Newsletter Archive

push picks 045: rachel chanoff

Rachel Chanoff has been working in performing arts and film for 40 years and is the founder and director of THE OFFICE performing arts + film, her New York City-based programming, consulting, and production company. She is the Curator of Performing Arts and Film for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Consultant to the Feature Film Program for the Sundance Institute, Curator of The New York Jewish Film Festival and The Margaret Mead Film Festival, and Senior Artistic Advisor to the FreshGrass Foundation. She served as the Director of Programming of the CenterSeries at the '62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College for 20 years and as the Artistic Director of the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival for 30 years. Rachel is proud to serve on the board of the 52nd Street Project and Working Films. She is also a long time participant in the Theater Development Fund’s Open Doors program, which introduces underserved high school students to the New York theater scene.

push picks 044: shirin towfiq

Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. Towfiq focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and her artwork reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.

push picks 043: david bench

david grew up in suburban houston and the alienation of that experience has inspired him to work towards creating an urban paradise on earth here in new york city.

he says he is lucky to live in an amazing former worker's cooperative in LES with his wife, daughter, and soon-to-be-baby boy!

push picks 042: trudie jackson

Trudie Jackson is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation - she identifies with her Four Clans: Bitterwater, Folded Arms, Mexican, and Yucca Strung Out In A LIne - a proud na'dleehi' (transwomen). She is from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona on the Navajo Nation but currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona for more than four decades. She identifies herself as an urban Indian and a product of the Indian Boarding Schools.

She is an advocate, grassroots organizer, and a trailblazer in the American Indian Two Spirit community. She is a co-leader with the Southwest Two Spirit Society, the founder of the Southwest American Indian Rainbow Gathering, and the Miss Indian Transgender Arizona pageant.

push picks 041: push store and rachael petach

Rachael is a creative, cook and gardener who has worked with some of the best restaurants, hotels and arts institutions in NY and CA. In the summer of 2018 while 6 months pregnant, she began experimenting with homemade cordials and fell obsessively for domestic blackcurrants. In winter of 2020 she founded C. Cassis and set about bringing contemporary blackcurrant liqueur to stores and homes. Rachael is now the mother of a sweet five-year-old, and she and her husband Steve (who does all the graphic design for the brand) share time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley. Last year they designed and opened a market and bar, CCTR, at the C. Cassis production space in Rhinebeck. When not working on cassis or hanging out with her family, Rachael loves sleep, baths, and reading.

sending off 2023 with a ridgewood roundup 🎆

For our last newsletter of the year, we gathered up some of our friends, neighbors, comrades, and colleagues to share their favorite spots in our favorite neighborhood.

push picks 040: daniel alexander jones

Unpredictable & unbound, Daniel Alexander Jones cultivates a wildflower body of artistic work. He is recognized by a wide range of communities. Jones roots in Black & Queer lineages of performance, music, literature, pedagogy, and civic practice. 2023 marks Jones’s 30th year as a professional artist. Previous projects include BLACK LIGHT (Public Theater, Greenwich House Theatre); DUAT (Soho Rep); RADIATE (Soho Rep & national tour) and PHOENIX FABRIK (Pillsbury House Theatre). As "altar-ego" Jomama Jones, named “a true theatrical original” by Backstage Magazine, Daniel has released six albums of original music and toured to critical acclaim. Recent work includes Daniel’s album AQUARIUS; MAY AS WELL BE A RAINBOW, a performance honoring Toni Morrison & her archive; & ALTAR NO. 3: I CHOOSE TO REMEMBER US WHOLE, an installation at The Henry Gallery in Seattle & public processional produced by The Meany Center at UW. Jones’s evolving ALTAREDSTATES initiative explores the power of mysticism in performance. It is housed at CalArts’ Center for New Performance where Jones is a Producing Artist. Described from the 1990s by American Theatre Magazine as an “interdisciplinarian” Daniel Alexander Jones went on to become a TED Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, a USA Artists Fellow, a two time Art Matters Grantee, a five time MAP Fund recipient, an inaugural Creative Capital Grantee, an Alpert Award in the Arts Awardee, and has received the PEN/America Laura Pels Award in Theatre and the IDEA Award in Theatre. A collection of his plays and performance texts, LOVE LIKE LIGHT, is available from 53rd State Press alongside a connected volume of conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs entitled PARTICLE & WAVE. Jones apprenticed with legendary artists Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn, Rebecca Rice, and Aishah Rahman. He is considered an innovator for his own contributions to the field, and a mentor to dozens of young artists. He is on the board of the Jerome Foundation. He lives in Los Angeles.

