Live in America
Springdale

Springdale

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Free Range Programming

David Thomson-Led Residency Workshop

The Basics of Self-Care, Your Finances, and Your Future

Registration Required (see below)
Saturday, November 18th
11am to 1pm
506 Holcomb in Springdale

Let’s look at the basics of self-care, your finances and the future.

We will cover the nuts & bolts of budgeting (personally and professionally), taxes, credit & debt, and legacy. Alongside this, we will discuss building a personal philosophy to help you define your own success. The materials and resources will be digitally shared and laptops are recommended for the workshop.

REGISTER HERE.

If registration is full, please join the wait list. On 11/15, we will finalize registration.

David Thomson

David Thomson is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity, using image, writing, performance, and installation as containers of inquiry. Thomson’s performance work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, and The Lunder Institute of American Art. Awards and fellowships include US Artist, NYFA, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has had the pleasure of working and collaborating with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Kaneza Schaal, Deborah Hay, and Okwui Okpokwasili among many others. Recent projects include collaborating on Matthew Barney’s film installation, Secondary; a published essay in Yvonne Rainer’s Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 (Performa), and he is one of the contributing artists in Cane: A New Critical Edition (the3rdthing.press) for the 100th anniversary of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel. In 2017, he initiated The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment.

Visiting Artists

Hall, Meehan, Thomson Visiting Artists

This residency is in partnership with The Momentary. With this collaboration, LiA and the Mo are continuing to nurture the relationships they fostered during the 2022 Live in America Festival.

Based on a dream…

This residency is based on the impetus to exchange and engage in organic conversations between old friends with overlapping concerns and open-ended dreams.  It is an opportunity to be with each other and to work independently and collaboratively. It’s about hanging together and seeing what catches our spirits.

Working together and separately, we’ll exchange recipes, laugh, play, and wander. Rest and travel excursions are embedded in our work ethic.  Rhythms, questions, and contradictions will abound.

Sean Meehan

Residency Artist

Sean Meehan is a drummer whose work incorporates contemporary composition, improvisation, hybrids of these, and interdisciplinary collaboration. His work has been presented at a number of prestigious institutions including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (New York), INSTAL Festival (Scotland), Goethe House (Hanoi), and The Whitney Biennial, but he more frequently performs in artist-run venues and festivals.

Meehan has released a number of recordings as well as a series of objects intended to encourage meditation on sound. These include Audio, a boxed set of four cassette-like objects, and Field Recordings Vol. 3, a folio of printed matter that suggest and intone various sounds and sound events.

Trained as an urban planner Meehan also makes urbanist super 8 films in the tradition of planners such as William H. Whyte and Kevin Lynch who utilized that medium for their groundbreaking research. This work has informed a 20-year collaboration with Tamio Shiraishi on their annual summer concert series situated in a variety of marginal, heterotopic spaces throughout New York City. These were documented on two vinyl records (In the City (Fuestron), and Annual Summer Concerts (JD Stereo). The pair was invited by Scotland-based presenting organization ARIKA to, with the help of an embedded cartographer, develop a similarly motivated tour throughout the United Kingdom.

He is currently writing an analysis of New Deal architecture in the South Bronx, a long-form solo drum recording, a collaboration with cellist Theresa Wong, and a split 7” recording with Michelle Ellsworth.

Meehan is the grateful recipient of a 2020 artist award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

David Thomson

Residency Artist

David Thomson is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity, using image, writing, performance, and installation as containers of inquiry. Thomson’s performance work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, and The Lunder Institute of American Art. Awards and fellowships include US Artist, NYFA, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has had the pleasure of working and collaborating with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Kaneza Schaal, Deborah Hay, and Okwui Okpokwasili among many others. Recent projects include collaborating on Matthew Barney’s film installation, Secondary; a published essay in Yvonne Rainer’s Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 (Performa), and he is one of the contributing artists in Cane: A New Critical Edition (the3rdthing.press) for the 100th anniversary of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel. In 2017, he initiated The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment.

