SHADOW/CASTERS

Hirshhorn and Transformer Celebrate Summer Solstice With One-Night-Only Outdoor Performance Features Four D.C. Artists in Conjunction With Capital Pride

Saturday, June 10, 2018
7:30 - 11:00 PM
$18 - Tickets Sold Here

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCES

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will partner with local arts organization Transformer to present Shadow/Casters, an after-hours performance art event on the Hirshhorn’s outdoor plaza Saturday, June 10, 7:30–11 p.m. Guests will be invited to explore the museum during special extended hours, enjoy a cash bar and music on the plaza, and take in four site-specific performances that creatively explore abundance, transition, and community through contemporary storytelling and ritual.

Coinciding with Transformer’s 15th anniversary and the approaching summer solstice, Shadow/Casters features one-night-only performances by Washington-based artists Jason Barnes (Pussy Noir), Alexandra ‘Rex’ Delafkaran, Kunj and Hoesy Corona. Music by Ebony Dumas aka DJ Natty Boom, with drumming by Devin Ocampo (the EFFECTS, Warm Sun) and Jerry Busher (Fugazi, French Toast).

Shadow/Casters will take audiences on a visual journey through culture, time, and space with a variety of immersive performance styles, including dance and drumming. The evening culminates as the moon emerges, with a three-story tall performance that transforms the Hirshhorn’s iconic round building into a physical shadow theater and creates a spectacular display of light and shadow, designed to be experienced by the crowds gathered below.  

Shadow/Casters is presented in conjunction with D.C.’s annual Capital Pride festival, held June 8–11, and in partnership with Smithsonian GLOBE (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Employees). 

The evening is curated by Transformer’s Executive and Artistic Director Victoria Reis.

Shadow/Casters joins the Hirshhorn’s 2017–18 schedule of diverse contemporary art that reflects global conversations that shape history, politics and culture, including work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, German artist Markus Lüpertz, Swiss artist Nicolas Party, and American artists Yoko Ono, Theaster Gates and Mark Bradford.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jason Barnes 
Born and raised in the D.C. area, Jason Barnes mixed his background in music, theater, art, and fashion in New York and Paris to develop his Pussy Noir character, an androgynous entity that first became popular in nightclubs and later was featured in art galleries around the city. Barnes continues to culture his act, in which the audience is invited to have a full sensory experience.

Alexandra "Rex" Delafkaran
Alexandra "Rex" Delafkaran is an interdisciplinary artist from San Francisco with a background in dance, who uses movement and endurance to explore intimacy and identities. She has performed and exhibited her work in cities around the country while working in arts administration. She continues to perform and exhibit, making sculpture out of Red Dirt Studios.

KUNJ
Questioning and rebelling against institutional ideas of race, gender and queerness, Kunj uses ritual performance and structure to explore the notion of no-identity versus new-identity. He received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and studio art from the University of Maryland, and has performed at Grace Exhibition Space in New York, EMP Collective in Maryland and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Hoesy Corona
Hoesy Corona is a multidisciplinary artist and the founding co-director of Labbodies, a visual arts organization that creates opportunities for artists working in the arena of performance art. Corona’s unapologetically colorful, sculptural and performance-based works have appeared at The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, The Queens Museum, Visarts, Transformer DC, Glass House Project, Kern Gallery, Haggerty Museum, The Peale Museum, Panoply Performance Laboratory and The Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, among others. Corona is the recipient of a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant administered by The Contemporary.

ABOUT THE HIRSHHORN

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn is located prominently on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. With nearly 12,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, mixed-media installations, works on paper and new media works, its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Hirshhorn presents diverse exhibitions and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all, 364 days a year. For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu.