Boundless Minds & Moving Bodies in 80’s New York in top 20 by Wendy Perron

The book Keith Haring, Muna Tseng & Tseng Kwong Chi: Boundless Minds & Moving Bodies in 80's New York was published last year at the time of the opening of the 'Keith Haring: Grace House Mural' exhibition. The book presents an intimate, visual journey through the early collaborations of Keith Haring, Muna Tseng and Tseng Kwong Chi. It presents a unique and colourful picture of three friends and their New York lifestyle. Although they expressed themselves in different disciplinary languages - drawing, dance and photography - all their works and interactions share the same energy. For choreographer Muna Tseng, Haring provided her performance Epochal Songs with a visual backdrop.

review

Wendy Perron on the book: "Haring's drawings for Epochal Songs (1982), richly reproduced in this book, are powerful and reflect the horror of the nuclear arms race and other social ills - in a cheerful way. Together, they devised a new device: a special carousel that could ride while the drawings were projected. (...) Somehow it is fitting that in the midst of the current pandemic, we learn about artists from the club culture of the 1980s lost to us by the scourge of an earlier pandemic. Besides the feast of visual images - street scenes, club scenes, Muna Tseng's beautiful dancing and Haring's dynamic drawings - the book includes an interview with Muna plus essays by Bill T. Jones and Joshua Chambers-Letson. In the latter, Chambers-Letson uses the word "queerness" to describe something larger than sexual preference, namely a social milieu "produced collectively at the margins of social, sexual and aesthetic norms."

Read the entire review here

About Wendy Perron

Perron graduated from Bennington College in 1969. She began her career in New York as a freelance dancer/choreographer at Dance Theater Workshop. She danced with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (1975-78) and participated in one of Twyla Tharp's farm clubs. She taught dance at Bennington College, Princeton University, NYU, Rutgers, and City College of New York. From 1983 to 1994, she directed the Wendy Perron Dance Company. She was also Senior Fellow of The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. From 1992 to 1994, she was associate director of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. In 2000, she received a master's degree from Empire State College.

Perron has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Ballet Review and the Dance Research Journal. In 2000, she joined the editorial staff of Dance Magazine, of which she became editor-in-chief in 2004. In 2013, she became editor-at-large. In April 2011, she was one of three artists inducted into the inaugural Hall of Fame of the New York Foundation for the Arts.