2025 Performance Festival

The Enduring Power of Play | Press Release | Tickets | Schedule

When: June 13th -15th, 2025

Where: The KoKo Lot, 440 19th Street, Brooklyn

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This is an all-ages event, but please sign a waiver for any kids.

The Enduring Power of Play, Open Source Gallery’s inaugural performance art biennial, will take place from June 13–15, 2025. The exhibition invites artists whose practices engage the public in spaces and encounters centered around joy, pleasure, communion, and games. The concept of play is inspired by Open Source’s KoKo Lot, an outdoor learning space for the KoKo kids’ program, where they collaborate with teaching artists to build structures and objects for play using recycled materials.

Unlike traditional art that produces objects, performance art emphasizes experiences. For this biennial, participating artists are invited to create the “stage” for their performances. Armando Cortes, Anindita Dutta, and Ed Woodham will participate, designing objects and structures that are mindful of the KoKo Lot’s primary audience—the Koko kids—and considering their relationships to the space. The artists will use KoKo’s reclaimed materials to construct their “stages,” and KoKo teaching artists will facilitate open play during the festival.

The Enduring Power of Play posits that play is not merely a developmental stage confined to childhood but a vital and continuous thread woven throughout the entirety of human life. While its crucial role in children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development is widely acknowledged, this initiative aims to illuminate and celebrate the enduring necessity and transformative potential of play for individuals of all ages. Recognizing play as a fundamental human need, the project will serve as a dynamic exploration into radical and reimagined forms of recreation, festivity, public spectacle reminiscent of parades, and lighthearted amusement.

Three distinct artistic practices will converge within this project, each offering a unique lens through which to examine and activate playful engagement. Cortes will embark on a transformative endeavor, repurposing discarded bicycle frames into an interactive light tower. This sculptural installation will transcend its static form, inviting physical interaction and visual delight, thereby becoming a beacon for spontaneous play and a testament to the creative potential of reclaimed materials.

Dutta will conceive and stage a captivating procession centered around a wearable sculpture. This mobile artwork will not be a passive object of observation but rather a catalyst for collective participation. By inviting children, families, and attendees of local festivals to join the procession, the artist will foster a shared experience of movement, visual spectacle, and communal joy, blurring the lines between performer and audience. The wearable sculpture itself will be a site of imaginative play, its design and materiality encouraging interaction and imaginative interpretation.

Woodham will present a conceptually rich and performative intervention in the form of a sologamist wedding ceremony*. This deeply personal act will serve as a powerful affirmation of self-love and autonomy, reframing the traditional ritual of marriage as an opportunity for individual celebration and playful self-acceptance. Through this unconventional performance, the artist invites reflection on societal norms and the diverse ways in which individuals can find joy and fulfillment.

The artists will engage with the environment, allowing its existing features and discarded materials to inform their creative processes. The overarching goal is to generate spaces and experiences that actively encourage audience engagement, prioritizing interaction as a cornerstone of playful encounters. Proximity and intimacy will be deliberately cultivated within the performances, emphasizing the direct, unmediated encounter between individuals as the fundamental building block for fostering a sense of playfulness and shared experience.

This festival creates a dynamic interplay between artistic creation and the surrounding context. As a result, the audience’s attention will fluidly shift between the tangible playful objects themselves, the broader environment in which they are situated, and, most importantly, their own direct, embodied experiences within these carefully crafted spaces. The aim is to move beyond passive observation and cultivate active participation, encouraging a heightened awareness of the playful potential inherent in everyday interactions and environments. Ultimately, The Enduring Power of Play seeks to reignite a sense of wonder and delight, reminding us that play is not a frivolous pastime but an essential element of a rich and meaningful life at any age.

The festival will also include a craft fair, live music including Drumstitch and Three Blind Mice, a puppetry workshop, and food and drinks.

*On Sunday, June 15th, Ed is getting married at the Lot! Learn more, RSVP, and contribute to Ed’s registry.

About the Curator:

photo credit: John Dennis

Dr. Kalia Brooks is a curator and arts consultant specializing in program development, strategic planning, and administrative systems for artists, arts non-profit organizations, and exhibition spaces. She possesses significant expertise in designing and delivering learning environments for artists and creative professionals, and has instructed professional practices to artists and curators for over a decade at the university level, notably at New York University and Pratt Institute. Dr. Brooks served as the inaugural Mellon Project Director in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department (AAADS) at Columbia University, and the inaugural Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN. Her academic research encompasses art from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on emergent technologies and African American, trans-Atlantic, and diasporic cultures of the Americas. Dr. Brooks holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is co-editor of the book series, Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2019 and 2022). She has held the position of consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and served as an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.

