I’ll be performing a new, site-specific engagement piece called Validated at Boston City Hall on March 29, 2025 as a part of an event showcasing work by artists in Boston’s Mobius Artist Group called States of Emergence.

This multidisciplinary event features participatory and experimental works in movement, light, sound, time, and interactive engagement. In response to contemporary threats to American democracy, society, and culture, States of Emergence asks: how do we emerge from this moment? By coming together to be grounded in our bodies, embrace complex emotions, listen to diverse stories, and share concerns with one another, we hope this evening of experiential dialogue will be a moment of catharsis and collective imagination toward a better future. This event is made possible by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, City of Boston, and showcases the work of fifteen artists and collaborators within the Mobius Artists Group, curated by Jasper A. Sanchez.

The Mobius Artists Group is a Boston-based artists’ collective committed to creating original, experimental work in all media. Its home is Mobius, Inc., an artist-run non-profit, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization that creates opportunities to generate, shape and test experimental art. Founded by Marilyn Arsem in 1975, Mobius has been a regional and transnational laboratory for supporting and building relationships among fellow artists. They have presented work involving thousands of artists over the past 50 years. Works created by members of Mobius Artists Group have been presented throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Several notable exchanges with artists from Norway, Northern Ireland and Ireland, Croatia, Macedonia, Poland, and Taiwan have focused on public sites as incubators for discourse.

More information at https://statesofemergence.splashthat.com/

Image designed by Marcel Marcel.

I’ll be presenting a new piece called Everything is an Archive from 4-8pm at “Undoing the Archive” a seven hour event that is part of “an archive and/or a repertoire” at Tufts University Gallery, SMFA.

Join Tufts University Art Galleries and Mobius Artists Group for performances, sound works, and installations responding to the Tufts University Archival Research Center (TARC)’s Mobius Inc. Records and the larger conception of the “archive.” Resisting the urge to adhere to the de facto logics, organization, and authority of the archive, contributions from Marilyn Arsem, Margaret Bellafiore, Jimena Bermejo, Serena Gabriels, Elena Godena, Heather Kapplow, Marcel Marcel, Forbes Graham, Jeff Huckleberry, Sandy Huckleberry, Kledia Spiro, Joanna Tam, and Anna Wexler embody adjacencies, challenges, resistances to, and thinking with archives—institutional, governmental, collective, familial, and personal.  

Mobius Artists Group is a Boston-based artists’ collective committed to creating original, experimental work in all media. Mobius, Inc. is an artist-run non-profit, tax-exempt, 501©(3) organization that creates opportunities to generate, shape and test experimental art. Since 1975, Mobius has been a regional and transnational laboratory for supporting and building relationships among fellow artists. Mobius is recognized as one of the seminal alternative artist-run organizations in the U.S. and has presented work involving thousands of artists over the past 40 years. Works created by our members have been presented throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Several notable exchanges with artists from Ireland and the U.K., Croatia, North Macedonia, Poland, and Taiwan have focused on public sites as incubators for discourse.

July 7, 12-5, weather permitting
You Only Get One Body! (Elder Sunbathing–But Everyone is Welcome!)**

Bring your grandparents, a blanket, some sunscreen, and water and come celebrate the anniversary of the 1992 court ruling that allows chests and breasts equal access to the light of day in the state of New York, while also celebrating bodies of all ages, shapes, sizes and genders. This is a preview event for The Golden Colonel, a speculative retirement home for artists on Governors Island that will open on July 13, 2024. The Golden Colonel will still be under construction, so not yet open to the public, but July 7 is an official holiday for the organization, celebrated annually with elder- (and ally-) optionally topless sunbathing. We invite you to join us to help kick off the first annual You Only Get One Body! 

A very (literally!) laid back sunbathing event on July 7 (12-5pm) about elder-visibility and allyship: You Only Get One Body! is a celebration of human bodies of all ages, shapes and sizes, as well as a commemoration of the 1992 ruling that allows everyone in New York to sunbathe topless if they so choose. We'd love you all to join us in this celebration of age, bodies and relaxation in the sun (which is kind of "retirement practice" for retirement for those of us who have not quite retired yet!)

