ADULT CONTEMPORARY is an experimental non/fiction salon series featuring readings, lectures, performances and interviews with and by established and emerging writers. We seek out first person perspectives characterized by the urgent and the everyday; true stories that connect us to the big by way of the small, uneventful, and unexpected. Readings will be followed by informal conversations.

Organized by Katherine Brewer Ball and Svetlana Kitto.

The March 5th installment of Adult Contemporary will feature Ariel Schrag, Malik Gaines, and Ethan Philbrick.

Ariel Schrag is the author of the novel Adam (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and the graphic memoirs Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise (Simon & Schuster). She was a writer for the HBO series How To Make it in America and the Showtime series The L Word. She lives in Brooklyn.

Malik Gaines is an artist and writer based in New York. He has performed and exhibited extensively with the group My Barbarian, with recent projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Goethe-Institut New York, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial; and with the newer collaboration, Courtesy the Artists, with recent projects at The Kitchen and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Gaines has written about art and performance for magazines, exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, and journals including Art Journal, Women & Performance and e-flux. His first book, Excesses of the Sixties: Performance, Gender Eccentricity, and the Black Transnational Imagination, is currently in the publication process with NYU Press. He is assistant professor in the department of Art & Art History at Hunter College, CUNY.

Ethan Philbrick is a scholar and performer based in Brooklyn.  He is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University completing a dissertation on the shifting conditions of collective artistic and political praxis in the 1970s.  He has previously served as the assistant editor of TDR: The Drama Review and is currently a member of the Women and Performance editorial collective.  He has performed in New York at SculptureCenter, BRIC, NYU Performance Studies, and Sophia Cleary’s Rehearsal at Cage.