Walker Art Center Presents
OUT THERE 2024
Honor: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor
Thursday–Saturday, February 22–24, 2024
8:00 pm
McGuire Theater
Honor: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor
Written and created by
SUZANNE BOCANEGRA
Performed by
LILI TAYLOR
Directed by
GEOFF SOBELLE
Video by
DERRICK BELCHAM
Design and Technical Director
JOEY WOLFSLAU
Tour Director
RACHEL PARK
Wardrobe Supervisor
THEODORA BOCANEGRA LANG
Costume photos by
THIBAULT JEANSON, GEORGIA NERHEIM, PETER SERLING
“Ríu, Ríu, Chíu” arranged by
DAVID LANG
Produced by
JECCA BARRY/FIN PRODUCTIONS
The performance runs approximately 70 minutes without intermission.
Twin Cities Ensemble
KATIE BOARDMAN, KRISTINA BOERGER, SOPHIE CAPLIN, NAOMI CROCKER, KRIS KAUTZMAN, LAUREL RAND-LEWIS, SALLY ROUSSE
Accessibility Notes
ASL interpretation is planned for this program on Friday, February 23.
Content Note: This performance includes themes of misogyny, death, and execution in art history, as well as brief mentions of incest and bestiality.
For more information about accessibility at the Walker, visit our Access page.
Program Note
Part artist lecture, part memoir, part cultural essay, Honor: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor is the fourth in a series of performances by Suzanne Bocanegra. It follows Farmhouse / Whorehouse: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor; When a Priest Marries a Witch: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Paul Lazar and Bodycast: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand.
Special Thanks
I want to thank Limor Tomer for inviting me to make this performance and Kristy Edmunds for our initial workshop at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. Thanks also to Abigail Browde of 600 Highwaymen for her thoughtful direction and choreography of the workshop.
At the beginnings of this project many people shared their enthusiasm and knowledge of tapestry with me, including Met curator Elizabeth Cleland and historians Laura Weigert, Glen Bowersock, Marilyn Lavin, and the late Irving Lavin.
Special thanks to the librarians at the Institute for Advanced Study, Kirstie Venanzi and Marcia Tucker, for all their help finding the many books and articles that went into making this piece.
– Suzanne Bocanegra
Learn More
The following is an excerpt of an interview with Suzanne Bocanegra for the Walker Reader, in which she details how her artist lectures began:
Well, I kind of fell into this by accident. It was 2009, and I was asked by Larry Kardish, who was the film curator at MoMA. He’d seen this piece I did called Rerememberer. It’s with an amplified loom, and an accordion is playing the loom tie-up instructions, which are on a staff just like music, and then I had 50 people who’ve never played violin before playing violin, and they were playing a version of the thread count. That was my first foray into performance, and Larry had seen that, and so he asked me to do one of those typical artist slide lectures.
So I thought, I’ve always wanted to tell the story about how I became an artist. I grew up in this working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, Texas, outside of Houston, and this scandal happened in my Catholic Church when I was 8 years old that made me want to be an artist. As I started writing it, it became a story. I mean, it was a story.
I have kids, and I realized a lot of the stuff I was talking about they would have no context for. For example, this was the ’60s, and what we considered long hair was just something that wasn’t a crew cut, and they don’t even know what a crew cut is. They’re not raised Catholic, and so they didn’t understand all the stuff about the Catholic Church. So I ended up putting in a lot of information about the Church in order to make it clear to people who didn’t grow up Catholic, or who didn’t grow up in that generation. And then, after I finished putting the whole lecture together, I realized I wanted someone who was a really good storyteller, a professional, to tell a story.
And that’s when I called Paul Lazar, my best friend’s husband. I said, “Can you do this, Paul?” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine.” You know, he just did it as a friend, as a one-off. But that kind of kicked it off, and now I’m starting No. 5.
Read the full interview here: Disparate Threads: A Conversation with Suzanne Bocanegra on Confronting Art Histories (walkerart.org)
Artist Bios
Suzanne Bocanegra (Writer / Creator)
Suzanne Bocanegra is a visual artist living and working in New York. Suzanne Bocanegra’s Artist Lecture performances have been presented in museums, galleries, and theaters across the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Pulitzer Foundation, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and in the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Bocanegra is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2020 she received the Robert Rauschenberg award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2019, a major show of Bocanegra’s work titled Poorly Watched Girls was presented at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Also in 2019, her solo show Wardrobe Test was the inaugural exhibition at ART CAKE, an exhibition space in Brooklyn. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Lili Taylor (Performer)
Honor marks the fourth Artist Lecture Lili has worked on with Suzanne. Lili and Suzanne have been performing When a Priest Marries a Witch, BodyCast, and Farmhouse / Whorehouse over the years in many different venues across the United States, including BAM, The Wexner Center, and The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, to name a few.
