Join celebrated dance artist Emily Johnson for a new, large-scale performance gathering that unfolds within Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT.

“A magnetic performer, adept at mobilizing people, onstage and off…”
—The New York Times

We’ll pay attention to another scale, another form, another knowledge. We’ll traverse together. We’ll listen to stories and provocations transmitted from artists across territories and First Nations. We’ll take in the sounds of famed DJ Dat Gurl Curly, from the Lower East Side. And we’ll gather on and amongst 84 hand-stitched quilts — a 4,000 square-foot design created over the past decade by hundreds of volunteers over multiple geographies.

An extension of care itself, designed by Ojibwe artist Maggie Thompson and activated through our performances, the quilts reflect a collective vision toward better futures. They hold a record of historic actions alongside personal histories, migrations, and dreams. You’ll be invited to take part by adding your ideas to this monumental project: what are your non-negotiable care actions? How do we defend land in a city? How do we disrupt the misuse of the terms: great, free, he, she, illegal, migrant, border?

About the Artist:
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Emily belongs to the Yup’ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, United States Artists, Braiding Seeds, Forge Project, Center CIRCL Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, among others, Emily is based in Lenapehoking / NYC and Haudenosaunee lands. Since 1998, Emily’s large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment—interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

Emily’s choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her current project, Overflow Radio is a performance, skill-share, planting of 1000 trees, and radio transmission taking place over 24 non-consecutive hours within a massive quilt installation and across geographies and territories. Emily’s recent work, Being Future Being, premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022, and was presented at PICA’s TBA Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, and Festival TransAmériques, among others. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017 and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018.

YOUR HONOR, a care procession, is part of the development of Emily Johnson/Catalyst’s newest work in development, a National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Project commissioned by Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater (REDCAT) and co-commissioned with DiverseWorks, MASS MoCA, and the University of Minnesota Dance Program (more information at npnweb.org); and with funds from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

Programs associated with Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT are supported in part by the Henry Luce Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Endeavor Foundation.

Emily Johnson / Catalyst, Quilt Being Star, worn by Ty Fierce Metteba, photo by Two Hawks Young.