push picks 039: raul zbengheci

Raul Zbengheci is a Romanian-American producer, organizer and director. If contemporary art and culture function today as an archipelago comprised of small islands, Zbengheci situates himself in the waters between them, following the currents and floating softly between different mediums, influences, and technologies. He works in the gaps between visual art, emergent technologies, contemporary performance, and public, site specific art.

Raul Zbengheci is currently the Deputy Director at NEW INC where he leads programming and strategy for the renowned art, design and technology program, including organizing NEW INC’s first festival, DEMO23, which took place in June of 2023.

He has produced and curated projects with the Whitney Museum of American Art, LEIMAY, Performa, MoMA PS1, PROTOTYPE Festival, Times Square Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The 8th Floor, among others.

scorpio season 🦂

This week’s push picks features death scent, eyeworks, and the integratron.

push picks 038: lina lyte plioplyte

Lina Lyte Plioplyte {linna – light plyo-pleet-eh} is an Emmy, Clio and a Silver Lion winning director and camera person. Lina’s passion for moving images started while studying journalism in Lithuania and later at the University of Colorado Boulder. The best film school has been New York city, where Lina established herself in 2008 making films for NYLON magazine and fashion brands. For the past 12 years, Lina has been working as a freelance director & cinematographer, making numerous documentaries, commercials, travel content and short films that have been shown on MTV, PBS, in Venice Biennale, and various film festivals, including SxSW and IDFA. Lina’s feature-length directorial debut was ADVANCED STYLE, currently streaming on Amazon, after a successful run on Netflix. She just premiered PERIODICAL, a feature documentary about menstrual cycle produced by XTR, at SxSW, to stream this Fall on MSNBC and Peacock, – and is developing her third feature.

push picks 037: luis nieto dickens

Luis Nieto Dickens is a photographer and artist working in New York City. He's currently the in-house photographer at Elsewhere Brooklyn.
Luis grew up in Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua, located in the Mexico-U.S.A. border and next to El Paso, TX. He graduated from the graphic design program at The University of Texas at El Paso with a specialization in printmaking.

push picks 036: esteban cabeza de baca

Born in San Ysidro, CA in 1985, Esteban Cabeza de Baca received a BFA from Cooper Union, School of the Arts in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. He currently lives and works in Queens, NY. Cabeza de Baca’s childhood hometown of San Ysidro virtually straddled the U.S.–Mexico border, as did his family. His father and Mexican-born mother were active participants in the Brown Berets, as well as the Chicano, American Indian, and Black Panther movements. Of Mexican and Native American heritage himself, Cabeza de Baca was heavily influenced by the border town’s liminal position, and by his parents, whose intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity led them to shelter undocumented migrants in their basement during his youth.

push picks 035: ani bradberry

Anahita (Ani) Bradberry is an Iranian-American artist and writer creating sculptural situations with plasma light. Anahita has been featured at Lichtkunstfest (Berlin, DE), Women & Their Work Gallery (Austin, TX), Dominique Gallery (LA), Two Six Eight Bowery (NYC), Washington Project for the Arts (DC), Transformer (DC), VisArts (VA), the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (DC), Gallery 102 (DC), and has two permanent installations in NYC: 55 Suffolk and Nothing Really Matters (within the 50th st 1 train subway station). Anahita earned an MA in Art History in Japanese Modern and Contemporary Art from American University (2015). She won a Mellon Grant to conduct research in Tokyo and lectured on her research at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2016). Ani also has an exhibition currently with Co-Lab in Texas through September 23rd!