Geoff Sobelle (Director)
Geoff Sobelle is a U.S.-based theater artist devoted to making original actor-driven performance works. His shows include: FOOD, HOME, The Object Lesson, The Elephant Room, all wear bowlers and machines machines machines machines machines machines machines (among others). He has received commissions from BAM, Lincoln Center, Arizona State University, Center Theatre Group, Edinburgh International Festival, and The New Zealand Festival. His shows have been recognized by a Bessie Award, an Obie Award in design, two Edinburgh Fringe First Awards, the Best of Edinburgh Award, a Total Theatre Award, and an Innovative Theatre Award. He is a Pew Fellow and a Creative Capital Grantee. Geoff was a company member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company from 2001 to 2012. He trained in physical theater at the Lecoq school in Paris and is a graduate of Stanford University.
Rachel Park (Tour Director)
Rachel Park is a Los Angeles-based director for live performance interested in interdisciplinary theatrical experiences and collaborative new play development. Her work has been performed at: REDCAT, École de la Comédie de Saint-Étienne, MOCA Los Angeles, Edinburgh International Festival, The Vagrancy, Center for the Arts at Kayenta, Under St. Marks, The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, Stella Adler, and The New American Theatre. Additional collaborations of note include production work with: Apple, Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Performance Practice, The Getty Villa, Page 73, and CalArts Center for New Performance. She holds an MFA in Directing from CalArts, a BFA from Boston University, and is an alumna of Directors Lab West. www.rsvpark.com
Joseph Wolfslau (Design and Technical Director)
Joseph Wolfslau is a set, sound, and costume designer based in Brooklyn. Recent designs include sound design for Sw!ng Out (Joyce), production design for La Sonnambula (Prom-enade Opera), production design for Magnum Opus: A Retrospective (The People Movers), sound for The Emperor’s Nightingale (Pan Asian Rep.), sound for The Peanut Butter Show (Little Lord), production design for Cendrillon (Promenade Opera), sound for Romulus the Great (Yangtze Rep.), sound for Brideshead Obliterated (Dixon Place), set, sound, and costumes for 410 [Gone] (Yangtze Rep), sound for CoIncident (JACK), sound for Ski End (New Ohio), sound for CoVenture (Baryshnikov), and set and costumes for Poor Sailor (Tugboat Collective).
Theodora Bocanegra Lang (Costume Supervisor)
Theodora Bocanegra Lang is a writer from New York, and graduate student at Columbia University. She received her BA in Art History from Oberlin College. She most recently worked at Dia Art Foundation, on exhibitions with Maren Hassinger, Joan Jonas, and Jo Baer, among others. Previously, she worked at Gavin Brown's enterprise and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jecca Barry/Fin Productions (Producer)
Jecca Barry is an opera, theatre, film, and music producer, as well as a nonprofit arts leader. From 2012 to 2022, she served as Executive Director of the acclaimed production company Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and was a co-director of New York’s annual PROTOTYPE Festival from 2017 to 2022. Jecca has overseen the commissioning, development, production, and touring of more than 30 new theatre, music-theatre, and opera works, and has toured those works to more than 40 national and 15 inter-national venues.
Katie Boardman (Ensemble)
Katie Boardman, soprano, has performed with ensembles around the country, including VocalEssence, the Mirandola Ensemble, the Rose Ensemble, and the Boston Camerata. She appears on the PaTRAM Institute Singers’ GRAMMY-nominated recording of Kurt Sander’s Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and was a VOCES8 Scholar in 2019-20. Upcoming performances include Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen with the Bach Society of MN, and the Poulenc Gloria at St Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis. Ms. Boardman holds degrees from Augustana College and Boston University. She maintains an active voice teaching studio in St. Paul, MN. www.katieboardman.com
Kristina Boerger (Ensemble)
Kristina Boerger works nationally as a practitioner and teacher of ensemble singing and directing, with specializations in Early Music, contemporary chamber works, and international vernacular traditions. Augsburg University’s Schwartz Professor of Choral Leadership, she has taught at the DePauw University, University of Illinois, and Manhattan Schools of Music, Carroll University, Barnard College, and public schools in Wisconsin and Illinois. She has served consecutive seasons of the Madison Early Music and Kalamazoo Bach Festivals, the Syracuse Schola Cantorum, and the Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute. Based in Manhattan in the aughts, she directed the Cerddorion and AMUSE chamber choirs and the Collegiate Chorale. Other guest directing appearances include engagements with The Rose Ensemble, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, An Opera Theater, and Chanticleer. Her concert and recording credits as a chamber singer include projects with Early Music New York, Western Wind, Pomerium, the Trinity Wall Street Choir, The Rose Ensemble, the Mirandola Ensemble, Ottawa Bach Choir, and Bobby McFerrin. Her self-published arrangements have been performed by volunteer and professional choirs across the U.S. and abroad, and her settings for treble chorus of poetry by Sarah White are published by Boosey & Hawkes. Her work in the 1990s as Founding Director of AMASONG: Champaign-Urbana’s Premier Lesbian/Feminist Chorus is the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary by Jay Rosenstein debuting nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens. AMASONG’s recordings of her arrangements and compositions earned the 1997 and 1999 Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards (GLAMAs) for Best Choral Performance and the 1999 GLAMA for Best Classical Composition.