More info: https://www.fluxfactory.org/the-golden-colonel

Hosted by Hey There Kapplow of Dirty Time (with Sally Beautytwin)

In 2022 and 2023, the dirtiest queers you know got their act together and formed a real bonerfide thinktank in order to fill the biggest gap in modern communication: the lack of an emoji for dirt. They spoke with small children in Norway and art students in the American South and hosted a month long installation of proposals and experiments and performances which they have just queerfully distilled down into a formal proposal and submitted to The Unicode Consortium for consideration for entry into the emoji lexicon alongside such beloved icons as 🌈🦄🍑🍆 and 💦. Perhaps soon the emoji for dirt will pop up on everyone’s devices between 🌵and 🌊, but you can be the first to see it at this celebratory meal featuring dirty food, dirty stories, and a participatory emoji reveal.

Thursday Apr 25, 2024 7pm. 

Top secret location in Queens NY.

Email info(AT)heatherkapplow.com for coordinates.

7pm Dirty Potluck - We’ll get things started with a shared meal. If you can, bring the dirtiest foods or drinks you can think of to contribute. What does that mean? Trust the dirtiest part of yourself to figure it out, but if you need help dirtying something basic up, we’ve got you covered–just bring what you’re inspired to bring and we’ll make it dirtier for you if need be.

7:30pm Dirty Stories - Once we’ve settled in with some food, we’ll start passing the mic. Who doesn’t like hearing a dirty story while they eat? Right? The dirtier the better.

8pm Slow Messy Reveal - The emoji reveal is collaborative. And the meal’s centerpiece. Will it be messy? Yes it will.

8:30pm Clean Up - I know, that seems counterintuitive. Still, if you stay to help clean up, we can offer…

9pm Dirty Karaoke After Party - Sing the dirtiest songs you know, songs about dirt, or super clean songs but accompanied by dirty dancing….

Join me at Goethe-Institut Boston's Germany Travel Stipend Showcase and Information Session on Feb 27 6:30pm where I'll give a presentation on the research and art-work I did in Germany in Dec 2023-Jan 2024, along with the other Boston-area artist who received the same Studio 170 travel grant, Kaia Berman-Peters.

I'll talk about two amazing residency programs that I spent barely enough time at that you might want to know about, and several more that I learned about while there; a deep dive that I took into a community care/mutual aid project that I think the Boston art community could really benefit from knowing about and which I am working now to import here; some of the complexities of what's going on in the artist-activist community in Berlin as I experienced it; failure; breakdown; inadequacy; death; memorial...all the good stuff. Please come, it will be weird and fun (I hope) and then there will be dancing.

ALSO, it's an opportunity to learn more about the grant if YOU have plans to do a project in Germany in 2024 and need travel support. Details below!

Meet last year's stipend recipients - Learn about Studio 170 programs and how to apply - Featuring live music by DJ Chaia

Wondering what the Studio 170 (travel stipend to Germany and residency at Goethe) is all about and how to apply? Want to get to know past recipents? Join us for a Studio 170 Showcase and Info Session!

RSVP here

2023 Studio 170 Travel Stipend recipients Chaia (Kaia Berman-Peters) and Heather Kapplow are back from their respective residencies in Germany and excited to share their stories and projects with us. Join us for an evening of their interactive project presentations, a session on Studio 170, residency opportunities in Germany and how to apply, and a Q&A session. As a special treat, Chaia will perform a set of her Klezmer-informed house/techno grooves dance music. 

Studio 170 ǀ Germany is a new travel stipend that offers artists of all disciplines, living and/or working in New England, support for projects that take place in and interact with Germany. Whether an artist residency or collaboration with an artist based in Germany, the support program helps to make these projects possible by covering travel, accommodation and transport costs.  

Chaia (Kaia Berman-Peters)  My name is Chaia and I'm an electronic music artist who brings together samples of Eastern European Jewish music with house and techno grooves. My trip to Berlin and performance at the Shtetl Berlin Festival centered both around Hofn Stantsye, an audio-visual installation I created in collaboration with Dan Tombs, and around the repertoire of Adriane Cooper, a pioneer of the Jewish world who wrote songs about peace and community-building. During my trip, I met with Dan several times and built a visual component for the installation. I also performed Adriane's repertoire for an audience of 500 people at the Jewish Museum of Berlin. While I wasn't able to perform the installation at the festival, I've been invited back to the next iteration of the festival in November and plan to perform it then. During my trip I also met with SoCalled and Dobranotch, artists at the forefront of the electro-folk scene and collaborated with them on two new remixes, which will be released this summer. https://www.chaia.online/

Heather Kapplow I’m a conceptual artist who makes participatory experiences and went to Germany for six weeks to do research for a future collaborative project called “Getting Somewhere Important?” that looks at how public spaces reflect social values around success and failure. And at creative ways people respond to public space that resist this embedded binary. I spent part of my time in Berlin at ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics, and the rest at a residency in Hamburg called Hyper Cultural Passengers. 
  
My plan for the trip took some unexpected twists and turns, but I trained in a DIY, feminist model of peer-driven community care; investigated my internal landscape for some of the patterns I’d intended to look at in physical landscapes; and—perhaps because of the scale of death being reported in the daily news, or because my residencies were both near sites of mass detainment and deportation of Jews in the 1940s—ended up focusing on the difficulty of memorializing the uniqueness of individual human lives.  
  
I closed the trip by producing a workshop and very simple installation called “Deathbed Dreams” at a radical/queer artspace in Hamburg called Villa Magdalena K.  https://www.heatherkapplow.com/.

I’ll be performing a new experimental movement pice called Getting Bent, as a part of the Evaporate Live Art Festival on November 5, 2023. Getting Bent is based on British Pathé film clips of a Cornish water diviner named Catherine Bent, at work, in 1954. Full festival description follows.

As an extension of the exhibition, Reservoir: What the Water Knows, curated by Arlinda Shtuni, Boston’s Mobius Artist Group presents Evaporate, a weekend’s worth of live art programming over the first weekend of November.

Evaporate takes advantage of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum’s unique setting and the special sensitivity of artists who work in ephemeral ways, and whose practices are deeply informed by watery surroundings, featuring artists from Performance Art Bergen in Norway and from Boston’s own Mobius Artist Group.

Organized by Mobius member Heather Kapplow and PAB member Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Evaporate consists of two days of performances that will activate the museums’ exhibition halls, grounds, and the nearby reservoir, flowing through these spaces in a quick rush, as the city’s water once flowed through them, and then dissipating just as quickly.  

Participating artists include: Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Bjørn Venø, El Putnam, Forbes Graham, Jan-Egil Finne, Jeff Huckleberry, Jimena Bermejo, Joanna Tam, Heather Kapplow, Kurt Johannessen, Kledia Spiro, Lani Asuncion, Marcel Marcel, Margaret Bellafiore, Marilyn Arsem, Max Lord, Nayara Leite, Nife Brzoza, Pavana Reid, Philip Fryer, Sandy Huckleberry, Sara June, Serena Gabriels, Tom Mackie.

***

Saturday Daytime Program (throughout museum opening hours; 10am-3pm; free)

Open Session, a large group improvisation spanning three hours, is a free and experimental art space, open to performers, artists and audience with an interest in performance art. The concept is inclusive and open, so performance artists can have an arena to test new ideas and freely work with their intuition and with each other. They also aim to stimulate and promote exchange between improvisations from different fields and disciplines - artists, dancers, musicians, actors, vocalists and above all, those who cross all these art forms and have an interest in improvising in an interdisciplinary and interpersonal way. The theme of this Open Session will be water.

Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Bjørn Venø, Forbes Graham, Jan-Egil Finne, Jimena Bermejo, Joanna Tam, Kurt Johannessen, Kledia Spiro, Margaret Bellafiore, Nayara Leite, Pavana Reid, Sandy Huckleberry, and Serena Gabriels. Audiences are also invited to participate in the improvisation.

***

Saturday Evening Program (6:30 doors, performances 7pm-9pm, tickets are $15 at the door, cash, cards, venmo, paypal accepted)

Curated by Mobius member Forbes Graham, this evening’s program features three artists from Bergen, Norway: Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Bjørn Venø and Jan-Egil Finne; and a solo performance by Mobius member Lani Asuncion. All performances are water-themed.