push picks 034: gabriel martinez

Gabriel Martinez was born near an atomic blast crater in the New Mexico desert. He graduated with an MFA from Columbia University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program before moving to Houston as a Core Fellow and artist-in-residence at Project Row Houses. He is the founding director of Alabama Song and the author of A Student’s Guide to Stealing.

push picks 033: anna polonsky

Anna Polonsky has worked in hospitality her entire career and earned accolades from numerous organizations, including Forbes Magazine’s 30under30 and the James Beard Awards.

For 7 years, she was a partner and US director of Le Fooding, a disruptive restaurant guide and event company recently acquired by Michelin. Her roster of consulting clients included LVMH, MasterCard, Nestlé Waters, and others. In 2014, she co-founded The MP Shift, the first 360 degree creative agency in hospitality, providing concept, graphics, and interior design services to an international clientele.

In 2019, encouraged by a chaotic political context, Anna took a new turn. With polonsky and friends, she seeks to apply her strategy and creative direction skills to clients who are working daily towards more quality, craftsmanship, transmission and inclusiveness.

push picks 032: han sayles

Han is a curator and the Director of Artist Collaboration for Meow Wolf, an immersive, collaborative arts exhibition based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For those who are not familiar with Meow Wolf, they have four permanent art exhibitions in Santa Fe, Denver, Grapevine and Las Vegas. Their vision is to redefine the paradigm of art and storytelling using creativity to make a positive difference in the world.

Han graduated Colorado College and after several years of community organizing, art-making and curation in Colorado Springs, she joined Meow Wolf as an Artist Liaison in 2018. In her role at Meow Wolf she aims to curate the best creatives across every medium throughout the world while offering exhibitions as a platform for diverse, emerging, and underrepresented artists across the country. If you want to follow my work, find me on IG: @han.imal

push picks 031: molly prentiss

Molly Prentiss is the author of the novels "Old Flame" and Tuesday Nights in 1980", which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine in France. Her writing has been translated into multiple languages. She grew up on a commune in Santa Cruz, California and currently lives in Red Hook, New York, with her husband and daughters. You can find her at Molly-Prentiss.com or on Instagram @MollyPrentiss.

push picks 030: harry weil

Harry Weil is the Vice President for Education and Public Programs at The Green-Wood Cemetery. Following his childhood passion for art, when all he wanted to do was visit the Brooklyn Museum, he studied and earned a PhD in Art History from Stony Brook University in 2013. Since 2016, he and his amazing team have been producing over 300 public programs a year at Green-Wood, including art installations, concerts, dance performances, walking and trolley tours, and immersive events. When not wrangling the dead, you can find him in the kitchen trying out new recipes and pouring himself too much wine (only Italian, never French), spending as much time as possible outside, and giving his dog DJ belly scratches (he really is the best dog).

push picks 029: sima familant

Sima is a private curator and art advisor. my sima:

the older sister who took me under her snowy arm to usher me into the blast and burden that is an untethered new york life. my uncle introduced me to her while he was alive (the same one my son is named after) and she has been an angel in my life's orbit since.

push picks 028: grant worth

Grant Worth is charmed by gentle pursuits. He's enthusiastic about collaborative practice and play, aural exercises, transformations, the ephemeral, and intimate connections with nature. Engaging in creation is his preferred human interaction. He yearns for a dimension where the softest among us are awarded the greatest volume.

push picks 027: kimia ferdowsi kline

Kimia earned an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and a B.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was named a Danforth Scholar. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery, Marrow Gallery, Wayne State University, and 68 Projects. Select group shows include, Ceysson & Bénétière, The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, PACE University, CANADA Gallery, and The Drawing Center.

push picks 026: sari kamin

Sari Kamin recently began working at the James Beard Foundation as the manager of public programs and events at Platform by JBF. When she was at MOFAD, she was featured along with her colleagues on CBS Saturday Morning for how they navigated operating a food museum through a pandemic and was awarded "Best Virtual Food Events" by Food52.

push picks 025: karen azoulay

Karen Azoulay is a Canadian born, Brooklyn-based visual artist and author. She has a fascination with floral symbolism and secret messages are often embedded in her work.

