Cry Until You Laugh
Forward Union presents an evening of sexual and repro rights comedy, performance, art, and action at Kickstarter
Rooftop season is NOT over. Join Forward Union on a stunning Brooklyn rooftop (thanks, Kickstarter!) for a night of sadistic comedic relief hosted by River Ramirez, featuring Marcia Belsky, Karen Chee, Marie Faustin, and Jes Tom!
With free beer from Circa Brewery, a performance by Narcissister, a rooftop installation by Amy Khoshbin/House of Trees, and an interactive feminist library by INNER COURSE, Cry Until You Laugh offers LOLs alongside ways to support local organizations that protect access to sexual and reproductive health care.
ALL PROCEEDS WILL BENEFIT PARTICIPATING NONPROFITS: The Center, OutSmartNYC, and Shout Your Abortion.
DOORS 6:30pm / COMEDY 7-8:30pm / ROOFTOP PERFORMANCE, INSTALLATION, BEER 8:30-9:30pm
Cry Until You Laugh is brought to you in partnership by Forward Union and Kickstarter with support by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. In-kind support provided by Circa Brewery.
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Forward Union is a coalition-building initiative connecting social justice organizations, artists, and creative communities. The organization has hosted its marquee event, Forward Union Fair, annually since December 2016. The Fair is a free social justice fair that brings together advocates, organizations, topical art installations, and public programs.
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Kickstarter is a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to bring creative projects to life. Artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date, tens of thousands of creative projects—big and small—have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community.
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River is an artist, comedian, and writer based in Brooklyn. They have written, produced, and directed a comedy special called PERVERT EVERYTHING for Adult Swim. They can be seen on the HBO comedy series RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS as well as the final season of Comedy Central’s BROAD CITY. Out next, River is recurring on HBO’s new half-hour comedy LOS ESPOOKYS’ opposite Fred Armisen, and heavily appears in John Cameron Mitchell’s upcoming musical anthology podcast ANTHEM, opposite Glenn Close. Last year, they were named one of Comedy Central’s Up Next Comedians, featured at San Francisco’s Cluster Fest comedy festival. And most recently, they were invited to perform at the Public Theater as a part of 2019’s Under The Radar Festival. They are a regular correspondent on VICELAND. They’ve performed at Caroline's, UCB, Ars Nova, THE SPECIAL WITHOUT BRETT DAVIS, THE CHRIS GETHARD SHOW, The Brooklyn Comedy Festival and has exhibited their work at Family Business Gallery, The Living Gallery, Cloud City and The Experiment Comedy Gallery. They grew up in Miami, Florida, and graduated from SVA.
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INNER COURSE will present The Agony of It All, a mobile lending library complete with librarian. For over a decade, INNER COURSE has amassed a collection of books that survey screwball feminisms and “mansplained” issues about women. Some give emotionally predatory business advice to female workers while others dish out self-help strategies for pop pathologies. Many of the books zero in on patriarchal hysteria, becoming foreboding omens of the false narrative epoch. They exhibit a society in anguish, one willing to entertain almost any pseudo cure-all for a faint possibility of reprieve; the desperation to ‘heal thyself’ has produced innumerable quacks with megaphones. Within this library, lunacy and narcissism are the authority, while our bodies and minds are their supposed dominion.INNER COURSE is a project by Rya Kleinpeter and Tora López initiated in 2011. Their performance-based projects incite systems of play through melodrama, humor, psychodramatic inquiry, and role-play. They’ve held performances and exhibitions at The Museum Of Old And New Art (Tasmania, AU), The Bunker Artspace (FL), Smack Mellon (NYC), Alaska Projects (Sydney, AU), Signs and Symbols (NYC), Honey Space (NYC), Whitney Houston Biennial (NYC), Pulse Art Fair (NYC), Life Is Art Foundation (New Orleans, LA), among others.
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Amy Khoshbin’s sibling-led arts collective, House of Trees (HOT), collaborated with Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye to create a series of flags entitled I PLEDGE on the one-year anniversary of the Women’s March 2017. These were exhibited from January through March of 2018 at NYU’s Kimmel Gallery; at Artpace Main Gallery, Texas, in 2019; and now Kickstarter. Continuing to take artful, political action through the third year of xenophobic edicts like the Muslim Ban, the repeal of DACA, headlines of sexual harassment, declining access to sexual and reproductive health, and the tearing apart of environmental regulations, I PLEDGE inspires sustained resistance and hope through poetry and public visibility.
House of Trees (HOT) arts collective is dedicated to the transformative effects of contemporary art through public art collaborations including murals, performances, installations, and other high-visibility interventions. It brings together international artists and institutions to collectively explore and expose deeper ways of connecting personally and politically through artmaking. HOT is a collaboration between siblings: Amy, Jennifer, and Noah Khoshbin, and has exhibited at venues including: the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Times Square Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, River to River Festival, etc. HOT members have published widely, including: Newsweek, Readymade, House Beautiful, Glamour; have received residencies including The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts; and have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Carrie Mae Weems, Jenny Holzer, and poets Anne Carson, Naomi Shihab-Nye, and John Phillip Santos, among others.
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Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Wearing mask and merkin, she works at the intersection of performance, dance, art, and activism in a range of media including film, video art, and experimental music. She actively integrates her prior experience as a professional dancer and commercial artist with her art practice in a range of media including photography, video art, and experimental music. She has presented work worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, museums, and galleries. Her art video “Vaseline” won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at The Good Vibrations Erotic Film Festival. She received a Bessie Award nomination for the theatrical performance of “Organ Player” and 2015 Creative Capital and United States Artists Awards. Interested in troubling the popular entertainment and experimental art divide, she appeared on America’s Got Talent. Her first feature film “Narcissister Organ Player” premiered at Sundance and SXSW in 2018. In collaboration with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, she is a Sundance Theatre Lab 2018 Fellow for the development of a new evening-length performance commissioned by the Soho Rep in New York. She recently completed the Artpace residency in San Antonio, Texas.