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Danielle Abrams
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| Danielle Abrams is an interdisciplinary artist who works in performance and video. She is a
monologist, orchestrates social interventions, channels figures of kin, and provides dance lessons.
Abrams performs at art galleries, museums, theaters, and performance spaces. She also waxes
poetics from park benches, advertises her meal plan service as she bar-b-ques for art-hungry crowds,
leads Conga lines as a Borscht-Belt “toomler,” and emerges from the afterworld via wireless phones.
Recalling Flushing, Queens; a Coney Island heyday; and Mount Morris Park in Harlem, Abrams
utilizes the tropes of identity to survey social oppressions. She challenges our relationships to origin
and biography as she embodies her own multiracial cast of family members. Her personae sight the
toxicity, as well as poignancy, of social interactions and conditions that lie undetected in our
communities. Danielle has performed at art spaces, galleries, festivals, and museums nationally. Her
performances and videos have been programmed at the Bronx Museum of Art, Queens Museum of
Art, Arizona State University Art Museum, Institute of American Indian Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange,
WOW Cafe, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, Galapagos, and Ladyfest East. Lisa Bloom has written
extensively about Danielle’s work in Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity
(Routledge 2006). Her work has also been written about in the New Art Examiner, PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art, the Village Voice, NY Arts, fluent collaborative, CURVE, and Queer Ramblings.
Abrams is the former artistic director of BUILD, a performance space in San Francisco’s hub of queer
performance: the Mission District. She is also a founding Board Member of the Harvey Milk Institute
in San Francisco. Abrams has been awarded residencies at the Yale School of Painting, the
Skowhegan School of Art, the Bronx Museum of Art, and she was an artist-in-residence at
Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, NYC. She has been a recipient of fellowships from NY Urban Arts
Initiative and NY Foundation of the Arts. She has lectured at the University of Massachusetts,
Barnard College, Ohio University in Athens, and at numerous national conferences. Abrams has
taught at Goddard College in Vermont, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Queens
College (CUNY), and York College (CUNY). She is currently an assistant professor at the School of
Art and Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. |
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Early Bird
2004 |
Performed by Danielle Abrams
Videography: Kara Williamson Editing: Kara Williamson, Robert M. Foster, Jr.
In Early Bird, Dew Drop Lady (performed by Abrams) converses and shares jokes with a community of seniors in conversations about Passover, Florida, and her lineage that is Jewish and Black. As
their dialogue unfolds, Dew Drop Lady uncovers the racist beliefs that lie latent in the minds of a
Brighton Beach community of Jews. |
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