POW POW POWER UP (2022-)

AN INSTALLATION-PERFORMANCE [45]

POW POW POWER UP: Someday is Now is an on-going series of site-specific installation-performances that use an AI-powered muse, inspired by the artist, educator, and social justice advocate Corita Kent, to question monuments as critical cultural objects. 

A research-based collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Liss Lafleur, POW POW uses Kent’s archive as a lens to engage contemporary social issues like reproductive rights, the climate crisis, or gun violence through the activation of spaces with music, sound, light, projection, and materials. The first of these temporary monuments, “greenfingers, 1969” – a sunset processional for chorus and electronics – was presented in 2022 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Audience members participated alongside performers by parading through the Grand Foyer holding picket signs designed and printed for the event while immersed in sound produced from both Millennium Stages at far ends of the iconic space. The piece was inspired by the image below, “green fingers” by Corita Kent, as well as the series of serigraph prints she called “Heroes and Sheroes,” which were made between 1968 and 1969. Temporary monuments combine public art, site-specificity, and audience participation to evoke joy around difficult social issues. This installment, documented in the photographs below, was performed by the DC chamber chorus Artifice, with support from the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, CA.