscape that gave birth to the Beastie Boys; explores the back alleys of vernacular photography; and sounds a threnody for the forgotten dead of New York City.
The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most of the essays are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante’s youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and 1980s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, and his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry—the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form. The book has been nominated for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Luc Sante’s most recent collection is Maybe the People Would Be the Times. His other books include Low Life, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris. He has lectured on four continents and contributed to many publications, from ephemeral zines to ornamental coffee-table anvils. (@luxante on Instagram)

Mike DeCapite
Jacket Weather
Jacket Weather is a tender love story that blossoms like a rose in the concrete of a city always on the verge. DeCapite’s effortless prose stirs echoes of certain New York School poets, of ‘cold rosy dawn,’ night streets illuminated by great bars and the music streaming out of them—the endless possibilities of a place where, despite persistent evidence to the contrary, ‘love is the heart of everything.’ —Max Blagg, author of Slow Dazzle and Loud Money

DeCapite reads from his highly praised first novel, Jacket Weather, published by Soft Skull Press.
Nick Hornby meets Patti Smith, Mean Streets meets A Visit from the Goon Squad in this quintessential New York City story about two people who knew each other in the downtown music scene in the 1980s, meet again in the present day, and fall in love.
Jacket Weather is about awakening to love—dizzying, all-consuming, worldview-shaking love—when it’s least expected. It’s also about remaining alert to today’s pleasures—exploring the city, observing the seasons, listening to the guys at the gym—while time is slipping away. Told in fragments of narrative, reveries, recipes, bits of conversation, and snatches of weather, the book collapses a decade in Mike and June’s life and shifts the reader to a glowing nostalgia for the present.
Poetic and compulsively readable, Jacket Weather invents a new genre—call it lyrical realism. Mike DeCapite casts a cool but affectionate eye on New York in the 2010s, as it lives on despite having become a replica of itself. Like Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex, Jacket Weather traces the lives of those who’ve stayed on after the party. It’s a love story improbably set at the beginning of late middle age, and it’s also a story of cities, survival, adaptation, desire, and a celebration of the small pleasures we invent and discover to offset unavoidable loss.
—Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker and Summer of Hate

Andrew Castrucci: 36 Years at Bullet Space
2021-10-23 - 2021-12-05 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Opening Reception: October 23, 6 — 9 PM
Andrew Castrucci is an artist who has contended with this magical, mysterious and often menacing space called Manhattan for over four decades… Castrucci is a portrait painter of the city we all love, who captures its primal essence not as a matter of realistic representation, but as a psychological study of the great ambivalence at the heart of this experience of living here. —Carlo McCormick
Howl! Happening is pleased to announce an exhibition that pays tribute to Bullet Space and Andrew Castrucci—framed around the artist’s 36-year tenure leading the unique community space, and two mammoth artists’ books he produced with a myriad of collaborators: Your House is Mine (1988–1992) and Fracktured Lives (2010–2020). Threaded throughout are other artifacts including his paintings on steel as well as silk screens from the two books; newspapers; and ephemera produced between 1985 to the present. The exhibition is curated by Carlo McCormick and Alexandra Rojas and will be accompanied by a catalog with essays by McCormick and Tom McGlynn.
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“When painting on scraps of metal, Castrucci evokes a temporal uncertainty that debilitates the monumentality at hand,” says McCormick. “It is heavy metal played with the volume off, hardcore slowed down to a waltz.”
On view will be the full range of Castrucci’s work—his signature paintings on metal, like the rude algae of time; paintings that channel his lifelong love for fishing; and other works that emphasize art-making beyond decoration. Rooted in community, the show also presents Castrucci’s collaborations with John Fekner—including the large stenciled works We the People and NY is OK—and pieces created with NOC 167, Tracy 168, Nadia Coen, Lee Quiñones, Alexandra Rojas, and Renzo Castrucci. “Art sometimes becomes a necessity,” says Castrucci, “and art as life is a necessary form of resistance.”
Your House is Mine by Castrucci and Nadia Coen is an oversized artists’ book with 33 signed silk-screen prints. A collection of images and texts defining and expressing the broad and essential issue of housing on the Lower East Side, the work as a whole creates a statement about the force of “art as a means of resistance.” The book is critical of the status quo. Provoking or inciting the public, it offers objective statements or alternative solutions to authoritative city planning.
An amazing array of groundbreaking artists worked with Castrucci to make silk screens for the book, including David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Lady Pink, and Lee Quiñones. From each silk screen, 150 prints were made to be wheat-pasted on city walls, and 150 were printed on 50-pound Mohawk vellum for Your House is Mine, which was designed by Castrucci, his brother Paul, and Coen. The book also presents contributions from figures like Miguel Algarín, Chris Burden, Martha Cooper, Daze, John Farris, Allen Ginsberg, David Hammons, Hettie Jones, Cookie Mueller, Public Enemy, Adam Purple, Bimbo Rivas, and Andrés Serrano.
Fracktured Lives is a massive 25-pound book, bound in sheet metal, which comprehensively takes on the subject of fracking. The project was created to protest and ultimately ban this polluting practice that forcibly extracts natural gas.
The book features 50 screen-prints by a diverse and intergenerational selection of artists—a veritable exhibition in codex form. Produced between 2010–2020, 177 artists, writers, and “fracktivists” contributed, notably including Joseph Beuys, Andrew Castrucci, Sue Coe, John Fekner, Yoko Ono, Alexandra Rojas, David Sandlin, and Walter Sipser.
Deploying a range of aesthetics between high and lowbrow art forms, the posters and the ideas behind them were collectively brainstormed and came to fruition at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where Castrucci and his students started the Dirty Graphics collective.

