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  • A Gathering of the Tribes

    A Gathering of the Tribes is an arts and cultural organization dedicated to excellence in the arts from a diverse perspective. Located on the Lower East Side of New York City, Tribes has been in existence since 1991.


  • A Gathering of the Tribes, 285 East 3rd St, 2nd Floor (between Avenues C and D)
    Phone: 212-674-3778
    Fax: 212-674-5776
    Email: Info@tribes.org


  • Tribes is a member of Chamber Music of America, Poets & Writers, Poets Society of America, St. Marks Poetry Project. We are Funded by NYC DCA, NYSCA & The Andy Warhol Foundation among others. All contributions are tax deductible.

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  • The 16th Annual Charlie Parker Festival

    Throughout the forties, Charlie Parker revolutionized jazz and immortalized the Lower East Side by capturing its combustive atmosphere and translating it into music. It is no wonder that every year the Lower East Side returns a little bit of the favor by celebrating Charlie Parker, his life and his legacy, as well as his deep rooted relationship with this neighborhood, through A Gathering of the Tribes' Charlie Parker Festival.
    This year, A Gathering of the Tribes is please to present the 16th Annual Charlie Parker Festival, entitled "BIRD LIVES," from August 2 - August 29. More information about this year's festival can be found here

Latest Reviews

Ernest Hemingway (A Review of Tao Lin’s Richard Yates)

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge […]


Just Kids, a Memoir by Patti Smith: “Because of Robert”

Reviewed by K.A. Sitafalwalla

Partially a proclamation to the 1970’s, the artists and the derelicts, the rich and poor, the talented and talent-less, “Just Kids” stands as an ode to friendship and love; everything in between. Patti Smith’s memoir is poetic and true with an honesty and straightforwardness that is disguised in her poetry and music. […]


I Need That Record Store: Retail as Club Membership

by Kurt Gottschalk

I first heard about it when I was about 12 — a store where Kiss albums could be procured for about a dollar less than at the mall; a store that, strangely, wasn’t in the mall. It wasn’t far, but it did mean asking my mother to make another trip.

Things seemed different at […]


Whitney Biennial 2010

By Vedan Anthony-North

With a name like “2010” you don’t really know what to expect when heading to the 2010 Whitney biennial. Unfortunately, you don’t really know what to think about the exhibit after leaving either. Though the theme of “2010” is justified by the curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari in the exhibit’s […]


THE LATEST FROM OILSPILLVILLE

By : Brian Boyles, New Orleans
It was getting a little too possible, you know? That we might make it, that whatever the forces leveled at our survival, they were internal, fixable, matters of fairness or racial understanding or budgeting. We could do that, couldn’t we? The Saints won, didn’t they? […]



Latest Poetry

In Church with Branded Knees

by Ayshia Stephenson
I don’t want him to tear my clothing off anymore. I don’t want him to crush my serenity
into this tiny spit of a paper ball, pit stuck in my throat, like it sits in a child who can not
say: please get it out. Branded knees need a buffer from a pebbled surface. Can […]


The Reunion: A Forecast by Suejin Suh

 
The Reunion: A Forecast                                                                           by Suejin Suh
 
 
Has it been more than three years?  Three or four years-ish since you cleverly sang,  
At the airport, we’ll cross paths walking, walking towards opposite ends/ like almostly- forgotten lovers who had seeming common sense.” (They lusted. Lusted incensed.)
 
Or was this an impromptu melody I made just […]



Latest Essays

UNPOP curatorial statement

by Janet Bruesselbach
“A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.” –Adlai Stevenson
Unpop has a variety of playful reactions to both art as commodity and the political legacy of pop art. Art is a commodity so oversupplied that it may be the testing grounds for a post-scarcity economy. Its economy of […]


Off-Off-Broadway in Mumbai

by Howard Pflanzer
How can you produce a brand new controversial American play in Mumbai?  I thought India would be an excellent place to produce and direct my new play, The Terrorist, a timely commentary on the US government policy of detention of South Asians and Muslims and the initiation of […]



Latest Fiction

Ernest Hemingway (A Review of Tao Lin’s Richard Yates)

