Tickets $15. Performance artist Ashley Yang-Thompson and author Jaydra Johnson lead a collaborative pimple porn presentation on the idea of “Cringe”. Cringe has become a referent for overly earnest, uncool, or passe behavior. But what if cringe vulnerability is actually the path to freedom? In this collaborative presentation, Ashley and Jaydra will reach their handsdeep inside the belly of cringe, feel around in the viscera, and ultimately expose its guts. Through images, video, and readings of their work, they will trace the development of their understanding of cringe as a way of life and the apogee of artistic expression. They will even risk doing something as cringeworthy as quote David Foster Wallace when he says, “The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile… who treat of plain, old, untrendy human troubles and emotions with reverence and conviction.”  With musical guest Alex Wilson. 

Tickets $15. Presented by local writer, filmmaker, and musician Kalimah Abioto, Twice as Nice is the second film by Jessie Maple, a pioneering independent African American filmmaker whose first film Will (1981) was the first feature-length independent film produced by an African American woman. Maple also made history as the first black woman admitted to New York’s camera operators union. Maple was also a journalist and ran her own independent theater 20 West out of her brownstone in Harlem. Tonight’s film Twice as Nice (1989) is Maple’s second feature film which explores the bond between twin college basketball players.