Summer Picnic with the Mayor at Gracie Mansion, June 2005
Mary S. Chen, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Steve Cannon, Miranda Kaplan
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. In that year, Steve Cannon, poet, playwright, novelist, and retired professor from the City University of New York, converted a portion of his apartment into an informal salon. Despite his loss of eyesight to glaucoma, he encouraged the exchange of alternative points of view traditionally overlooked by mainstream media. The ideas raised in the discussions served as inspiration to the pieces later published in A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine.
In 1993, a further transformation of the space by Dora Espinoza, a Peruvian photographer, produced Tribes Gallery. Since then, Tribes has evolved into a performance venue and meeting place for artists and audiences to come together across all artistic disciplines, all levels of complexity, and all definitions of difference. In this pan-disciplinary, multi-cultural environment, artists exchange ideas, create peer relationships and find mentorship. Through Tribes’ publications, readers encounter a unique synthesis of literature, visual art, criticism and interviews with promising artists of all kinds. In an attempt to attract a wider audience for these artists, Tribes additionally organizes an annual outdoor event — The Charlie Parker Festival — to engage members of the community who have seldom, if ever, attended literary or artistic events.
Steve Cannon and others, with Hillary Clinton, December 2003
Tribes’ History
Tribes was conceived as a venue for underexposed artists, as well as a networking center and locus for the development of new talent.
The formation of Tribes was motivated by the thriving artistic community in and around the Lower East Side: poetry at The Nuyorican Poets Café; performances and plays at the Living Theater; activist art at Bullet Space; as well as hundreds of artists trying to find and develop a voice in their medium and a place in which their work might be appreciated.
Housed in a historic federal house built by the founder of The Nation magazine, (Hamilton Fish), Tribes is located on East 3rd Street between Avenues C and D.
The space houses administrative offices, a gallery, and a salon where artists of all kinds can drop in and connect with each other and the organization.
Recognition for Tribes’ Programming
Tribes has participated in collaborative programming with such institutions as Lincoln Center, where Lawrence “Butch” Morris staged his “Poet’s Choir,” and the Whitney Museum, where Tribes artists staged the play “En Vogue” as part of the Basquiat Retrospective. Poets from Tribes have performed at the St. Marks’ Poetry Project, the Public Theater, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Schomburg Center in Harlem, Barnes & Noble, and more recently at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Borders Books.
In the year 2000, Poets’ House, City Lore, and St. Marks’ Poetry Project considered Tribes to be an important enough venue on the literary scene of New York City to make the organization one of the sites for its People’s Poetry Gathering, a weeklong citywide celebration. As part of the week long celebration Tribes hosted a massive 24-hour reading for that event, featuring over 200 writers.
Besides sponsoring events in New York, Tribes has also cosponsored readings in cities as far as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, New Orleans, and Chicago. The organization has even gone so far as to dispatch a few of its members abroad to stage poetry/dance performances in Copenhagen, where they were greeted warmly by the Danish artistic community. During the holiday season last year, to much acclaim, Tribes joined hands with its sister organization, The House of Tribes Theater, to present “Up Close and Personal with Wynton Marsalis.” An encore presentation featuring Wynton Marsalis and his band, as well as Abby Lincoln, is scheduled to take place next summer.
Tribes and the Community
Tribes reflects and celebrates the fluidity and diversity of contemporary society. Tribes’ audience comprises every possible ethnic group, age group, religion and income level. The artists Tribes serves are similarly diverse. Tribes not only serves various communities, it actually creates a community. Artists bring their own audiences to Tribes for their events, where they meet and interact with Tribes’ larger audience.
Board of Directors
- Miguel Algarin
- Dominique Bachemin
- Randy Bloom
- Diane Burns
- Steve Cannon
- Mary S. Chen
- Kati Duncan
- Dora Espinoza
- William Fiske
- Francis Greenburger
- Heidi Haas
- David Hammons
- Al Loving
- Hilary Maslon
- Terry McMillan
- Mary Minieka
- Lawrence D. Morris
- Ellen Raskin
- Ishmael Reed
- Quincy Troupe
- Christine Wang
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Tribes Funders
The DCA http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcla/html/home/home.shtml
The Puffin Foundation http://www.puffinfoundation.org/
The Delmas Foundation
The Sonia Alden Foundation
The Greenwich Collection
The Andy Warhol Foundation http://www.warholfoundation.org/
Councilwoman Rosie Mendez http://www.rosiemendez.com/
Foundation for Contemporary Arts http://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/
The Buddy Taub Foundation