May 19th, 2018

Bring Down The Walls – Week 3

BRING DOWN THE WALLS

WEEK THREE

 

This May, Creative Time, in partnership with The Fortune Society, artist Phil Collins and over 100 collaborators, presents Bring Down The Walls, a three-part public art project which turns an unconventional lens on the prison industrial complex through house music and nightlife. The project consists of a communal space that functions as a school by day and dance club by night, as well as a benefit album of classic house tracks re-recorded by formerly incarcerated vocalists and electronic musicians. Bring Down The Walls will be free and open to the public each Saturday in May at Firehouse, Engine Company 31, a historic, decommissioned fire station in Lower Manhattan.

During daylight hours Bring Down The Walls operates as a school for radical thought and political exchange featuring conversations, workshops, and convenings led by people directly impacted by the prison system and those working to change it. The curriculum represents the broad spectrum of perspectives and voices in the struggle for justice, offering new ways to build deeper knowledge around mass incarceration and prison abolition. Throughout the day, discussions exploring the history of house music are threaded into the dialogue. Direct services will also be available for free counseling on civil, legal, and housing issues.

When the sun goes down, Bring Down The Walls turns into a dance club, inspired by the ethos of early house music venues, which often functioned as hubs of political engagement as much as spaces of personal liberation and collective transcendence. Programmed in collaboration with gathering place and party space, Nowadays, each Saturday will be hosted by different NYC collectives that celebrate the history and present-day role of nightlife as a haven of relief and transformation in which divisions of race, class, gender, and sexuality are often crossed in unexpected ways.

See the lineup for each Saturday here, and please note that Bring Down The Walls is an organically evolving communal space. Times may shift and programs added throughout the run of the project. Check back regularly for the most up-to-date schedule.

The Firehouse
87 Lafayette Street
New York, NY
Saturday, May 19, 2018
Opens at 2PM
Full schedule here

To attend, register for a pass.