Artist Talk with Silky Shoemaker

13 Front Street,Frenchtown NJ 08825

02 April, 2022

Description

Silky Shoemaker will introduce the Artist Ancestors in the new McDonnell Theater Please join us for an artist talk with Silky Shoemaker, whose 40 Artist Ancestors, portraits of iconic cultural figures, have come back from the great beyond to inspire our community with the examples of their brave, original, and idiosyncratic lives. The Artist Ancestors were commissioned by ArtYard at the start of the pandemic to illuminate figures who inspire the ArtYard ethos while enforcing social distancing in the new McDonnell Theater. Visitors will have the opportunity to enjoy a concert, reading, film screening, or selfie beside departed luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Tolstoy, and Agnes Varda. Shoemaker is a painter and performance artist from Central Pennsylvania now living in San Francisco who explores queer community in its many despairs and ecstasies, solitudes, strangeness, and epic iterations. She is the creator of the Queer Icons: ArtYard’s inaugural contribution to the Frenchtown Pride celebration. The Icons later struck out on their own when they migrated during two Covid induced gallery-closures to nearby shop storefronts and a local school. Shoemaker has a rare capacity to capture in her deft portraiture something more compelling, funny, empathic and insightful than mere likeness. Shoemaker will share her evolution as an artist, from her beginnings as a professional musical theatre kid in Annie to her life as a member of the anarcho-vaudevillian Shaboom performance collective. She’ll also discuss the root of her process and the political circumstances that are inevitably bound to the creative in her practice. This event will take place in the McDonnell Theater among the Artist Ancestors. Selections from the Queer Icons collections will also be on display in the theater’s lobby. ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. We are an interdisciplinary alternative contemporary art center comprised of an exhibition space, theater, and residency program, dedicated to presenting transformative artwork, fostering unexpected collaborations, and incubating original new work. Address: 13 Front Street, Frenchtown NJ Email: [email protected] Phone: (908) 996-5018