Arleen Schloss Papers

Arleen Schloss (born 1943) is a New York City based poet, visual, performance, video, and film artist. An influential figure in the Downtown New York scene, she is known for her interdisciplinary loft space, A's, as well as her involvement in Danceteria, The Storefront of Art and Architecture, and the No Se No Social Club at the Rivington School.

Schloss attended the Parsons School of Design from 1961-1964 and attained a Bachelors of Education from New York University in 1967. She taught art at New York public elementary schools from the 1960s-1990s. In her own words, her framework of "teaching the alphabet with sound poetics and improvised chance operations" was a source of inspiration for her art. In her early educational and artistic career, Schloss lived in a building with other artists, including Merce Cunningham and Ray Kelly, with whom she began to organize workshops and parties (Bowery Artist Tribute, The New Museum).

Circle K Ranch began in 1971 as weekly "performance parties" organized by Ray Kelly, Bill Dunas of the Ambrose Art Foundation, and Arleen Schloss. In 1978, Schloss and R.L. Seltzman organized Performance Art Workshops on Monday evenings. From this came A's on a regular weekly basis, often referred to as "Wednesdays at A's" and "Saturday Night at A's." This experimental space at Schloss' 330 Broome Street loft was open to local and international interdisciplinary artists interested in collaborating and working with live audiences. Early participants included Claire Fergusson, Joe Lewis, Kirsten Hawthorne, Jean Allen as Boo the Clown, Mania D, and Tod Jorgensen. The first band to play at A's was Grey, Jean-Michel Basquiat's band. Posters for A's events were also the result of artistic collaborations, and were exhibited across Europe including at the Vienna Biennale and Art Basel in Switzerland.

As she was hosting these parties and workshops throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Schloss also performed some of her most well known works. These include Shot Dot Shot and A Shot Chance (The Kitchen, 1977), Its A at MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), AAA (Robert Freidus Gallery, 1978), The Staten Island Ferry Diamond Jubilee in 1980, How She Sees It By Her (various venues in New York City and Montreal, 1982), Performance A-Z (Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1982), The Letterwoman Show (Shuttle Theatre, 1984), A.E. Bla Bla Bla (Ars Electronica, 1986), and Loveletters (The Museum of Modern Art, 1987).

During this time, Schloss toured around the world to present her work at festivals and galleries. Her trips included a European tour in the early 1980s with performances in London, Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, and Brussels; a trip to Japan in 1987 to study language, characters, and sounds, which culminated in video exhibitions and "Peace on Earth," a light and sound environment piece; a trip to China in 1992 with Asian American artists, where she presented a media workshop at the Hong Kong Art Center and collaborated with the Peking Opera in Taiwan; a 1993 residency in Bremen, Germany, where she taught multimedia and fine arts at Hochschule für Kunste; a trip to South Korea in 1997 to participate in the Nine Dragon Heads International Environment Art Festival and Symposium; and repeated trips to Linz, Austria throughout the 1980s and 1990s to participate in the Ars Electronica Festival.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Schloss also ran a video production studio in her loft, Studio A, and produced several works of film and television. Schloss' films include 30 Seconds (1983), Glenn Branca Symphony No. 4 / Physics (1984), It's A Live Laser (1985), A National Geographic (1989), Sun Daze Away (circa 1988-1992), Art Around the Park (1990-1998), From Kepler 2 Cyberspace: Virtual Worlds / Digital Dreams (1993), and Windows of Chance / Change (circa 1998). Her television work includes ID / It's Dance (1987-1989) and the Nickelodeon series Eureeka's Castle (1989-1990).

In September 1980, Schloss began to produce A's Gallery (also called Salon A and Le Salon A), which presented visual works and installations every Saturday. Many shows were put together by guest curators and each exhibit presented a different theme. In the 1990s, A's ended its regular schedule and Schloss developed A's Wave, a web platform to host multimedia performances and interactive projects. Schloss described A's Wave as the "digital sibling" of A's, where she practiced "investigating decontextualization extracting the digital usages of language with society's use of the Alphabet" (Bowery Artist Tribute, The New Museum).