VENT2011

 
DA will tell stories about growing up as a biracial butch dyke in Flushing and take us with her on her childhood tours into Manhattan the the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

Danielle Abrams’ practice began in painting and installation and now encompasses performance and social engagement. Her works address the themes of cross-cultural history, bi-racial identity, and popular culture. She performs as her multiracial cast of family members, and incites participatory extravaganzas.   From her New York City lineage of Jewish toomlers and bubbies, and African-American ancestry from the South, emerge a blend of personae that subvert a one-dimensional portrait. As her characters, Abrams hosts talk shows, runs a mealplan service, and spends time with a Jewish community of senior citizens.  Her characters wax poetic from park benches, barbeque "butch burgers", and lead Conga lines through a Borscht Belt mirage. She utilizes the tropes of personae to inquire about racial and ethnic tensions, to challenge our reliance upon origin and biography, and to reveal the frolic, poignancy, and revolutionary potential that is created at the intersections of diverse urban cultures.


Danielle Abrams has performed at a wide range of art spaces, galleries, festivals, and museums including the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Jewish Museum (NY), Bronx Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, The Kitchen, WOW Café Theater, and the Intervene! Interrupt! Conference. She is the former director of the San Francisco performance space BUILD (Performance. Art. Objects.).  She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Urban Artist Initiative, Skowhegan School of Art, and Yale School of Painting. Abrams teaches at York College (CUNY) and at the MFA Program for Interdisciplinary Art at Goddard College.

danielleabrams.com