Prof. Brigid Cohen, New York University, Lucia Dlugoszewski, Fluxus, and Immigrant Experimentalism, 24 marca 2026, godz. 11:00
Instytut Sztuki PAN, ul. Długa 26, Sala im. Sobieskich
The story of New York experimentalism has often been told as a narrative of American “innovation” and “freedom.” Yet the constraints of migration and national uprooting often lay at the heart these communities’ creativity. This talk explores this dynamic via Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925-2000), a Polish-American composer, and her previously underexplored connections with Fluxus—a transnational organization that sponsored artists, musicians, and writers dedicated to questioning boundaries between art and life. The idea of Fluxus was conceived by George Maciunas (1931-1978), an artist and impresario who had immigrated as a wartime child refugee from Lithuania via Germany to New York. In Fluxus, Maciunas worked closely with Lithuanian-American filmmaker Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), who in turn collaborated with Dlugoszewski. Dlugoszewski has only recently gained scholarly attention although she was lauded by Fluxus composer Philip Corner (1933-) as a founding figure of the “international cross-cultural underground.” Having grown up in a striving immigrant community in Detroit, she flouted expectations of respectability to pursue her musical ambitions in bohemian Greenwich Village. Ultimately, this talk brings new perspectives to Fluxus as a movement of largely displaced people and immigrants by exploring Dlugoszewski’s film music, in collaboration with Mekas, and her reimagination of the piano.
Brigid Cohen is a historical musicologist who studies music and migration. She has taught and published on 20th-century avant-gardes, archive studies, diaspora, imperialism, and intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. Her first book Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Her second book, Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022), won the Irving Lowens Book Award of the Society for American Music. Cohen is currently writing “The Musical Vocation of Yoko Ono,” the first monograph to explore the lifelong musical dimensions of Yoko Ono’s work. Cohen’s research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Academy in Berlin. With literary scholar Wendy Lee, theater artist Rosemary Quinn, and designer/choreographer Mimi Yin, she is also a cofounder of Consent Lab, a mobile arts unit devoted to interactive experimentation.
Photograph credids: NYU, https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/brigid-cohen.html
Spotkanie w ramach projektu "Muzyka polska i litewska w perspektywie globalnej: migracja, tożsamości diasporyczne i ojczyzna" / 'Polish and Lithuanian Music in Global Perspective: Migration, Diasporic Identities and Homeland'