Ben Hall

Residency Artist

Ben Hall is a writer and composer based in and from Detroit, Michigan. He was profiled in Fred Moten’s 2017 book, Black and Blur, and frequently works as a critic with a research focus on the visionary American composers Milford Graves and Bill Dixon. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College from 2018-2022. He is currently compiling material for the forthcoming Black Liberation Music Guide.

Events Gallery

Yard Art Celebration of Artist Danielle Hatch

More Delicious, More Lovely, More Beautiful invites viewers to consider softness and beauty as essential to our shared neighborhood landscape, and examines baking as a historical site of feminine power.

Thanks to photographer Ashlyn Gulbranson for capturing these images.

Made possible by generous support from our sponsor.
The House

Guillermo Gómez Peña’s Live in America Cocktail

What ensues is our sneaking across a dark lawn, crouching between trucks. There is some minor trespassing, some sneaking onto a porch, some unproductive peeping action. Multiple times, I bring up guns and the fact that we’re in Arkansas.

Time: 

How long do you want to be hungover? 

Ingredients:

Diet Coke

Kombucha 

Fireball

Ice

Red solo cup

 

If you want to zhuzh:

Bitters

Lime wedges

 

Step One: Consider Your Setting

Think about a great cocktail bar. Think about all its smoothly curved stainless steel tools, all the beautiful liquor bottles, the leather stools, the glitzy patrons, the repressed longings, all the craft booze-pouring/shaking that just flourishes inside. Now take all of that away. That’s not the where and how of this cocktail recipe. Instead picture a cute craftsman home whose full-time resident artists are drinking less, and so they don’t have much liquor around. There’s a cooler of coke and diet coke and sparkle waters as well as a cooler of Modelo. But no bitters, no tequila, no back-lit bottles of gin. However, because these two artists remain cocktail fans, there are tools– a stainless steel shaker and a jigger, plenty of ice. But alas no mixologist and no actual booze. 

But glittery patrons? Oh, we have those. And I would venture to say on this particular birth-of-a-heretofore-unknown-cocktail night, we host enough glittery artists with enough longing to explore and to adventure, to wander across the lawn to in order to peep through the eccentric neighbor’s window, that their inevitable shenanigans rival those of any late night bar crowd. But despite this gathering of glitz and glam and longing and well frankly, mania, our celebration is initially missing the creative spark that will move the night’s festivities to the next level. 

Step Two: Gather Your Sparks

Think of this as a found cocktail. Ie, someone found all these ingredients and then mixed them together to make a cocktail. The first spark/ingredient, Fireball, arrives with a local city council person. At the door, they present to the hosts a literal bucket of premeasured Fireball shots and some holiday-flavored Chapstick. We immediately do shots of Fireball. I say to myself, “Mistake number one tonight.” The bucket of Fireball lives on the dining table, and all night, as new guests arrive, they remark, ”My god, is that a bucket of Fireball shots?” Yes, yes it is. (By the end of the night, it will be empty.)  But initially, the Fireball remains untouched until the arrival of a certain performance artist of note, ie spark two. 

When Guillermo Gómez Peña walks in with his artistic and life partner, Balitrónica, I am a bit starstruck (well, way more than a bit). Starstruck as only someone who has a PhD in obscure performance practice can be in the presence of Guillermo Gómez Peña. Guillermo is a Mexicano/Chicano performance artist/activist/writer. I studied him throughout my doctoral program. In those days, he was fascinating to me because he was one of the few Mexicano/Chicano performers with whom academic-y, art-fancy people were fascinated, and yet he managed to achieve the status of “fascinating” without having to center his career around white narrative structures.

Like for so many other scholars/artists, Gómez Peña’s performances in museums captured my imagination. My favorite was a collaboration. In the early 90s, in partnership with Coco Fusco, the two famously staged The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. This performance lives so hard in my brain that I can describe it to you now without looking at a reference. In this work, first performed to mark the anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America, Gómez Peña and Fusco outfitted themselves in quasi-authentico Native American drag. Their museum performance space was marked with traditional institutional trappings: encyclopedia-style articles and museum plaques, all with museum-quality writing. All very officious. In the museum, they inhabited a literal cage chock full of stereotypical Native paraphernalia and chock full of signs of the West, including Coke bottles and laptops and a Polaroid camera. 

