W. David Hancock & Wardell Milan
MASTER
May 25–June 24, 2017
Irondale Theater Center
85 S Oxford Street
Brooklyn, New York
The Foundry Theatre announces the world premiere of MASTER, a site specific installation of new works by Wardell Milan, and an immersive performance written by W. David Hancock. MASTER exists between the language of theater and the silence of art as it confronts the inadequacy of our American stories head-on, and imagines a new freedom.
Commissioned to playwright W. David Hancock (Conventions of Cartography) in collaboration with visual artist Wardell Milan, MASTER is a performance / installation inspired by “The Illuminated Twain,” an incomplete work by the late African American contemporary artist James Leroy Clemens (“Uncle Jimmy”) itself inspired by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. What survives of the 42 illuminations that comprised Uncle Jimmy’s final work has been installed by a team of artists and designers including Marsha Ginsberg, Thomas Dunn, Tilly Grimes, and Mikaal Sulaiman in the Irondale Theater in Brooklyn. Milan and Hancock, working together and in their own forms, have taken up Clemens’ mandate to create a “righteous completion” of the character Jim from Twain’s American classic.
Hancock writes:
“Uncle Jimmy’s Illuminations are inhabited by all the characters from Mark Twain’s novels, not just the famous—but also all the minor, non-speaking parts as well. The unnamed slaves that Twain hardly mentions—the anonymous crowds of townspeople—thousands of invisible souls—generations now—loving, living, raising children, passing on, remembered only inside Uncle Jimmy’s imagination. We come face-to- face with the invisible multitude: the faceless, the nameless, the pointless and the forgotten, the never remembered, the disremembered, the misremembered, the vaguely recalled and the never called. All—all these lives we take in—the beginnings of relationships and the ends—the memory traces and voids. These illuminations aren’t just representations of Jim’s body, they’re reliquaries for his grief.”
Unable to achieve broad recognition in his lifetime, Clemens labored in obscurity until his death last year. This exhibit and performance is the first one devoted entirely to what remains of his life’s work, alongside and embedded in new works by Milan, Ginsberg, Grimes, and Sulaiman.
MASTER is performed by Mikeah Jennings and Anne O’Sullivan, and directed by Taibi Magar (Underground Railroad Game).
Timed entrance is necessary and audience capacity is limited. The schedule for MASTER is as follows: Monday at 7pm, Tuesday at 7pm, Wednesday at 7pm and 9pm, Thursday at 7pm and 9pm, Friday at 7pm and 9pm, and Saturday at 5pm and 9pm.
W. David Hancock’s plays include The Convention of Cartography, The Race of the Ark Tattoo, Deviant Craft, The Puzzle Locker, and Our Lot (with Kristin Newbom). Hancock’s has been produced by The Foundry, Clubbed Thumb, Rude Mechanicals, Salvage Vanguard, People’s Light & Theatre Company, Empty Space, Abbey Theatre (Dublin), Compagnie Elapse (Paris), Théâtre des Carmes (Avignon), and the Christian Bernst Gallery (Paris). His fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Permafrost, and (with Spencer Golub) Chicago Quarterly Review and Pear Noir!. He has received two Obie Awards, the Whiting Award, and a Cal Arts/Alpert Award.
Wardell Milan grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his parents and teachers nurtured his artistic talent. As a teenager, Milan turned his attention to photography, earning a BFA in photography and painting at the University of Tennessee. He was an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine before he earned an MFA at Yale University. Recently Wardell Milan has been exhibiting selections from ongoing bodies of work on paper and photography such as Kingdom or Exile: Parisian Landscapes, at Savannah College of Art and Design and (Show Untitled) Parisian Landscapes, at Osmos Address, New York, and The Charming Hour (2015) at David Nolan Gallery, where he is represented in New York. In 2017, Milan participated as an Artist-In-Residence at The Rauschenberg Residency and was awarded The African American Trail Blazer Award by the University of Tennessee.
