NYC Tapestry: Home as Refuge

Laurie Anderson is a writer, director, visual artist, and vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, experimental music, and technology. Her recording career, launched by “O Superman” (1981) includes the soundtrack to her feature films Home of the Brave (1986) and Life on a String (2001).

Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Borealis Festival, Seattle; SITE Santa Fe; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Ende Tymes Festival, New York; The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Biennial, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Carnegie International, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community.

Emel Mathlouthi is a Tunisian-American singer-songwriter, composer, performer, and producer whose music has crossed time, countries, and continents.

In 2008 she fled Tunis after her music was banned in Tunisia and she was prevented from performing in the country. With creative freedom in Paris, she pursued writing and perfecting her protest songs, mainly voice, guitar, North African percussion, and cello, later adding electronic textures which made the body of her first studio album, Kelmti Horra (My Word Is Free).

One of the most exciting bands to come out of the wild late-night scene in the East Village of New York City, Forró in the Dark combines the driving dance rhythms of forró from Northeastern Brazil with a melting pot of rock, jazz, reggae, psychedelia, folk and more.

Wang Guowei is a performer on the Chinese two-string fiddle erhu and a composer. He studied at the Shanghai Conservatory and was concertmaster and soloist with the Shanghai Traditional Orchestra. Becoming Artistic Director of Music From China in 1996, he has been hailed as a “master of the erhu” by the American press.

Five-time Grammy Award winner Angélique Kidjo is one of the greatest artists in international music today, a creative force with sixteen albums to her name.

Michael Mwenso is a bandleader, co-founder of Electric Root, Emmy Award-winning creator, curator and creative artist.

Mwenso and the Shakes is an electrifying musical collective that seamlessly blends jazz, funk, and soul into a captivating sonic experience.

thingNY is a collective of composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006, thingNY performs experimental works created by the core ensemble – alejandro t. acierto, Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Dave Ruder, and Jeffrey Young – and by adventurous composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Robert Ashley, Rick Burkhardt, Pauline Oliveros, Joseph White, and Julius Eastman.