Reading starts promptly at 7pm
Free

"What is it to construct the time-based artistic creation that is a book-length work, while dealing with the minute-by-minute concerns and distractions of a day job? Suzanne Stein’s book-length poem New Sutras was written during the eight years that mark her tenure as founding editor-in-chief of SFMOMA’s Open Space; the same day job I have had while writing And What’s More. You could say the two books have nothing in common, and on one level that’s true. But that isn’t the level that interests me at all." – Claudia La Rocco

Suzanne Stein’s poetry publications and performance documents include The Kim Game, TOUT VA BIEN, and Passenger Ship; her book-length poem New Sutras is forthcoming this spring. With the poet Steve Benson, she is the author of DO YOUR OWN DAMN LAUNDRY, just released from Gauss PDF, which collects the 36 improvisational dialogues they performed together between 2011 and 2012. Writing has appeared recently in The Best American Experimental Writing, Elderly, and Open Space; performance recordings are archived at PennSound. Suzanne was the founding editor, and for eight years editor-in-chief, of Open Space, SFMOMA'S hybrid art and language platform and publication. In the mid-90s she was the co-director and film curator of a little San Francisco gallery called {four walls. After thirty years in the Bay Area, she now lives in San Diego, CA.

Commissioned Project
Claudia La Rocco: And What’s More
June 1–June 30, 2019 

Claudia La Rocco's And What’s More is a literary, performance, art, and sound project that refuses traditional audience/maker/doer relationships. The third in her experimental Olivia Trilogy, And What’s More developed from years of La Rocco's collaborations with artists in different fields, exploring how form and content mutate but also cohere across disciplines, and how an artist can remain true to herself while working in service of others. For this project, rather than asking artists to explicitly interpret her creation, she brings talented individuals into her fictitious imaginings (through the book form of And What’s More) in order to create a loose conversation between and among forms, both on and off the page: "A lot of what sparks my enthusiasm here is curiosity. What would happen if...? Specific to all of the individuals is a bristly intelligence — for some this is structural, for some physical, for some linguistic, philosophical, and so on… And there isn't anything I like more than intelligence. Even when intelligence fails, it's interesting." With characteristic humor and poetry, La Rocco invites her collaborating artists to use The Lab’s space as a "page or a performance, or something else entirely."

Claudia La Rocco is a writer whose work frequently revolves around interdisciplinary performances and projects. She is the author of The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited, 2014) and the chapbook I am trying to do the assignment ([2nd Floor Projects], 2018). The first two installments of The Olivia Trilogy, petit cadeau and Interstitial, were published in print, performance, and digital editions by The Chocolate Factory in 2015 and Michelle Ellsworth’s Man Pant Publishing imprint in 2016; the final book is forthcoming from The Lab. La Rocco’s duo with musician/composer Phillip Greenlief, animals & giraffes, has released the albums July (with various musicians; Edgetone Records, 2017) and Landlocked Beach (with Wobbly; Creative Sources, 2018). Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous anthologies and she has bylines in such publications as Artforum, BOMB, and The New York Times, where she was an arts critic and reporter from 2005-2015. She has received grants and residencies from such organizations as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts, and her work has been presented by The Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum of American Art, et al.