Earlier this year, Arts Letters & Numbers established a partnership with the global education organization Big Picture Learning to develop new projects in the Albany Area, as well as, Nationally and Internationally.

On June 28th, we had a beautiful artist in residence show by Marie Claire Macadar after a festive summer communal dinner. The show started with a video presentation of Marie Claire’s completed puppet shows, including “Hangers! The Musical”, which was nominated for the 2015 National Puppet Slam.

On June 22nd, Nihilo-Ex-Datum (Prelude) by Liao Dean has filled up our New Studio with a wide range of works produced during his four-week residency at Arts Letters & Numbers.

Each month the Upstate Alliance for the Creative Economy (ACE) holds a Creative Economy Mixer. We are honored to have been the chosen host this months event. This was an incredible opportunity to share ALN with a community who might otherwise not know our organization.

“The universe is made of stories not of atoms”  -Muriel Rukeyser

We are pleased to present ‘Hunting Life; A Forever House’ an exhibition of drawings, stories, and structures by David Gersten. This work began in 1990 as David Gersten’s thesis in Architecture at the Cooper Union School of Architecture. The work continued over a ten-year period between 1990-2000. The continuous creative dialogue with Dean John Hejduk and the long-established creative community of the Cooper Union were central to the creation of this work…

A virtual exhibition of Camera Obscuras and Drawings by Homa Shojaie.

This film premiered and was initially commissioned as part of “SunShip; The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CityXVenice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

In this talk, Professor David Gersten, will discuss the poetic, spatial imaginations, and social politics in John Hejduk’s works. He will address the poetic imagination as a dimension of human life, and a means of addressing our social political lives.

A short video, “Layering Community on the Wynantskill,” introduces a project initiated by the question “How Will We Live Together?” Actions and workshops over the last months have explored local layers of geology, geography, and history of both structures and people, with engagement from the community at several levels…

What if myth were not a lie but a story truer than truth? This powerfully intimate work enacts wonder, desire and denial across cosmic, cultural and artistic thresholds, with puppets, masked dancers, and digital animation. A specially designed theatre for one heightens the drama of encounter with this elusive deity of doorways…

It is with great joy that we announce ANTIPOLIS an exhibition of works by Armand Biglari. This exhibition contains five bodies of work, each pursued during a period of intense concentration and exploration. Through his deep intellect, ethos of precision, and exploratory mind, Armand Biglari reveals spaces of the human condition, each mark, at once archaic and radically new, speak of our ineffable depth.

Swifts are fast flying birds who spend their lives in the air. In late summer evenings, towards dusk, they perform magnificent aerial dances in large flocks. The form of the dance is elusive. It is seemingly unorchestrated and improvised, crystallizing in moments of grand collective gestures or dissipating into fragmentary, individual trajectories. A three dimensional choreography that is impossible to predict and hard to describe yet breathtakingly beautiful…

"The Architecture of Public Spaces as Museums: The case of MOMAFAD" at EMST - Temporary Exhibitions Space (-1), is the inauguration of the 1st MOMAFAD and is being held as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Number’s exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

“There is an ultimate space in my life where I engage in the meaning-making of my being. It is hard to reach this space very often. It demands seeking an internal path within one’s self in a moment of truth. It is either transpiring or not! If it does, it can vanish quickly…”

In Search Of An Alternative Habitat For The Written Word is a Zoom-based three-session workshop hopes to open a conversation engaging diverse voices through the language and space of the written word. The workshop introduces concepts of self-expression in creating space through the medium of calligraphy…

“Eureka! - I found it!” This famous exclamation of Archimedes as he discovered the law of buoyancy in a bathtub captures the joy of embodied knowledge and heuristic experience. How can dramatic arts infuse architectural pedagogy with Eureka potential, while fostering creative collaboration and ethical imagination? This dialogue among architectural educators reflects on recent theatrical experiments and dramatic approaches to design education.

The Del Sol Composer Incubator was created in 2020 to offer early career composers the chance to work in-depth with Del Sol over the course of 6 months on unique musical projects. By providing ample collaborative time, the quartet will work with these composers to think critically about the role of activism, performance venue, and concert presentation while writing a work for string quartet. This concert presents the works by the 3 inaugural composers.

In April 2020, early into our first Covid lockdown, David (Gersten) began a series of weekly Zoom chats with members of the ALN community that included family, friends, friends of friends. Under the wide umbrella, of “the pause moment” participants would gather virtually to share their experiences, suspended as we all were from our normal day to day activities. It was a healing experience — intimate, esoteric, and diverse. Any given meeting was part bull session, prayer meeting, meditation, rant, riff, communal kvetch.

Ramiro Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents—his father a trucker, his mother a janitor at his own school—and displayed artistic talents early on which presently won him admission to CalArts. But he left that institute within a year and instead secured employment as a nanny for an entertainment industry family in the Hollywood Hills (“a part of town,” as he says, “which is largely Latino by day but which, come five in the evening, when the trucks descend and the limos return, reverts to its largely Anglo basis”).

How does drawing construct perspectives of thought? What happens between thinking and image making? In this lecture, the artist Ian Woo asks himself what are the reasons for his desire to construct pictures of spaces that evolve and transit as an image of continuous presence…