SUITE/Space 2023-24

Late Bloomer

Created by

Naima Lowe

Directed by

Asher Hartman

Text by

Naima Lowe

Sound Design and Music by

Naima Lowe, Jordan Wright, and kara lynch

Lighting Design by

LW Miller

Production Manager

Andy Goodman

Performed by

Naima Lowe as the Late Bloomer

Jordan Wright (vocals, trombone, keys, synths) and kara lynch (vocals, violin) as The Band

Festival Stage Manager

Labhaoise Magee

Sound Board Operator

Stephanie l. Carlin

Production Crew

Žilvinas Jonušas
Ansel Combs

Performances

January 30 at 7:00 PM, February 1 at 7:00 PM, & February 3 at 9:00 PM

Runtime: 45 minutes

Masks are required for all SUITE/Space performances. Please wear a mask that fits securely over your mouth and nose at all times in public spaces (hallways, bathroom, lobby, elevator). If you do not have one, we can provide one for you.

Mabou Mines
150 First Avenue (Second Floor), NYC 10009

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Late Bloomer is a poetic musical performance about love, longing, and ambition written and performed by Naima Lowe, with a highly improvised punk-jazz musical score co-created with musicians kara lynch and Jordan Wright, and with direction by Asher Hartman. As the Late Bloomer, Naima embodies a heightened version of herself experiencing various stages of a secret, unrequited love affair with an unseen and unknowable figure known as “the old man who has agreed to be the human embodiment of her ambition” or simply “Ambition.” Ambition is charming, elusive, and may or may not be a figment of the Late Bloomer’s imagination. Combining tactics from experimental theater, improvisational music, spoken-word poetry, and physical comedy, Late Bloomer is about a monstrously beautiful body and soul embracing its multiplicity and sexual power by growing ever bigger, badder, and more willing to risk it all in the name of love.

Content Warnings: Sexually Explicit Language, Partial Nudity

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Photo credit: September Dawn Bottoms

Naima Lowe (she/her/hers) is a Black queer disabled writer and artist who creates performances, texts and videos using transgressive and radical traditions of Black utterance. She earned her BA from Brown University and MFA from Temple University where she was a Student Academy Award Finalist for her experimental nonfiction film “Birthmarks.” “Birthmarks” also won Best Experimental Film at The Newark Black Film Festival, Best Sound Design at the NextFrame International Student Film Festival and in 2020 received the Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Awards, where it is now part of the permanent collection.

Naima’s screenings and exhibitions include Anthology Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Henry Art Gallery. Naima’s essays, poetry and artist books have been published by The Encyclopedia Project, Sound American Magazine, and Walls Divide Press. Her self published artist book “39 Questions For White People” is held in the permanent collections of Harvard University Library, Franklin and Marshall College, The University of Buffalo, among many community based and institutional rare books libraries. Naima has held artist residency fellowships at the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and The Lighthouse Works.

Naima was a 2021-2022 Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange Artist Fellow, recipient of the 2022-23 Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and a recipient of a 2022 Jazz Road Creative Residency. In 2020, Naima launched her independent art and design imprint Trial and Error and since 2021 has been a Community Coordinator for the online writing community at Louis Place. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.

Special Thanks

Emmy Bean, September Dawn Bottoms, Taylor Ho Bynum, David Caruso, Evan Clayburg, Claudia DeSimone, Lois Eady, Quincy Flowers, Lewis Freedman, Dylan Gaultier, Andrea Geyer, Jeffrey Gockel, Vera Haddad, Jessica Harvey, Shira Hassan, Sally Hensel, Steffani Jemison, The Lowe Family, The Myers Family, Nate Malinowski, Kristina Nygaard, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eliza Schmidt, Lighthouse Works S57 and Lucas Wrench.

Late Bloomer has been supported by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, The Lighthouse Works Residency Fellowship, the Mid America Arts Alliance Innovation Award, The Jazz Road Creative Residency and the Foundation For Contemporary Art Emergency Fund.