Sophie Caplin (Ensemble)
Sophie Caplin, soprano, recently moved to the Twin Cities where she is quickly becoming a sought-after soloist, opera and ensemble singer. Recent performances include solo cantata Also hat Gott by Buxtehude for the Buxtehude Festival, solo and duo art song recitals with pianist Donna Stoering, concert and solo work with Consortium Carissimi, Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro and Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro. Other recent performances include Oberto in Alcina (Chicago Summer Opera), Jenny Slade in Roman Fever (UNCG Opera Theater), and Phani in Les Indes Galantes (Opera OrQuesta). She has toured as an ensemble member and soloist with Zephyrus, Central Virginia’s Early Music Ensemble, as well as the Duke Evensong Singers.
Sophie won the Canadian Sinfonietta Young Artist Competition in 2019 and first place in North Carolina NATS 13A competition in 2021. Sophie recently graduated with her Master’s from UNC Greensboro where she studied with Dr. Robert Wells.
An avid chamber musician, Sophie has also studied at CCM Baroque Collective, Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, Amherst Early Music Festival, and at Haymarket Opera Company’s summer course.
Naomi Crocker (Ensemble)
Naomi Crocker is an artist, educator, and arts administrator, whose work explores the boundaries between seemingly-disparate disciplines. She is drawn to acts of facilitation, but also utilizes installation, performance, sculpture, sound, and text-based practices. Naomi’s projects often consider humanity’s relationship with language (oral, written & gestural) and she is frequently inspired by linguistic histories, processes, and structures. Naomi holds dual B.A.’s in Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, an M.A. in Second Languages & Cultures Education, and works as both an independent researcher and administrator primarily within museums and cultural organizations. She currently serves as Manager of Director’s Office & Strategic Initiatives at the Walker Art Center and enjoys reflecting on how arts & culture administration can be framed and lived as a creative endeavor.
Kris Kautzman (Ensemble)
Alto Kris Kautzman thrives on the particular joys and challenges of singing in small chamber ensembles. She has performed and recorded with groups including The Rose Ensemble, Bach Society of Minnesota, Minnesota Renaissance Choir, Border CrosSing, and First Readings Project. She also serves as section leader and soloist at Holy Family Catholic Church in Saint Louis Park.
Laurel Rand-Lewis (Ensemble)
Laurel Rand-Lewis is the Curatorial Fellow in Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. She is a member of Calliope Women’s Chorus. Previous theatrical credits include Dog Days (Run Crew, 2015) and anatomy theater (Supernumerary, 2016) with LA Opera Off Grand.
Sally Rousse (Ensemble)
Sally Rousse performs, teaches, choreographs, curates, writes, and advocates dance. She is a two-time recipient of the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Dancers (2001 and 2014), received a 2013 Sage Award for “Outstanding Performer” and was named “Artist of the Year” (City Pages, 2010). Her productions “ICON SAM: The Temple Dances” (2018), “KOM HIT!” (2014), and “trickpony” (2008, 2002) were each named “Best Performance of the Year” in the Twin Cities. Rousse began dancing in Barre, Vermont, trained in New York City before performing as a leading dancer with Ballet Chicago, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, and James Sewell Ballet (JSB), which she co-founded in NYC in 1990 and served as its managing director throughout its move to Minneapolis in 1993. Since leaving JSB in 2014, Rousse’s site-specific works have taken dance off the traditional stage into venues such as the Kwon Tung Pier in Hong Kong and up the tree of a vacant lot. Her works feature artists who identify as LGBTTQA+, Disabled+, femme, and BIPOC and have been supported by the Southern Theater, Walker Art Center, MassMOCA, VocalEssence, Marshall Field's, Harvard's American Repertory Theatre, the Cartoon Channel, the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the McKnight Foundation. Rousse has taught and choreographed at several companies, studios, and higher education institutions including Carleton College, Harvard University, Macalester College, St.Olaf College, Ballet Preljocaj, Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion PIctures, Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Ballet Hispanico. She formed Dance Advocacy Minnesota (DAMN) in 2017 to address sexual misconduct in dance and has contributed labor to two national organizations, Creating New Futures and BreakBank, which are focused respectively on ethics and equity in dance, and promoting balanced screen usage while decentering whiteness. She continues to work with several diverse dance entities in the Twin Cities and around the world.
Living Land Acknowledgement
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Walker Art Center Acknowledgments
Walker Art Center Producers' Council
About the Walker Art Center
Media Partner
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2023/24 Walker Performing Arts Season.
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