About Bullet Space
Located at East Third Street in Loisaida, Bullet Space is an act of resistance, a community-access center for images, words, and sounds of the neighborhood. Founded in the winter of 1985, it was part of the squatter movement and reconstructed with or without the formal sanction of the city—invisible officialdom. The ground floor of the building is open—like a bulletin. “Bullet” first originated from the name-brand of heroin sold on the block—which was known as the “bullet block”—encompassing the accepted American ethic of violence. “Bullet Americana” is art form as weaponry.
About Andrew Castrucci
Andrew Castrucci was born in 1961 and raised in the proximity of West Hoboken and Cliffside Park, spanning New Jersey’s industrial expanses of the lower Hudson River.
From 1984–86, he ran the A&P Gallery with his brother Paul. In 1986, Castrucci co-founded Bullet Space, an urban artist collaborative. Creating a print shop there, he was instrumental in producing over 10,000 silk screen posters by a wide range of artists, writers, and thinkers. Castrucci curates shows and publishes artist’s books, most recently the Bulletin newspaper edition #10, and Shoot the Pump, co-curated with Lee Quiñones and Alexandra Rojas.
Castrucci co-published the Your House is Mine 1988–92 book and poster project, which has been hailed as one of the most important artist’s book editions of the 20th century by Marvin Taylor, head of the Fales Library collection of New York University. He also published Fracktured Lives, a 10-year project dealing with hydro fracking in upstate New York and its global impact.
For 20 years (1986–2006), he ran artist workshops through Healing Arts Initiative (HAI) at Wards Island, the Fort Washington Men’s Shelter, a Rockland County juvenile detention center, and a correctional facility in the Bronx where he discovered the now well-known artist Melvin Way.
Castrucci has been working on a film, The River Speaks: Urban Angling in the East River, where life becomes art. His other films include Struck by the Hand (2000), The Resistance of Memory (2005), America Berserk (2008), and Ninety Degrees North (2018).
In 1997, in collaboration with his students at the School of Visual Arts Printshop, he started the collective Dirty Graphics, which continues to this day, having printed thousands of silk screen posters.
Castrucci’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; State Museum of Berlin; Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands; and the Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections Division in Washington, D.C.; among others.

The Full Moon Show with John Pizza: Beech Nuts
2021-10-20 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Visit Howlarts.org from Midnight to Midnight to watch the Full Moon Show!
It’s fall. All the fruits,
all the berries are ripe.
The beech tree is masting
and dropping tonight.
Seeds lying dormant,
then reaching out,
In hopes that crisp winter
helps them all sprout.
Join John Pizza for Beech Nuts, a preparatory puppet show about fall and its flashy display. It’s our last chance before winter to let the roots go down and the leaves go up…
John Pizza is a performer, builder, and drawer. He uses trash and thrift-store detritus scrounged in his Brooklyn neighborhood to tell stories and make his shows. He loves the macabre and the mushy sweet. His sculptures are performative, and his performances involve sculptures—an object theatre of weird surprises.