Push Picks 024: Cassandra Marketos

Cassandra Marketos is a los angeles-based writer, compost practitioner, and community volunteer. she works in her neighborhood to divert food waste from landfills, build and maintain composts with neighbors, and educate students on decay.

push picks 023: roseli ilano

Roseli Ilano is a mother, gardener, a former community organizer and educator, who has spent the past decade with a focus on using storytelling to bring people together.

push picks 022: akwetey orraca-tetteh

Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, vocal performance, and emerging technologies. Akwetey's work concerns the mythology of the future and the way in which “ancestral, cultural and digital memories transform contemporary visual language".

push picks 021: marcella zimmermann

Marcella Zimmermann (MZ) is a veteran art world publicist and creative director. She is the head of Digital Counsel, the New York creative agency that provides advertising by artists.

push picks 020: jacqueline tse

Jacqueline Tse (she/her) is an artist and designer currently based in Tucson, Arizona. Burnt out by corporate culture, she returned to her passion of sculpting as a form of self therapy, channeling her love-hate relationship with sugar into intricate porcelain sculptures — an ode to her obsessive and indulgent nature, love of pastry arts, frustration, and ultimately, acceptance of sugar addiction. Her work has been included in various publications on contemporary ceramic art.

push picks 019: benjy russell

please welcome artist Benjy Russell to the Push Picks stage. In his own words...

I’m a Choctaw artist who grew up in rural Oklahoma, and for the last fifteen years I’ve lived in rural Tennessee on stolen Euchee land. Living as a gay man in these rural landscapes can often feel impossible, yet here I find a thriving and diverse community of queer and trans people to vision the new world along with me.

precious ordinary

moving right along through the inevitable harshness of january on the east coast, i continue to revisit the essay that our last push picks spotlight, Lisa Gross, suggested. in the essay, Part 1: Hearth: A Thesaurus of Home, author Jay Griffiths writes, " Bachelard writes of an ideal of home, as i do here. it is ideal. it is also utterly ordinary; the precious ordinary.
salt. candle. seed. shelf. loaf."

push picks 018: lisa gross

Kicking off '23 with a really important guest: Lisa Gross, who exposed me to so much richness in culinary, cultural, and socio-emotional learning. We also have an annual breakfast date where we really address every conceivable topic. Actually next week is our slated time and we are hitting up Okonomi for a Japanese breakfast.

end of year 💎

I've decidedly not compiled any end of year gift guide type of thing as you all know what to do with your money. Instead I want to gift you a little something: a map of special places from one of my beloved trips this year: Asheville. There's no reason I'd ever live there and it's not close to the ocean (i kind of assess each vacation as possible places for me to land) but it's very easy living that I want to revisit a lot in my life.

push picks 017: simon edery

I met Simon Edery in Los Angeles many years ago when the both of us were staying at the legendary Laurie Frank's house, where you're sure to get to know the most interesting people in town and eat the most delicious food. I know Simon as a filmmaker but he's so much more. He is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute with a Masters in Film and Sculpture. He has produced films all over the world with such actors as Prince, Malcom McDowell, and Willam Dafoe. He has exhibited in such places as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Modern Art Museum in San Francisco and various film festivals, as well as galleries in Los Angeles.

push picks 016: lori idso

Lori is a ceramicist, quilter, patternmaker, and mother who lives and works in Queens, NYC. Her creative practice is a form of meditation, the focus on the process, the inherent slowness of it. Her work in textiles and clay connect her to a childhood spent in nature, studying the sounds, colors and textures of the forest, the prairie, the beach, the microcosm of one patch of moss.

harvest moon 🌙

We launched our archive at the end of October 2022 and wanted to celebrate! Alongside links for an Elvis road trip, intercoastal art, and new art crushes.

push picks 015: carlos rosales-silva

Carlos was born on the border of the United States and Mexico in El Paso, Texas. His studio practice considers the vernacular culture in the American Southwest, the western canon of art history, and the political and cultural connections and disparities between them.

