ADULT CONTEMPORARY is a mobile reading and performance series founded in 2013. We ask artists, academics, performers, and writers to “read” in whatever way they see fit; to use the platform to experiment in form; to give us words, movements, sounds, or textures. Adult Contemporary is a salon-style site of experimentation, genre collapse, and extra-ordinary conversation. Our events are always free and open to the public. All events are curated by Katherine Brewer Ball & Svetlana Kitto. ADULT CONTEMPORARY presents multimedia performances by Justin Allen, Amelia Bande, and Savannah Knoop. Curated and narrated by Katherine Brewer Ball and Svetlana Kitto. Cocktails provided at 431 Fishermans Path (Yellow House). Come beach ready for the day. BOFFO to provide limited umbrellas. Picnics encouraged.
Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York City. Her writing has been featured in New York, Guernica, the New York Times, Interview, and BOMB, among other publications. Since 2013, she’s curated the reading and performance series, Adult Contemporary, which has created programming for Hauser & Wirth, Performa, Printed Matter, CANADA gallery, and more. As an oral historian, she’s contributed oral histories to archives and exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Museum of Arts and Design and NYPL for Performing Arts. In addition to freelance writing and interviewing, she works as a writer and editor for the gallery Gordon Robichaux in NYC.
Katherine Brewer Ball (b. 1980, Cambridge, MA) is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department at Wesleyan University, where she previously served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities from 2013-2014. They are also faculty at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Brewer Ball earned their PhD in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013. Their research and teaching interests include theater, visual culture, Black and Indigenous thought, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. They are currently finishing a book project, The Only Way Out Is In: The Racial & Sexual Performance of Escape, which traces contemporary literature, theater, and performance works by Glenn Ligon, Tony Kushner, Sharon Hayes, and Junot Díaz. They are also working on a second book project tentatively titled Unsettling Art Criticism. Their writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Artforum, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Criticism, RECAPS, Little Joe, Bomb Magazine, Dirty Looks, ASAP/Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and by BOFFO and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. In addition to teaching, Brewer Ball curates performance and art events, including the NYC performance salon, Adult Contemporary, and publishes creative nonfiction.
