Watermill Center’s Annual Summer Benefit and Auction returns on July 28th for its 25th year. TIME BOMB: The 25th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit & Auction will be held at the Foundation’s Water Mill, NY location. This event will honor the late Pierre Bergé who was the co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, a founding benefactor of The Watermill Center and a close friend of Robert Wilson.
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, The Watermill Center invites over 1,000 guests to experience a world conceived by Founder and Artistic Director Robert Wilsonalongside more than 100 international artists representing a wide range of artistic disciplines. The evening will double as a retrospective of Watermill’s vibrant past remounting a selection of work by alumni of The Center’s programs from the past quarter-century.
TIME BOMB takes as its central theme this year looking to “the future” and will feature installations and performances conceived and produced by participants in this year’s International Summer Program. The Summer Program provides young and emerging artists with the unique opportunity to observe the performance methodologies of Robert Wilson and his collaborators; to forge relationships with artists from a broad range of experience levels and disciplines; to develop networks of US and international professional contacts; and to investigate what it means to be a “global artist.”
This year, the Watermill Center’s Summer Program brings together over 70 artists from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States of America.
Curated by Noah Khoshbinand Ivan Cheng, highlight guest artists performing and showing work at the summer benefit include but are not limited to:
- Oliver Beer (United Kingdom), who creates performances in which spectators take part by the mere fact of their presence, as well as sculpture and video that highlight this subtle relationship. [Watermill alumni]
- Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, Carrie Mae Weems, Wangechi Mutu [among others] (Mixed) Word on the Street, an ongoing text based art initiative consisting of original political and poetic banners created by renowned female artists and writers in collaboration with female refugee fabricators based in Texas.
- Bianca Casady (France, by way of Hawaii), who along with her sister Sierra formed CocoRosiein 2003, a band whose music is described as “New Weird America” and incorporates elements of pop, blues, opera, electronica, and hip hop. They are frequent collaborators of Robert Wilson. [Watermill alumni]
- Dawn Kasper (U.S.A.), an interdisciplinary artist (performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, sound), whose improvisational work – using costume, comedy, gesture, repetition, music, and monologue, creates what she refers to as “living sculptures” and often derives from a “fascination with existentialism, subjects of vulnerability, desire, and the construction of meaning.”
- NoodleRice (China and U.S.A.) is a young internationally recognized artist collective founded by Yao Zhang in collaboration with Liang Guo, both born and raised in west China and now are traveling and working between United States and China. NoodleRice was first formed as a film collective and now works with both cinema and live performance, plus the area in-between. [Watermill alumni]
- OSGEMEOS (Brazil), identical twin brothers whose graffiti became influential in developing Brazil’s style beginning in the late ‘80s will mount a large scale mirrored mural work. [Watermill alumni]
- Reynolds Reynolds (U.S.A., based in Berlin), an award-winning filmmaker influenced early by philosophy and science and working primarily with 16mm as an art medium; his depiction of people often makes us aware of the small frames we use to understand reality.
- Georgia Sagri (Greece and U.S.A.), a performance and mixed media artist whose work is primarily influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles; and by issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organization. She is the founder of the audio-only magazine FORTÉ, and SALOON, an ongoing curatorial project.
- Tassy Thompson (Norway), an artist and designer who is now an award-winning natural playground designer; currently writing on ‘playful environments’ for the Venice Biennale for a book for Routledge. [Watermill alumni]
Described as an ‘enchanted forest’ and ‘performance art extravaganza,’ the Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit unites the worlds of art, performance, music, theatre, design, architecture and fashion into an immersive experience. All Benefit proceeds will support The Watermill Center’s year-round Artist Residency and Education Programs. Generous support has been provided by presenting sponsor Van Cleef & Arpels and supporting sponsors VCA, Karma Automotive, Tequila Don Julio, Mouton Rothschild, Peroni. For more information, please visit http://www.watermillcenter.org/TIMEBOMB.
About The Watermill Center
Founded by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson in 1992, The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts supporting young and emerging artists through its year-round Artist Residency Program and International Summer Program, as well as Education Programs, exhibitions and events open to the public. Throughout the year, The Watermill Center offers tours of the Center’s eight-and-a-half acres of grounds and sculpture gardens, and 20,000+ square-foot building, which houses a library and a significant collection of contemporary and ancient global art and artifacts. For more information, please visit www.watermillcenter.org.
