Farmhouse/Whorehouse considers the lives of Bocanegra’s grandparents on their small farm in La Grange, Texas, which was located across the road from the Chicken Ranch, better known as “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” Using text, songs, film, and projections, Bocanegra and actress Lili Taylor, with an original song by Shara Nova, tell a rambling story examining the idyllic place the rural world occupies in our urban imagination as well as the invention of the pastoral in art, contemporary homesteading and back to the land movements, and various utopian communities throughout history.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Suzanne Bocanegra (Author) is a visual artist who uses theater and theater craft to interrogate the history and practice of visual art, employing large-scale video, performance and installation, as well as collage, sculpture and painting. She is the recipient of the 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards. 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 Artcake, an exhibition space in Brooklyn. Bocanegra’s most recent performance “Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor,” was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has traveled to LAMoCA, ICABoston and the Walker Art Center.
Previous performances have been commissioned and/or presented by the Museum of Modern Art, The Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance at the Ace Theater, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Hammer Museum, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, among others. Bocanegra’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), among others. https://suzannebocanegra.com
Lili Taylor (Performer) has been working on stage and screen for thirty years. She has appeared in dozens of films including Mystic Pizza, Say Anything…, Dogfight, Short Cuts, Household Saints, Factotum, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, Ransom, and The Haunting. In television she has starred in Six Feet Under, Almost Human, Outer Range and American Crime, for which she earned an Emmy nomination. Taylor has appeared on stage in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including Three Sisters (Roundabout), Mourning Becomes Electra (Acorn Theater), and The Library (Public Theater).
Lee Sunday Evans (Director) is a two-time Obie Award-winning Director + Choreographer and the Artistic Director of Waterwell. She most recently directed the acclaimed production of Heather Christian’s Oratorio For Living Things and was just announced as the director of a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time. She is developing a TV project for A24. Notable credits include Dance Nation by Clare Barron, the live production of The Courtroom, Detroit Red by Will Power, Sunday by Jack Thorne, In The Green by Grace McLean, Miller, Mississippi by Boo Killebrew, and Home by Geoff Sobelle.
Jecca Barry (Producer) is an opera, theatre, film, and music producer, as well as a nonprofit arts leader. From 2012-2022, 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 2017-2022. Jecca has overseen the commissioning, development, production and touring of over 30 new theatre, music-theatre, and opera works, and has toured those works to over 40 national and 15 international venues.
Joseph Wolfslau (Design and Technical Director) 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).
Benefits include:
All of the benefits Friends receive plus:
All of the benefits Sidekicks receive, plus:
All of the benefits Besties receive, plus:
All of the benefits Bosom Buddies receive, plus: