Special Projects, Writing

New Acquisition

Why

Writing and creating performances can take years. You begin writing a play or a story and months or a couple years later it starts to make its way out into the world, through readings or workshops. Then, later still, a production or publication comes along, if you are persistent and lucky. I started this project in order to have something immediate, short-term, fun, and collaborative. A project that defies the usual rules of the game—it’s fast, cheap, responsive, and playful. This project has allowed me to explore new forms of performance and publishing, and also to build a project specifically aimed at providing opportunities for women—a group persistently excluded from both publishing and performance establishments even in the 21st century.

What

Project Website: www.newacquisition.org
Summary:
Since 2007, New Acquisition has distributed nearly 5,000 pamphlets at public performances, bookstores, and art galleries around New York City.

Each pamphlet is filled with writing and art focused on themes drawn from early and contemporary American religious and political pamphlets. The group then creates performances and/or installations that act as a means for us to distribute the pamphlets to the general public (which are given away for free) and engage them in the ideas discussed in the pamphlets.

The primary goals of New Acquisition are 1) to encourage artists to react creatively to contemporary political and social debates; 2) to help wrestle literary and artistic work out of the ever-shrinking niche that it generally exists within; and 3) to expose the public to contemporary creative work by emerging female artists and writers via mass distribution of pamphlets—creative people who are currently under-represented in literary magazines, book publishing and art galleries.

When & Where

Availability: Available for touring and performance.
Production History:
Past performance venues include: Chashama, the One Million Forgotten Moments project, the 2008 New York Dance Parade, and FIGMENT 2008.

For complete information about this project, please visit the New Acquisition website.

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

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