🍂 fall feels 🍂

Autumn 2022 saw links for traditional Mallorcan ceramics, visible mending, and listening to your plants.

push picks #014: alicia le'von boone

Alicia Le'Von Boone is a visionary, cultural producer, and community-centered strategist committed to curating spaces that encourage communities to expand their creativity using art and technology and align with their divine purpose in life.

🍁 welcome fall 🍁

November 2022 Push picks including Solange Knowles at the New York City Ballet, a Web3 starter kit, and the Center for Craft fellowship application.

push picks #013: Faye orlove

Faye Orlove (she/her) is an artist, activist, and proud Virgo living in Los Angeles with her partner and two cats. She is about to be a mother to a human baby. Faye's problematic fav is Kim Kardashian and no she doesn't want to talk about it.

☀️ summer slows down ☀️

November 2022 Push picks include a group fighting racism in surf culture, DIY rosewater, and the 50 best restaurants in the world.

Push picks #012: ariel sophia bardi

Ariel is a multinational writer, photographer, and researcher. Her work investigates culture and conflict.

abortion is a human right

Our end of June 2022 list included resources for abortion access, Dall-E’s whackiest meals, and how plants can hear.

feels like summer ☀️

Our early June push picks featured pics from our Elsewhere Rooftop takeover, radical queer potlucks, and seed exchanges.

push picks #011: kate fittinghoff

Kate is a jack of all trades, master of none (AKA a creative producer) and also the designer of Push Projects’ website and newsletter. They brought a pride month twist to their selection of push picks.

mid MAY 🌷

May 2022’s newsletter featured Matteah Baim’s wonderful fundraising badges, seed librarry initiatives around the country, and an open edition print sale funding artists at risk.

push picks #010: michael hambouz

Michael is a wonderful friend of push and participated in what was said to the rose, our collaboration with dominique gallery for other places art fair in 2020. he is a multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent curator.

many moons 🌙

April 2022 saw a throwback article for Molly, good news about humpback whales, and a new art crush.

push picks #009: fallen fruit

We are so excited to welcome to the Push Projects stage fallen fruit! creative pair David Allen Burns and Austin Young have brought their vision, artistry, and abundance to this week's push picks.

in like a lion 🦁

For March 2022, we welcomed cake as art, black falconers, and Dolly Parton’s college fund.

push picks #008: dominique clayton

We're so excited to welcome Dominique Clayton, founder of Dominique Gallery to be a part of this edition of Push Picks. Dominique collaborated with Push on participated on both Healing Feeling and what was said to the Rose. Dominique just left her position at the Broad to become the new Director of Deitch Projects.

antiquity ⏳

February 2022’s Push newsletter featured special sand castles, ASMR bread slicing, and Jane Goodall.

new year, same push 💝

We welcomed in 2022 with cookies on the mind (and in the belly)

push picks #007: marissa zappas

Another new year and another Push Picks! This time we're so excite to share the insights from perfumer and artist Marissa Zappas, who was our first ever artist-in-residence for Elsewhere's Landscape program.

giving back 👐

For the 2021 holidays, we gathered up ways to give back to different organizations and causes.

push picks #006: ilana harris-babou

We're so excited to share the stage with artist Ilana Harris-Babou, who designed an Infinite Object in partnership with Push Projects.

🔔 jingle jingle 🔔

November 2021’s newsletter featured NFTs, Green-Wood Cemetery, and the Exhibition of the Year.

push picks #005: Grace Miceli

We are so happy to welcome another Push Picks guest curator this week. Grace Miceli has been a longtime favorite of push, and we've worked with her on murals for Elsewhere, our Harvest Time in this Time project, and on her sold out Infinite Objects run.