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge […]


Gone Fishing, Again

by Christopher Heffernan

The cult classic Trout Fishing in America, written by Richard Brautigan and first published in 1967, has been released in a new edition by Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  The book has not been published on its own since the early ‘80’s when […]



Latest Videos

A Starter Kit for Collectors: Exposition et vente au profit de TRIBES

A Starter Kit for Collectors: Exposition et vente au profit de A Gathering of the Tribes
Samedi 1er mai – Dimanche 16 mai 2010
Vernissage: Samedi 1er mai 14-18H
Réception pour les artistes : Samedi 1er mai, 19h-22H
Tribes Gallery
285 East 3rd Street, 2ème étage, NYC 10009
A Gathering of the Tribes est une association artistique et culturelle qui […]


A Starter Kit for Collectors: Art Exhibition and Sale A Benefit for A Gathering of the Tribes

A Gathering of the Tribes is an arts and cultural organization dedicated to excellence in the arts from a diverse perspective. Located on the Lower East Side of New York City, Tribes has been in existence since 1991.   tribes-poster-color.jpg
Saturday May 1st, 2:00 - 6:00 pm : Public preview
Saturday May 1st, 7:00 – 10:00 pm […]


Pinero

Pinero a Miramax Pictures film directed by Leon Ichaso

 pinero.jpg

Review by Luis Chaluisan

Interesting how late seventies and eighties urban history is handled in the movie “Pinero.” The movies producers and director/writer confirm a prediction made by Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe co-founder Miguel Algarin more than 25 years ago about efforts to bring Latino creativity into the mainstream, “I see a lot of waste because before the great Hispanic hit is going to come out you’re going to have to break through all of the cliches.” Miguel Algarin August 1977. The movie about Miguel Pinero’s life reinforces the view no matter how creative Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are we’re still a bunch of savages.

 

“Pinero” is a cliche filled exercise delivered by Co-producer John Leguizamo and his cohorts that fails to balance the debauchery it emphasizes with the positive creative impact of the Nuyorican experience that Miguel Pinero helped found. AThere’s no denying Miguel Pinero was one wild son of a bitch. Mikey Pinero would be the first to say it. And Miguel Algarin acknowledged it when I first met him in the late seventies but he put it in perspective then,

 

 

“Mikey Pinero is an area we live in. What’s happened to him is exactly what he would have wanted along all lines. He’s leading the life he loves. But at the same time the man is developing in a form that no other Puerto Rican playwright or writer has succeeded in. If a Pinero script attracts the studio guys at a TV show like Baretta with Robert Blake they tackle it… if they don’t like it they let it go… they pay the 1600 dollars or 1800 dollars and take the loss.”

 (August 1977)

 

The Miguel Pinero and Nuyoricans of the late seventies at the Sixth Street location (a space markedly different that the current incarnation on Third Street that’s jarringly used for the movie) were much richer than what I saw on screen. Even the founding of the 6th Street Cafe - portrayed as a move by Algarin to get Pinero and his boys out of his hair - contradicts what Algarin himself held true in the Cafe’s infancy, “At one point we were using Joe Papp’s space at 4 Astor place by the Public Theater. I found that the workshop I had at the Public was too removed. Then Marvin Felix Camillo came in right behind me with The Family (the group that first produced Miguel Pinero) and occupied the space. Things changed when Joe decided to give up the space to rent out. Marvin had to get out too and then moving down this way was just a matter of facilitating what I wanted to be doing at that moment. Then when things developed along with my work with Mikey and Lucky, the Cafe was initiated as a continuation of the theater work.”

 

Miguel Pinero, Bimbo Rivas, Pedro Pietri, Lucky Cienfuegos, Brenda Feliciano, Sandy Esteves et al. in the early days there was the power of life and death in the written word. At a time when mainstream media ignored Puerto Ricans they showed us who we were as a people and who we could become. This movie serves no purpose but to present the general public with a distorted view of Nuyorican creativity and do a hatchet job on a dead man whose words have outlived his hectic life.

 

I doubt it will survive more than a month in release.