The Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can Present
Bang on a Can: Beauty Is Power
Featuring Cellist Maya Beiser
January 29 Concert Tied to Exhibition Celebrating Legendary Cosmetics Entrepreneur, Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power
New York, NY – Bang on a Can: Beauty Is Power, a concert featuring “cello goddess” (The New Yorker) Maya Beiser, will take place at the Jewish Museum on Thursday, January 29 at 7:30pm. Tied to the Museum’s exhibition, Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power, the first exhibition about the legendary cosmetics entrepreneur and trendsetting art collector Helena Rubinstein, the performance will highlight powerful women composers. This program is the third concert of the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can’s partnership to produce a series of dynamic musical performances at the Museum from June 2014 to May 2015, inspired by the Jewish Museum’s diverse slate of exhibitions.
Maya Beiser’s concert features beautiful music by powerful women. From Hildegard von Bingen to Janis Joplin and Imogen Heap, Anna Clyne to Yoko Ono, this program explores themes of beauty, spirituality, and ritual. The concert will include the U.S. premiere of Anna Clyne’s Rest These Hands and a version of Yoko Ono’s seminal performance Cut Piece presented in collaboration with the innovative design trio threeASFOUR, whose 2014 Jewish Museum exhibition MER KA BA was hailed as “one of a kind” by Vogue.
Of her Beauty Is Power program, Maya says, “Inspired by the fascinating self-made beauty industry powerhouse Helena Rubinstein, I asked myself: Is beauty powerful? Is power beautiful? Can we, women, be both beautiful and powerful? Can we find our inner sway when we feel beautiful? In my art, I think a lot about beauty. For me, performing music is the act of peeling through layers of beauty, revealing its many faces. Today, women have seized the commerce of beauty; most fashion magazines are spearheaded by powerful women. But throughout the millennia, the art of music – the ultimate form of beauty – has been monopolized by men.”
The January 29 performance includes O Virtus Sapientiae by Hildegard von Bingen, Summertime by Janis Joplin, the U.S. premiere of Rest These Hands by Anna Clyne, Byzantine Chant arranged by Aleksandra Vrebalov, Maya’s own arrangement of Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap, and an homage performance of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, with music from Far-Off Country by Eve Beglarian.
About Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power
Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power is the first museum exhibition to explore the ideas, innovations, and influence of the legendary cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965). By the time of her death, Rubinstein had risen from humble origins in small-town Jewish Poland to become a global icon of female entrepreneurship and a leader in art, fashion, design, and philanthropy. As the head of a cosmetics empire that extended across four continents, she was, arguably, the first modern self-made woman magnate. Rubinstein was ahead of her time in her embrace of cultural and artistic diversity. She was not only an early patron of European and Latin American modern art, but also one of the earliest, leading collectors of African and Oceanic sculpture. The exhibition explores how Madame (as she was universally known) helped break down the status quo of taste by blurring boundaries between commerce, art, fashion, beauty, and design. Through 200 objects – works of art, photographs, and ephemera – Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power reveals how Rubinstein’s unique style and pioneering approaches to business challenged conservative taste and heralded a modern notion of beauty, democratized and accessible to all.
Public programs are made possible by endowment support from the William Petschek Family, the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, William Halo, Benjamin Zucker, the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation, the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation and Ellen Liman. Public support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
About the Partnership
The partnership between the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can launched in June 2014 with a free, outdoor, kick-off performance by Asphalt Orchestra as part of the Museum Mile Festival. Presentations have included a July concert of minimal music in conjunction with the exhibition Other Primary Structures, and a November jazz concert connected to the Abstract Expressionist painting exhibition, From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945-1952. The final concert in the series is Bang on a Can: Revolution Of The Eye featuring the Bang on a Can All-Stars, on May 14, 2015 in conjunction with Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television.
Tickets for the January 26 program are $18 general public; $15 students and senior citizens; and $12 for Jewish Museum members and Bang on a Can list members, and include exhibition admission prior to the performance. Further program and ticket information is available by calling 212.423.3337 or at TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar. The Jewish Museum is located at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan.
About Maya Beiser
The New Yorker famously once referred to Maya Beiser as “the cello goddess.” She has captivated audiences worldwide with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, and relentless quest to redefine her instrument’s boundaries. The Boston Globe declares, “With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.”
Raised in the Galilee Mountains in Israel, surrounded by the music and rituals of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, while studying classical cello repertoire, Maya has dedicated her work to reinventing solo cello performance in the mainstream classical arena. A featured performer on the world’s most prestigious stages including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, London’s South Bank Centre, Sydney Opera House, and the Beijing Festival, she has collaborated with artists across a wide range of musical styles, including Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Tan Dun, Evan Ziporyn, and Carter Burwell, among many others. Maya’s 2012 production, Elsewhere: A CelloOpera, premiered at Carolina Performing Arts followed by a sold-out run at the BAM Next Wave Festival. Her latest project All Vows explores the dichotomy between the physical, external world and the inner landscape of our secret selves, and premiered at the Yerba Buena Center in 2014.
Maya’s 2011 TEDtalk has been watched by close to one million people and translated to 32 languages. In 2013, she was a featured guest alongside such luminaries as Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, and Isabella Rossellini at ICASTICA, a festival celebrating women working in artistic fields in Arezzo, Italy.
Maya is a graduate of Yale University and a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Her vast discography includes eight solo albums and many studio recordings and film music collaborations. Her 2010 album Provenance topped the classical and world music charts on both Amazon and iTunes, and her album Time Loops was selected among NPR’s top 10 recordings of 2012. Her latest album Uncovered, a collection of re-imagined and re-contextualized classic rock masterpieces, was in the top 10 on the Billboard Classical Chart upon release in August 2014. For more information, visit www.mayabeiser.com.
About Bang on a Can
Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Founded by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, who curated the first Marathon concert in 1987 and remain co-Artistic Directors to this day, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers; performs, presents, and records new work; develops new audiences; and educates the musicians of the future. “Bang on a Can plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come” (The New York Times). Current projects include the annual Bang on a Can Marathon; The People’s Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a professional development program for young musicians; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can’s extreme street band; and Found Sound Nation, a musical outreach program partnering with the U.S. State Department to create OneBeat, a program that bridges the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries. For more information, visit www.bangonacan.org.
About the Jewish Museum
Located on Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, the Jewish Museum is one of the world’s preeminent institutions devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, offering intellectually engaging, educational, and provocative exhibitions and programs for people of all ages and backgrounds. The Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary as the core of a museum collection. Today, the Museum maintains a collection of over 30,000 works of art, artifacts, and broadcast media reflecting global Jewish identity, and presents a diverse schedule of internationally acclaimed temporary exhibitions.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for visitors 18 and under and Jewish Museum members. Admission is Pay What You Wish on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm and free on Saturdays. For information on the Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3200 or visit the website at www.thejewishmuseum.org.
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