With their performance of a fictional pair of undiscovered Native islanders trapped in a cage, they unleashed the assumptions and stereotyping and racismo of the audience. Despite the telltale signs of irony, many museum-goers treated Fusco and Gómez Peña as objects, as animals, as other: asking to see Fusco’s breasts, harassing the performers with ape sounds and rattling their cage, handing them bottles filled with piss, generally accepting the whole ironic fiction as fact. The audience remained privilegedly unaware of the social/historical critique they themselves created with their performative responses to The Couple in the Cage. 

With photos from the performance slide-showing in my mind, I watch Gómez Peña from across the room. Shorter than I imagined. Good rings. He leads with a discussion of how many brujas he senses in the house. He exhibits a deep appreciation for good beans. Offers a dick joke. In a short time, he is unapologetically holding court around our dining table. And of course, he wants a cocktail. And of course, the only liquor we have is that bucketful of Fireball shots. 

Step Three: The Shake

Making do with items on hand, Guillermo gamely mixes over ice in a shaker equal parts Fireball, Kombucha, and Diet Coke. He serves this concoction with ice in a red plastic igloo cup. (And when I tell him that I am going to write about this concoction, he requests that I underscore that the ice is essential. He also tells me to tell you that if he ever tries the mix again, he’ll experiment with bitters and some lime wedges.)

Anyway, Guillermo and I are introduced. He immediately hands me a cup of his new cocktail. I am surprised and overwhelmed, more by his presence than the drink. I try to focus, keep my fangirl shit together. I take a sip. Oddly thirst-quenching. But as this mix of dieted godforsaken chemicals, spicy cinnamon, and vinegar water race through my body, it unleashes the floodgates, and I start to gush to Guillermo. What his work means to me, appreciation for how he carved out room in practice and in institutions for someone like me to imagine her own arts practice. I choke up. I also choke on the drink. Faced with tears and gagging, Guillermo is gracious. I am sure many have gushed-choked at him before. But the party keeps moving, and not wanting to appear like a total stalker, I drift away. The next time we connect, he comes to me with a question.

His question goes something like this: I have heard next door there is a performance artist última. She lives her everyday life inside performance. Can you come outside and tell me more, maybe show her to me? Now, it is true that our neighbor only wears period clothing. She’s a costume designer and a historian, and she is so dedicated to her craft that she sews her clothes with (and in terms of the earliest cases without) period-appropriate machinery. And it is true that this is a lifestyle choice in that she and her kids only ever wear these historical clothes and refer to their modern clothes as “pajamas.” And it is also true that watching someone dressed like Martha Washington step out of an SUV while holding a Big Gulp is quite a performative experience. But nonetheless, our neighbor does not refer to herself as a performance artist. I explain all these circumstances to Guillermo along with the neighbor’s fascination with the decorative macabre. His response: I must see for myself. 

What ensues is our sneaking across a dark lawn, crouching between trucks. There is some minor trespassing, some sneaking onto a porch, some unproductive peeping action. Multiple times, I bring up guns and the fact that we’re in Arkansas. I explain “defend your ground.” And eventually the message gets through. As we cross back over the neighbor’s lawn, Guillermo removes his cigarette to cough. He looks at me and says that he only answers to two gods: American Spirits and Albuterol. Then we take selfies on the porch. 

Step Four: Offsetting Dark Magics

I have several of Guillermo’s cocktails. Several more than several. But here’s the true miracle. I don’t puke. I don’t get a headache. I never remotely skirt morose-alcohol-fueled-sadness. And I should have. I should have been very sick and probably crying at 3am. The only conclusion I can draw is that somehow the Kombucha mixed with a lot of borracho beans and stirred with the force that is Guillermo Gómez Peña healed me, offsetting all the dark magics.

CoOp Group

CoOp Team

Live in America Springdale collaborates with a team of local creatives to communally grow our artistic, producorial, and arts administration skills.

