Following a sold-out run at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater last year, Pamela Sneed, a poet, performer, and visual artist, will bring her “Tribute to Big Mama Thornton” to The Church on Saturday at 6 p.m. The cabaret performance, which she herself conceived and wrote, honors the life and music of Willie Mae Thornton. She will be accompanied by Viva DeConcini on guitar, Mara Rosenbloom on piano, and David A. Barnes on harmonica.
Thornton, a blues singer and songwriter who died in 1984, was known for her rendition of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Hound Dog,” which influenced Elvis Presley’s version, and her own composition “Ball and Chain,” which became a hit for Janis Joplin. She was an important influence on younger blues and soul singers, including Joplin and Aretha Franklin.
Sneed has performed throughout the United States and Europe, and has published her poems in The Paris Review, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Poetry magazine, among others.
Tickets are $60, $55 for members.
In connection with The Church’s current exhibition, “This Land: Considering the American Landscape,” Sheri Pasquarella, the executive director of the Sag Harbor cultural center, will speak Friday afternoon at 4 about early American art.
Drawing connections between the exhibition’s 19th-century paintings and artists working today, the lecture will consider the roles of nationhood, community, and value in connection with the last two centuries of landscape art.
The exhibition juxtaposes works from the Hudson River School, this country’s first major art movement — which flourished between 1825 and 1870 and included such noted artists as Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and Thomas Moran, to name a few — with paintings by contemporary artists.
That same period also saw the emergence of the American art market, the founding of some of the nation’s first museums and art schools, and the advent of collecting practices that continue today.
Drawing on nearly a decade of independent research presented at Yale University, Columbia University, Christie’s Education, and other institutions, Pasquarella will discuss the rise of the Hudson River School, which coincided with the creation of the nation’s cultural institutions; when “speculators” became part of the art market, and how those events resonate today.
Pasquarella has over 20 years’ experience in the visual and performing arts. She was an associate director of the Marlborough Gallery from 1998 to 2022 and director of Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery from 2002 to 2005. From 2003 to 2012 she was adjunct faculty in the art market M.A. program at SUNY F.I.T. and has lectured on the American art market at Yale, Columbia, and elsewhere.
Tickets are $10, free for members.
