Miami, FL. Jan. 8, 2018 – Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) is pleased to announce Bride of the White Widow, an interactive multimedia performance by acclaimed art collective My Barbarian. The audience will be led on an outrageous musical journey through sea voyages, the Age of Exploration, colonialism, and global warming, complete with song, dance, participatory contests with prizes, and the group’s trademark brand of piercing humor. Bride of the White Widow will have only one performance at 8 p.m., on Saturday, Jan. 20, at the Miami Light Project at The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse.
Bride of the White Widow asks, who put the gold in the Golden Age? The three members of My Barbarian – Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade – playfully and critically wrestle with that question in a surreal, post-colonial tale about the doomed crew of the White Widow, seventeenth-century Dutch sailors lost in the so-called New World. A show within a show, Bride of the White Widow is an interactive play, exploring contemporary issues of cultural appropriation, globalism, and environmental collapse through music, choreography, and games with the audience. The performance at the Light Box in Miami explores My Barbarian’s 16-year journey as a performance collective.
Working at the intersection of visual art, theater, and critical practice, My Barbarian uses performance to theatricalize social problems and imagine ways of being together. Founded in Los Angeles in 2000, the group’s work moves through different modes that prepare for, present, and represent live performance: music composition, plays, and other texts; costumes, masks, puppets and sets; video; and drawings and prints. The group has performed and exhibited widely in art, music, theater, and public spaces, while maintaining a focus on the provocation of theatricality in the visual-art context. My Barbarian has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum and Participant, Inc., New York; Museo El Eco, Mexico City; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Human Resources, Los Angeles; Gallery 400, University of Chicago; Transformer Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and Yaffo 23, Jerusalem. The group has been included in the Whitney Biennial, two Performa Biennials, two California Biennials, the Montreal Biennial, and the Baltic Triennial.
Bride of the White Widow is part of Living Together, an exciting cross-disciplinary series of programs that will galvanize Miami audiences with thoughtful and challenging performances and exhibitions that draw from art, music, theater, politics, and poetry. Spread across the city at a wide array of venues, the series features performances, exhibitions, film and video screenings, readings, talks, and workshops that will reflect the cultural, social, and political realities of how we live now. The series seeks to find new ways to think about civic space and citizenship, to instigate actions and conversations that may help us to reimagine our cities and our lives.
Living Together will take place at various sites across the Greater Miami Area from January to September 2018 and include works by 17 of the most acclaimed national and international artists, art collectives, musicians, and writers. Events in the series will be produced by MOAD MDC in collaboration with a range of other Miami institutions. Most events will be free and open to the public. Living Together is curated by Rina Carvajal, executive director and chief curator of MOAD MDC, and Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator based in New York.
Bride of the White Widow is produced in partnership with the Miami Light Project at The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse. The Living Together series is made possible through the generous support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council; the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council.
WHAT: My Barbarian: Bride of the White Widow
WHEN: Saturday, Jan. 20, at 8 p.m.
WHERE: Miami Light Project at The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse
404 N.W. 26th St.
Tickets: $15 general admission; $5 students with ID; free for MDC students with ID. To purchase tickets and for more information, visit http://www.mdcmoad.org.
MOAD Press Contacts: JWI PR—Jessica Wade Pfeffer: 305-804-8424, jessica@jwipr.com; or Juliana Gutierrez: 305-991-4259, juliana@jwipr.com.