DJ Girlfriend

CoOp Member

DJ GIRLFRIEND is a house + disco DJ based in Fayetteville, AR. While their work is largely informed by the music they grew up with in Memphis, TN, they also draw inspiration from the local music scenes across Northwest Arkansas and surrounding areas.

Image credit: Elizabeth Salazar Photography

Pura Coco

CoOp Member

Pura Coco, born in New York, raised in Northwest Arkansas, is an emerging sensation in alternative R&B, blending Latin and southern influences into a unique, heartfelt sound. Her velvety vocals and electrifying stage presence create a deep connection with her fanbase. Pura Coco transcends traditional music boundaries, captivating audiences worldwide.

Image Credit: Zeta Inc.

DJ Raquel

CoOp Member

Raquel Thompson is the CEO and Founder of the artist-friendly label, Love More Records, co-founder of electronic music event production collective, Haus of Untz, and an electronic music DJ with over 11 years in the game under her belt. She is dedicated to building a sustainable and thriving music ecosystem in Arkansas by fostering collaboration, community, and equity in the arts.

Image Credit: Zeta Inc.

Briseida “Brioch” Ochoa

CoOp Member

Briseida Ochoa’s “Brioch” is a Latina visual artist, whose work places alternative processes of photography and printmaking as a means to new perspectives and realities with the help of cyanotype and anthotype techniques. Her work demonstrates how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of cultural interaction. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between self and the other. She was born & raised in the sister cities of El Paso, TX & Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, MX. She holds a BFA in Studio Art Printmaking and Painting from the University of Texas at El Paso.

Image Credit: Joanna McCormick

Patricia C. Rodriguez

CoOp Member

Patricia is a creative based in Springdale, Arkansas. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Work and is exploring the use of art and expression in healing and mental health with bilingual and bicultural communities as well as with people in mental health crises. She is a mom who is intensely committed to wholesome fun.

Image Credit: Jesus David Lopez

Free Range Programming

Yard Art Celebration of Danielle Hatch

Featuring the work of Danielle Hatch
6 to 8pm Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023
506 Holcomb St., Springdale, AR 72764
Admission: FREE!
More Delicious, More Lovely, More Beautiful, invites viewers to consider softness and beauty as essential to our shared neighborhood landscape, and examines baking as a historical site of feminine power.

Join us for a celebration of Danielle Hatch’s Yard Art Installation, More Delicious, More Lovely, More Beautiful, at the Live in America Residency House. We’ll welcome her art into our Springdale neighborhood with a community event that features dessert, dancing, and decoration. 

Exploring the role of gender in domestic decorative craft and baking, More Delicious, More Lovely, More Beautiful, invites viewers to consider softness and beauty as essential to our shared neighborhood landscape, and examines baking as a historical site of feminine power. The building exterior is transformed into a space of radical refusal of the status quo that divides interior and exterior domestic environments, embracing instead a language of visual freedom and decoration.

Created with Support From: Walmart Foundation

Design Credit: Chantal Herrera
Credit: Danielle Hatch
Yard Art Fabric Sketch
Made possible by generous support from our sponsor.
Events Gallery

Yard Art Celebration of Artist Audrey Vega

With mural and portrait painting, Los Hermanos Vega: Rooted in Springdale is an ode to Virginia Vega and Eddie Vega, siblings who devoted many years to expanding and supporting the Latine community in Springdale. Thank you to photographer Cynthia Tran for capturing this event!
Made possible by generous support from our sponsor.
Events Gallery

The Residency House

Take a look at our residency house in Springdale, Arkansas! Thanks to Ashlyn Gulbranson for capturing the feel of the space.
  • Front Porch Time
  • Living Room
  • Living Room Entertainments
  • Dining
  • Kitchen
  • Tomatoes Waiting
  • Guest Room One Downstairs
  • Another of the Guest Room
  • Downstairs Bathroom
  • Carra Space
  • Office
  • Desk of Carra
  • Back Door onto the Patio
  • Guest Room Two Downstairs
  • Plant Light
  • Upstairs Landing
  • Upstairs Sitting Area
  • Guest Room Three Upstairs
  • Growing a Library Upstairs (potentially haunted rocking chair)
  • Upstairs Bathroom
  • Guest Room Four Upstairs
  • Back Porch
  • Backyard
Free Range Programming

New Orleans Artist Residency Workshop

HOW TO LEVITATE : Exploring the Magician Archetype Through Mask-Making and Illusion
How to Levitate
New Orleans Residency Workshop
Saturday, September 30th
10am to Noon
Space is limited. For further information, register HERE.
Parking across the street.