Body as Playground, Body as Battleground: Sexuality and the Female Gaze
2021-10-15 19:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Organized and curated by Tessa Hughes-Freeland with co-curator Johanna St Michaels
Howl! Happening is pleased to present Body as Playground, Body as Battleground: Sexuality and the Female Gaze; a selection of films chosen by Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Johanna St Michaels depicting varied interpretations of sexuality and the body through the eyes of female filmmakers (60 min.) The evening continues with a panel discussion and short performance by St Michaels, Spilled Milk, about the consequences of beauty—beauty as commodity, bodily maturity, and female sexuality.
St Michaels and Hughes-Freeland will be part of the panel discussion, as well as MM Serra, filmmaker and director of the New American Cinema Group aka Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York City. This event is the continuation of an exhibition co-curated by Hughes-Freeland and St Michaels in Gothenburg, Sweden, in February 2020.
Extending from the time of the 60s sexual revolution to the current decade, the films illustrate how an array of aspects of sexuality is represented in different forms and cinematic styles by women filmmakers including MM Serra, Beth B, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson, Johanna St Michaels, Maria Beatty, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.
About Tessa Hughes-Freeland
About Johanna St Michaels
About MM Serra
This program is made possible by the New York City Artist Corps.

Mike DeCapite’s Jacket Weather
2021-10-10 15:00 - 17:00 | Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street, New York City, NY, 10003, United States
Publication Party and Reading
Jacket Weather is a tender love story that blossoms like a rose in the concrete of a city always on the verge. DeCapite’s effortless prose stirs echoes of certain New York School poets, of ‘cold rosy dawn,’ night streets illuminated by great bars and the music streaming out of them—the endless possibilities of a place where, despite persistent evidence to the contrary, ‘love is the heart of everything’. —Max Blagg, author of Slow Dazzle and Loud Money

Howl! Arts is pleased to present an afternoon with friend and colleague, writer Mike DeCapite, in honor of his highly praised first novel, Jacket Weather published by Soft Skull Press.
Nick Hornby meets Patti Smith, Mean Streets meets A Visit From the Goon Squad in this quintessential New York City story about two people who knew each other in the downtown music scene in the 1980s, meet again in the present day, and fall in love.
Mike knew June in New York’s downtown music scene in the eighties. Back then, he thought she was “the living night—all the glamour and potential of a New York night when you’re 25.” Now he’s twice divorced and happy to be alone—so happy he’s writing a book about it. Then he meets June again. “And here she was with a raincoat over the back of the chair talking about getting a divorce and saying she’s done with relationships. Her ice-calm eyes are the same, the same her glory of curls.”
Jacket Weather is about awakening to love—dizzying, all-consuming, worldview-shaking love—when it’s least expected. It’s also about remaining alert to today’s pleasures—exploring the city, observing the seasons, listening to the guys at the gym—while time is slipping away. Told in fragments of narrative, reveries, recipes, bits of conversation and snatches of weather, the book collapses a decade in Mike and June’s life and shifts a reader to a glowing nostalgia for the present.
Poetic and compulsively readable, Jacket Weather invents a new genre—call it lyrical realism. Mike DeCapite casts a cool but affectionate eye on New York in the 2010s, as it lives on despite having become a replica of itself. Like Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex, Jacket Weather traces the lives of those who’ve stayed on after the party. It’s a love story improbably set at the beginning of late middle age, and it’s also a story of cities, survival, adaptation, desire, and a celebration of the small pleasures we invent and discover to offset unavoidable loss. —Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker and Summer of Hate
Under the banner of Sparkle Street Books, Mike DeCapite has published the novel Through the Windshield, the chapbook Creamsicle Blue, and the short-prose collection Radiant Fog. Cuz Editions published his story Sitting Pretty, later anthologized in The Italian American Reader. DeCapite grew up in Cleveland, lived in London and San Francisco, and has spent most of his creative life in New York City, where he now resides.
Jacket Weather is a beautiful, evocative account of a late-in-life love sprung into being in early twenty-first-century Manhattan, characters tossed forth from the aftermath of the punk rock seventies. Protagonist Mike spins cryptic, poetic observations of his daily life, strikes random and true chords, pen as Telecaster. His plaintive adoration of June, the love of his life, is painted with enduring mystery and great respect. —Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth, author of Road Movies and JNRLS80s