***

Sunday Daytime Program (throughout museum opening hours; 11am-4pm; free)

Staggered around the museum and its grounds often in overlapping ways, Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Bjørn Venø, El Putnam, Jeff Huckleberry, Jimena Bermejo, Heather Kapplow, Pavana Reid, Marilyn Arsem, and Nayara Leite will showcase individual works related to water and the site throughout the day.

***

Sunday Evening Program (6:30 doors, performances 7pm-9pm, tickets are $15 at the door, cash, cards, venmo, paypal accepted)

Curated by Mobius member Jeff Huckleberry, this evening’s watery performances will feature Kurt Johannessen, and local artists Sara June with Nife Brzoza and Max Lord, Philip Fryer, and Tom Mackie.

***

Please see https://performanceartbergen.no/en/members/ for more information about the artists from Bergen Norway who will be performing and  https://www.mobius.org/mobius-artists for bios of Mobius artists.

As parking is extremely limited at the museum, we strongly encourage taking public transit to the festival. Directions can be found here: https://waterworksmuseum.org/visit/#directions

Dirty Time, a queer artist duo focused on dirtiness and time, announces a weeklong popup exhibition and participatory activities related to their campaign to add an emoji for dirt to the official catalog of emoji. 

Dirty Signs runs from September 23 - October 1, 2023 with a rousing closing event including live performances by Sarah Dahlinger and Ed Woodham on September 30 from 1-5pm, at Colonels Row House 404A, Governors Island.

Dirty Signs is an exhibition of international artist responses to the idea of emojifying dirt, featuring works by B a r b a r a Schneider, Daniel S. DeLuca, Ed Woodham, Gustavo Gómez-Mejía, IPRAMENE, Lee Tusman, Liz Nofziger, M Greenwald, Maia Liebeskind, Noelle Salaun, Renée Crowley, Sarah Dahlinger and Vidya Giri in 2D, 3D and 4D formats. Dirty Time will also be collecting visitor suggestions for a potential dirt emoji through a “think tank” installation within the exhibition, and several participatory activities on September 30.

Even though dirt is where our food comes from, is where our bodies get buried when we die, and is literally everywhere we go, it is not represented yet in the emoji universe. Somehow we have emojis for unicorns, pufferfish, poodles and Santa Claus, but not dirt! Dirty Time is planning to try to correct this oversight and will be submitting a proposal for a dirt emoji to the Unicode foundation in 2024. 

Join us for Dirty Signs at the Flux House on Governors Island from September 23 - October 1 with think tank activities, performances and artist reception on Saturday, September 30 from 1-5pm. 

This exhibition is part of Flux Factory’s 2023 residency on Governors Island.

About Us:

Dirty Time (https://dirtytime.us/) is Hey There Kapplow (http://heatherkapplow.com) and Walker Tufts (http://walkertufts.com). We have been investigating the impossibility of cleanliness since 2021 and we’ve dug up a dirty little secret: there’s no clean that’s not dirty.

Dirt feeds you and eats you. Dirt is your companion and your portal to the past and the future. We’re here to help you recognize your glorious, delicious dirtiness and your connection to all time through dirt. 

For more information see: https://dirtytime.us/dirtysigns.html

Join me for a walking experience connected to my project Seeking the Source, currently on view at the Somerville Museum as part of the exhibition Waterlines curated by Arlinda Shtuni. You can get a ticket for the event here.

The event will begin at the museum with a discussion about the work on display, and then we’ll explore the museum's immediate neighborhood in silence, paying acute attention to how intuition offers guidance about when to walk, when to pause, and how to keep the group together. The event will close with reflections from the experience.

ADMISSION: $10/person; Somerville Museum active members free (with code MEMBER); no charge for children under 12 years old. Admission to this event also includes exhibition admission.

NOTES ABOUT EVENT: This event is rain or shine, please dress accordingly. Good walking shoes, water bottle, sunscreen, hat, and umbrellas are recommended depending on the weather. The walk will last about an hour.

