Ander Mikalson

Art in General presents Scores for a Black Hole, a New Commission and the first major solo exhibition by Ander Mikalson, following acclaimed performances by the artist at The High Line, The Kitchen and Queens Museum in New York City.

Across her work, Mikalson uses performance and collaboration to make space for embodied and participatory forms of knowledge. With Scores for a Black Hole, events both quotidian and profound unfold daily around a seven-foot hole. Big enough to fall into, this void serves as a site for collective action and shared experience, exerting a powerful gravitational field.

Numerous collaborators invited by Mikalson—from artists to actors to novelists to children to yogis and more—enact scripted yet unrehearsed responses to the black hole, allowing for the spontaneous, unforeseen and unrepeatable to take shape. Forty-three hand-made, black-and-white drawings by Mikalson line the walls, functioning at once as instruction, archive and poem.

Day-by-day as each score is performed, the meaning, nature and function of the exhibition itself shifts dramatically and unpredictably, with no two visits yielding the same experience. Over the course of six weeks, the artist and her host of collaborators perform actions that ask us to contemplate the role of the human inside our current political, economic and social order which seems to disavow it at every turn. Together we face a reflective void and in it encounter the immediacy of our own experience, be it thrilling, ordinary, or something as yet unknown.

Scores for a Black Hole is created and performed in collaboration with Irina Arnaut, Karen Azoulay, Taylor Baldwin, Jesus Benavente, Charlotte Calvert, Gabo Camnitzer, Serena Chang, Iris Cushing, Carey Denniston, John Dombroski, Katie Gaydos, Aric Grauke, Ariadne Greif, Adam Henry, Leah Herder-Kuehn, Madeline Hollander, Loie Hollowell, Kent Ishimoto, Baseera Khan, Amy Lincoln, Sarah Loveland Gill, Gloria Maximo, Sondra Meszaros, Skyler Mikalson, Ryan Mrozowski, Ilse Murdock, Roderick O’Toole, Jean-Jacques du Plessis, Molly Prentiss, Becky Sellinger, Tom Simon, Barb Smith, Nikolai Smith, Samara Speller, Alina Tenser, Kyle Toby, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Lumin Wakoa, Chris Wiley, Marisa Williamson, and Ariel Yelen.

Ander Mikalson received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, a BA from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her performances have been shown at The Kitchen (New York, NY), The High Line (New York, NY), Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY), The Art, Design & Architecture Museum (Santa Barbara, CA), Kate Werble Gallery (New York, NY), Queens Museum (Queens, NY), Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia, PA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, ME), and Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm, Sweden). Her projects have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2016), the Art Matters Foundation Grant (2013), College Art Association Professional-Development Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2012), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship (2011). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum (2015-18), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2016), and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2018). In 2019 she will be a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow in Washington, DC.