Collaborators

kara lynch (she/ze), a time-based artist, lives en exilio in Indian Territory. Conjuring autonomy for Black and Indigenous people across Diaspora, kara’s art practice is re-memory, vision, and movement. Collective feminist practice and social intervention animate lynch’s aesthetic/political explorations of time + space.
lynch is anchor artist for INVISIBLE – episodic, multi-site installations excavating the terror and resilient beauty of Black-Indigenous experiences, and co-editor of ‘We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions’– an edited volume of Black Speculation, and director of ‘BlackRussians’ – a feature documentary video.
kara completed the MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and has been a research fellow at the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas Austin and the Academy of African Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany. kara is an emerit@s Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College, a 2020-23 Tulsa Artist Fellow, host of Blues U, a bi-weekly radio show on radiocoyote.org, a principled artist with GalleryOfTheStreets, and a co-shaper of Black August In Motion.

E. Jordan Wright (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and musician. They graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in music composition and vocal performance in 2015. Their artistic practice is informed by their experiences as a nonbinary person, a privileged child of the middle class, and a survivor of houselessness. Favorite performances include: reading a piece at the 2017 women’s march in Tulsa Oklahoma, and performing in plays written by children at the library. Their experimental duo “Astrophoria” has produced pieces such as “States of Motion, States of Rest,” which can be found on Astrophoria’s YouTube page. For more of their work, visit Astrophoria.bandcamp.com

Asher Hartman (he/him) is a transgender visual artist, writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feeling. A great deal of his work was developed with the support of Machine Project in Los Angeles from 2010-2017. Asher Hartman is the director and founder of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of visual artists, actors, and performance artists with whom he has created since 2010. Recent projects include “It’s Better to Start Out Ugly,” JOAN (2023), The Lab, San Francisco, (2023) and a novel, an excerpt of which is featured in TDR (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as “Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers.”

Andy Goodman (she/they) is a multifaceted artist and advocate, blending their talents as a painter, youth advocate, videographer, dancer, and curator. Rooted in Narragansett land, Andy utilizes movement as a medium to connect with their Diaspora Jewish identity, interpreting the complexities of living on colonized land. As an artist, Andy is drawn to the imperfections of movement, speech, and story, finding profound wisdom in the awkwardness, failures, and stutterings as they explore their familial history, a narrative filled with amnesia and loss.
Graduating in 2021 with a master’s degree from Brown University in American Studies, their scholarship was centered on performance, film, and critical race theory. Andy is a recipient of Brown’s Community Artist Grant, Brown Executive Scholarship Award, and Digital Scholarship Award. They have exhibited their artwork, displayed video installations, and performed dances in the Seattle, WA, and Providence, RI areas.
Currently, Andy is an artist and consultant for artists, cultural organizations, and government agencies dedicated to youth advocacy, queer justice, and equitable city planning.

SUITE/Space 2023 -24 | Naima Lowe | Late Bloomer

SUITE/Space 2023-24

Late Bloomer

Created by

Naima Lowe

Directed by

Asher Hartman

Text by

Naima Lowe

Sound Design and Music by

Naima Lowe, Jordan Wright, and kara lynch

Lighting Design by

LW Miller

Production Manager

Andy Goodman

Performed by

Naima Lowe as the Late Bloomer

Jordan Wright (vocals, trombone, keys, synths) and kara lynch (vocals, violin) as The Band

Festival Stage Manager

Labhaoise Magee

Sound Board Operator

Stephanie l. Carlin

Production Crew

Žilvinas Jonušas Ansel Combs

Performances

Special Thanks

Late Bloomer has been supported by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, The Lighthouse Works Residency Fellowship, the Mid America Arts Alliance Innovation Award, The Jazz Road Creative Residency and the Foundation For Contemporary Art Emergency Fund.

Collaborators

Žilvinas Jonušas
Ansel Combs