Organized by Andrea Grover

John James Audubon’s New York farm, Minniesland, once occupied 40 wilderness acres of what is now the Washington Heights Neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. This cinematic tribute to the universal pastime of bird watching is a nod to the farmland that once comprised this region, Audubon’s life work with birds, and the timeless current of artists’ studies of wildlife. This screening will showcase short films and videos on birds and birding in a variety of genres including documentary, experimental, animation, found footage, historical and silent films.

Andrea Grover is the founder of the Aurora Picture Show. A Houston-based non-profit organization dedicated to championing short, artist-made film and video projects falling outside the realm of conventional moviemaking, the Aurora Picture Show organizes screenings in a variety of non-traditional venues in its home state of Texas.

A project by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles will create a baroque site-specific work around the possibilities of silence as central to the syntax and punctuation of everyday life. A diverse group of poets will present short pieces at various locations on the outdoor plaza of Audubon Terrace, where they will be joined by a group of students from PS4. Also accompanied by dancers, Buddhists, an opera singer, and a life drawing class, this mute and active gathering will demonstrate and celebrate the collective power of silence and the capacity of an unvoiced poem to serve the communal purposes of public life. Participants include poets Charles Bernstein, Stephanie Gray, Tim Liu, Monica De la Torre, and Rachel Zolf, dancer-choreographer Christine Elmo, The Village Zendo, and soprano Juliana Snapper.

Eileen Myles is among the ranks of the officially restless, a poet who writes fiction (Chelsea Girls, Cool for You), an art writer and journalist whose essays and reviews have appeared in Art Forum, and Book Forum, The Believer, Parkett, and The Nation and a performer and libretticist whose opera “Hell” (with composer Michael Webster) was performed on both coasts in 2004 and again in 2006. In the 80s she was Artistic Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In ‘92 she conducted an openly female write in campaign for President. From 2002-07 she directed the writing program at UC, San Diego and is currently Professor Emeritus of Writing & Literature. The Importance of Being Iceland, a collection of writings on art, culture, and queerness for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant will be out in July from Semiotext(e)/MIT. She lives in New York.

The program will include a wide range of artists and feature a new work by Ulrike Müller films.

Ulrike Müller is an artist living and working in New York and Vienna, Austria. She has worked with the queer feminist collective LTTR, is the editor of Work the Room: A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006), and currently serves as visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts' MFA in Visual Arts program. Recent exhibitions include Empfindung at Augarten Contemporary in Vienna (2009), Two of Three Things I Know About Her at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, and Unmonumental Audio at the New Museum in New York (both 2008).

In 2007 Dia Art Foundation and The Hispanic Society of America initiated a multi-year collaboration to present commissions and projects by contemporary artists within the context of the Society’s historical collection. This partnership provides a venue for Dia Art Foundation's exhibitions and public and educational programs while a permanent home for these initiatives in New York City is developed.

For more information, please visit Dia Art Foundation’s website.