This Friday, December 4, PlayCo hosts an Idea Lab event with performance artist Aisha Cousins.
Partly inspired by her own experience when an acquaintance disappeared, playwright Maria Milisavljevic’s Abyss touches on one community’s relationship with the local police in Berlin. Join us for the second public showing of “Learn / Unlearn”, a performance score by Brooklyn-based artist Aisha Cousins. The December 4 event will use as its subject matter a project titled “I <3 Cops.” Cousins originally developed the piece as part of The Laundromat Project’s 2014 Community Art Workshop series to engage black audiences in processing their history of abuse at the hands of police officers.
Aisha Cousins
Aisha Cousins is a Brooklyn based artist. She writes performance art scores (do-it-yourself art projects) that engage black audiences from different backgrounds in exploring their ideas about beauty and processing the changes taking place in their worlds. Her interactive, public performance art scores have been performed on the streets of historically black neighborhoods from BedStuy to Brixton, as well as inside institutions such as the Museum Of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston’s Project Row Houses, and the internationally renown Kitchen. Her score “How to Listen to Lil Wayne: For Nia, Nya, and Kamaria” was recently exhibited at MoMA PS1 as a part of “Clifford Owens: Anthology” an abstract compendium of notable black performance artists. Cousins’ project “Story Skirts” was recently awarded a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs via the Brooklyn Arts Council’s ReGrant program. In addition, her project “SAY IT LOUD!: Performance Art Scores for the Young, Gifted, and Fabulous” was recently awarded a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Cousins’ work has been featured on television and in print, including coverage in New York’s Daily News, The New York Times and The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Magazine.
All Idea Lab events are free and open to the public. You don’t need to have attended the performance that day, just arrive at the theatre about 90 minutes after the curtain time and join the conversation.
