Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker: An Afternoon of Art, Music & Dance Celebrating the Diversity of NYC

Join us on Saturday, October 5th from 1-5pm at Broadway Plaza, North of Union Square for the opening of Coco Fusco’s Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker, on view on LinkNYC screens around the park.

The celebration will include a special viewing of Fusco’s video, a performance by Xenoduo with A Mobile Home, the launch of Noah Fisher’s newspaper, New York 2044: Issue 2, focused on immigration (in collaboration with Jacob Cohen, Luna Fischer, and Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga’s esfuerzo project), and a musical performance by Reverend Billy Talen & the Stop Shopping Choir!

In the lead up to the national election and as part of More Art’s 20th Anniversary Year, Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco will launch a video for the ubiquitous LinkNYC screens focused on the public perception of newly arrived migrants in New York City.

Broadly known for her interdisciplinary art practice that over the last several decades has been concerned with the themes of colonialism, power, race, gender, and history, Fusco’s work addresses the ways that immigration to New York – which has been constant since the city’s founding – is recast as a crisis that threatens city life to serve conservative political purposes.

New York City was built by immigrants and its vibrant culture is composed of contributions from the many cultures that coexist and mingle here. Forty percent of the city’s population is foreign-born. Immigrants bolster the city’s workforce, making crucial contributions to the city’s economy, gastronomy, linguistic diversity, and street life. Our city’s guarantee of universal housing and universal education is under threat by those who seek to demonize and problematize the presence of immigrants, overlooking the reality that New York regularly receives tens of thousands of immigrants annually and succeeds in integrating them.

By interspersing historic images with contemporary photographs Fusco’s work draws attention to the continuities between past and present immigration to call into question the negative characterization of migrants as a destabilizing force.

Fusco’s video will be on view at 10 link screens around Union Square, Manhattan, from October 5, 2024 to November 5, 2024, the day of the general election. Click here to learn more about Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker.

Xenoduo is a creative collective between visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). Since 2017, the duo has been collaborating on installation and performance projects exploring diasporic imagination, future folklore, and the nuanced art of cross-cultural and transatlantic homemaking.

Xinan Ran received her MFA from Hunter College (2022), and BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator and an aspirational set designer for new theaters.

Miguel Alejandro Castillo holds a bachelor’s in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Miguel is one of the “25 performers to watch out for in 2024” by Dance Magazine. Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning, Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. Castillo is a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna in 2021, a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist in 2022-2023, and an Abrons Arts Center artist in residence for 2024-2025.

Xenoduo’s project A Mobile Home was selected as More Art’s 2024 Engaging Artists Commission.

Noah Fischer is a Brooklyn-based maker, performer, and educator whose work shifted from the gallery to the streets; from installations into stage design and performance, organizing, drawing, and writing. Noah has contributed to public discourse over the role cultural institutions play within capitalism and the debts that affect creative communities. He has exhibited in museums internationally with and without permission. As a founding member of Occupy Museums, a member of Gulf Labor Coalition, and a longtime collaborator with Berlin-based theater group andcompany&Co, he balances collective and solo practice. He has participated in the Berlin Biennale, documenta, Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. Fischer teaches art at Parsons and NYU. He is currently finishing a science ficton novel about direct democracy.

The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the mid 1990s by actor and playwright, William Talen.

The Reverend Billy character debuted on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998, outside the Disney Store, where he proclaimed Mickey Mouse to be the anti-Christ. He was arrested multiple times outside the Disney Store, where he duct-tapped Mickey Mouse to a cross. Reverend Billy’s sermons decried the evils of consumerism and the racism of sweatshop labor, and what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit in Rudolph Giuliani‘s New York.

The Reverend Billy character isn’t so much a parody of a preacher, as a preacher motif used to blur the lines between performance and religious experience. “It’s definitely a church service,” Talen explained but, he added, it’s “a political rally, it’s theater, it’s all three, it’s none of them.” Alisa Solomon, the theater critic at the Village Voice, said of Reverend Billy’s persona, “The collar is fake, the calling is real.” Along with the Church of Stop Shopping, they have been referred to by academics as “performance activism,” “carnivalesque protest,” and “artivists”

The Stop Shopping Choir is a radical performance community based in New York City. They come to the Choir from many different creative and activist backgrounds. They have evolved a very particular sound and performance experience from the synthesis of our lived experience. They are grounded in the work of Justice and in service to the Earth. They love to Sing together.

Supporters

Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.