The Shed At Hudson Yards Is Making New Performance Art Available On Mondays For Free

If you’ve been missing the opportunity to go to art shows over the past few months The Shed at Hudson Yards is hosting a free digital art show on its websites each Monday, with the content swapping out every other week to feature new artists.

The ongoing digital series is called Up Close.

Monday a new instalment of the program drops at 8am AEST by Troy Antony and Jerome Ellis. Unlike some of the other installments that can be enjoyed whenever you want to participate, the duo will be performing “a live virtual music-ritual for mourning, communion, and healing” via Zoom. You’ll need to register for the event prior to it happening. Registration ends at 5pm ET. If you miss it; however, documentation of the event will be made available via the event’s page on The Shed’s site for future visitors.

Here’s a description of the event

In PASSING NOTES, Troy Anthony and Jerome Ellis create a virtual sanctuary on Zoom and invite us to participate in a collaborative ritual loosely based on the seven stages of grief. Together, the two have composed original music and text, as if passing notes to each other at school, in order to make a space where we can honour the healers in our communities, address the racialized and gendered injustices exposed by the coronavirus, mourn those who have died during the COVID-19 crisis, and celebrate new habits, practices, and relationships that have been born during this time.

PASSING NOTES arose out of a conversation between the artists and The Shed’s program team shortly after Ellis’s grandfather passed on April 4, 2020. Like many families, Ellis’s relatives have not been able to hold a funeral due to restrictions on gatherings, and Anthony and Ellis began to ask themselves how they could intentionally use Zoom’s digital platform to bring grieving loved ones together. Inspired by sources including Assata Shakur’s poem “Affirmation,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler’s On Grief and Grieving, and the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” PASSING NOTES is intended to be experienced as a live, participatory event, making space to share grief in real time while separated from each other. Documentation of the ritual will be added to this page after the event as digital artifacts so that future visitors might build on the healing power of the work.

Beyond tonight’s performance, several other commissions from the series are still available on The Shed’s website.

There’s this one, that takes a look at street dance from the confines of home:

And another exploring how social distancing and the American dream are changing in urban communities:

If you’ve been missing performance art over the past few months, or if you just want to check out something new, the collection of commissions is worth a look. And if you just want to use your quarantine time to learn a little more about art, MoMA is offering a bunch for free right now through Coursera, including one on strategies for engaging with art.