About the Artists:

Armando Cortés will be creating a new sculpture from repurposed bicycle parts that will invite the audience to interact and activate the work. The work is inspired by memories of street fairs and carnivals.

Armando Cortés (b. 1989 Urequío, Michoacán, México) received his BA from UCLA, 2012 MFA from Yale School of Art, 2021. Cortés has exhibited at The Shed, New York, NY, Jenkin & Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY; MassMOCA, North Adams, MA; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, CA; ASU Art Museum, Tampe, Az; and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, amongst others. He has been in residency at Bemis Center, Omaha NE, 2023; Field Projects, New York, NY, 2023; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY, 2022. He is a 2025 NYSCA Support for Artists Award recipient, received a Franklin Furnace Fellowship, 2021-2022, and was the Saint Elmo Artist Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, 2021-2022. Cortés currently lives and works between Brooklyn, NY, and Wilmington, CA, while continuing to visit his home town of Urequío. These three places and the vast time and space between them inform his work.

Anindita Dutta will present Long Walk / Circular Path, a dynamic performance art, a “sculpture in motion”, through the interplay of cloth, body, and metaphor reflecting life’s dualities, structured around ethics (dharma), materiality (artha), and desire (kama). It aims to provoke thought and foster hope by depicting the spectrum between extremes. By using metaphorical objects of textiles, leather, and accessories, the performance bridges personal and shared conversations, addressing sensitive themes while experiencing life’s experiences. It aims to provoke thought, encouraging a movement toward hope, with gestures and emotions depicting the spectrum between extremes of life.

Anindita’s work has been exhibited both in the US and internationally, including at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan; Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology in Beijing, China; and CAMAC in Marney-sur-Seine, France, among others. She has received numerous prestigious grants and fellowships, such as the 2022 TOY Fellow and the 2022 NXTHVN Fellowship in New Haven, USA, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Artist Residency Grant in Japan (2010), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008), a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2005), and the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists Fellowship (2005). Her works are part of several esteemed collections, including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art in Beijing, China, the Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum in Iowa, USA, the Francis J. Greenburger Collection in the USA, the Arthur M. Sackler Collection in the USA, the Karen and Robert Duncan Collection in the USA, and the Marc and Kathy LeBaron Collection in the USA.

Ed Woodham will present Love Saves the Day. Sologamy, also known as self-marriage or autogamy, is the act of marrying oneself in a symbolic ceremony. It is a way to celebrate self-love and independence. Being engaged at this period — historically and personally — is spot-on. It began with humor — from the whimsy of a queer self-marriage proposal in the backseat of an NYC cab overlooking Manhattan – but gradually progressed to a commitment to life, work, and self. In the current unstable national and global mesosphere of fear, assimilation, and conformity – the act of queer sologamy is an act of defiance. Love Saves the Day is a public ceremonial commitment to continue gathering – power, connections, and purpose. “I want children of the future to know that anything is possible with love. Love is the message, and love saves the day.”

Ed Woodham is an independent elder Southern queer conceptual social-absurdist artist, curator, producer, and educator entangled in a mélange of NYC activities across media and culture for over 45 years. Woodham employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style to encourage greater consideration of – and provoke deeper critical engagement – with the urban environment. Ed created the project Art in Odd Places (AiOP) as a response to vanishing public space and personal civil liberties. Woodham has taught workshops in politically based public performances at NYU Hemispheric Institute for EMERGENYC and at School of Visual Arts in NYC. Woodham was a 2013 Blade of Grass Fellow in Social Engagement. Ed was a featured speaker for TEDxGowanus and TEDxIndianapolis in 2014. For 2016- 2017, Woodham served as artist-in-residence at The Smith Gallery at Appalachian State University Art Department. For 2017-18 Ed was the UVA Studio Arts Board artist-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. In 2019-20 Woodham was an artist-in-residence for the City of West Hollywood, CA. and has returned for 2024-25. Currently he is mentor for the New Museum’s NEW Inc and the lead instructor for Arts Connection’s Teens Curate Teens program working with a curatorial teen team to produce an annual NYC-wide exhibition featuring 25+ teens’ artworks.