From New Orleans masking and parading culture, we bring you “How to Levitate.” In this workshop guests will be invited to create a mask and appear as a character in an immersive photo shoot inspired by The Magician. The artists in residence will be creating illusions, unique sounds, and costumes that workshop attendees will be invited to interact with. This will be a collaborative environment, all ideas are welcome and mask-making supplies will be provided. Feel free to come dressed in costume or with a magical object of your choosing and be ready to Play! Many of New Orleans’ traditions and rituals are inspired by myth and storytelling. By embodying the Magician, we will be exploring what it means to manifest.

RSVP for Free at this link—> https://bit.ly/liveinamericalevitate

Credit: Sarah Danziger
Visiting Artists

New Orleans Visiting Artists

This residency is in partnership with The Momentary. With this collaboration, LiA and the Mo are continuing to nurture the relationships they fostered during the 2022 Live in America Festival.

Delving into play, making music, photographing The Magician. New forms of merrymaking and collaboration. Live in America Festival Facilitator, Jay Pennington, brings a crew of New Orleans artists to make magic in Northwest Arkansas.

Rusty Lazer

Visiting New Orleans Artist

Rusty / Jay is a lifelong musician, a decades-long resident of New Orleans and the co-founder of New Orleans Airlift and its flagship project, Music Box Village. He brought New Orleans artists Big Freedia and Nicky Da B to prominence internationally as a manager, DJ and producer. His practice has been rooted in connection, collaboration, exploration and investigation, sprinkled with a healthy dose of practicality and improvisation. In his latest phase he’s turning away from the sprawling, community-focused artwork he’s known for and producing new music and experiences while learning to be somewhat singular creatively, unifying facets of his past adventures and identities into a kind of internal self-collaboration. 

Jami Girouard

New Orleans Visiting Artist

Jami Girouard is a New Orleans based artist interested in world building through the exploration of different aesthetic modalities including but not limited to lighting, textile, costume design and interior decor.

Jami will be using her time at the residency to delve into a sense of play by stepping back from the pressures to produce for capitalistic consumption and following where creative curiosity leads.

The Floozies are a collaborative partnership between artists Margot Couture and Libbie Allen. They bring a revolving cast of characters to life through performance, costuming and a commitment to the practice of Play. Drawing from regional folklore, Couture and Allen imagine the other-than-human entities that surround them and invite these beings out to be seen.

Margot Couture is a painter and multimedia artist whose work depicts bizarre characters, masked figures, and archetypal imagery. She is heavily inspired by New Orleans, her home, and its rich history of Carnival. For over a decade, she has produced underground parades and parties whose themes have explored issues of identity, rebellion, and sexuality. Her current work is a window into this world. In 2008 she received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU School of the Arts.

Libbie Allen works across mediums exploring the web of relationality that is life on Earth. Allen’s work is informed by her interest in myth, dreams, and the unknown, and is inspired by how women connect to nature through intuition. Using printmaking, photography, embroidery, painting, and natural dye, she aims to weave corporeal experiences with ephemeral manifestations of spirit. Allen received a Bachelor’s of Science in the Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. Her work has been shown in the Ogden Museum of Art and is in the permanent collection at the Alexandria Museum of Art. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Floozies will be using their time at Live in America Springdale and The Momentary to bring to life the archetypal figure The Magician. In Tarot, the magician is the first character the fool meets on his journey and symbolizes manifestation. Using oversized props, costumes, smoke, mirrors, and the surrounding woods, they will create a photo series. They hope to engage with people from the community by inviting them to also be characters in the photos.