PARKING: The Somerville Museum has no dedicated parking spots. Please note visitor parking spots on Westwood Road, Central Street, and Highland Ave. Visit our website for more information.

ACCESSIBILITY: The Somerville Museum is now ADA compliant. For more information contact us at info@somervillemuseum.org.

Curated by Community Curator, Arlinda Shtuni, Waterlines explores Somerville’s origins, urban expansion, and ever-changing ecology through stories about water.

Seeking the Source is a project by the artist Hey There Kapplow, commissioned for the exhibition Waterlines at the Somerville Museum, in Somerville MA (USA) from December 2022 - March 2023. It uses water as a metaphor for intuition, and the tenacious persistence of the practice of dowsing in the modern world as a symbol of our capacity to retain and nurture intuitive understanding even while we rely on technologies and enlightenment-age logics for our day to day operations in a way that would seem to make intuition obsolete.

The exhibition hosts a collection of ‘objects with soundtracks’ I’ve made which evolved out of an interest in the contemporary coexistence of the folk-practice of dowsing (water divining) alongside more modern methods of detecting and assessing the presence of water underground.

The development of Seeking the Source has been supported by The Somerville Museum, Flux Factory, ARoS Museum, Useful Art for Communities, and USF Bergen.

This Sunday, starting at noon, Dirty Time will be collecting your dirt and your dirty stories for our traveling Dirty Library as a part of Familiedag på USF in Bergen. Bring some dirt/soil/dust or other detritus that is meaningful to you in some way and it will become a part of Dirty Time's permanent roving dirt collection. Learn more: https://dirtytime.us/

Storyteller Sara Domingo Brauner and participatory artist Hey There Kapplow invite you into a conversation and crafting workshop investigating the place of the intuitive arts in the modern world.

Inspired by the (Jewish) story of the angel Lailah, and the way that water divination has been woven into or used alongside scientific methods in the professions that seek and map underground water sources, we will share personal stories and experiences with one another while making and experimenting with some tools from the intuitive arts and techniques for strengthening the intuition, despite the noise and chaos of modern life.

BIOS

Sara Domingo Brauner is a storyteller and a body therapist. As a storyteller and artist, Sara has traveled collecting stories and studied in the International School of Storytelling, in England, where stories are used as a method to bring change to the world. In addition, she has studied under the mentorship of Shonaleigh Cumbers, in the way of traditional Jewish storytelling, using this art as a way of transmitting wisdom. Currently she is holding monthly storytelling circles and workshops, bringing the art for storytelling into her community in Aarhus.

Hey There Kapplow uses prompts, conversations, objects, sound, installation, walks and circumstances to invite people to pause their usual ways of operating and participate in embodied, anti-capitalist discovery processes together. Kapplow facilitates collective experimentation with alternative ways of being and understanding, in an effort to reduce suffering bred by the social structures around us.

RSVP on Facebook for this event.

Every dumpling is holding an answer. But you have to bring the question. The water boils. The oil bubbles. The oven bakes. The answer ripens in the dumpling. It is growing there while you grow your question.

On Saturday at 10:30, close your eyes.

No, open your eyes and look at the sky, or the ceiling.

Watch your question form there like clouds gathering.

No, close your eyes. Watch your question turn into words. What do you need to understand to make the next choice in your life?

What do you need to understand to make the world you want come into being around you?

Open your eyes. Rub your hands together briskly. Put your warm hands on your stomach and know that the answer to your question is coming your way...

TANKEN EXTRA

TANKEN will be in Damhus Å Havn (Bækbyvej 19, Skalstrup, 7570 Vemb) on Sunday 25 September at 14.30

Here two American artists will be visiting: Will Owen and Heather Kapplow, who will already be familiar to the local MEETINGS and TANKEN audience. They are both associated with the multifaceted art space Flux Factory in New York, and for the fifth time a large group of Flux artists are artists-in-residence at ARoS in August and September. Will and Heather attended the opening of the 2019 MEETINGS festival; Will was one of the artists behind 'Thyborøn Trawl Dance' during the MEETINGS festival 2017; and Heather visited TANKEN in Ramme almost a year ago under the title 'Forgetting the year'.

Will and Heather have taken a day out of their ARoS schedule to come to Nissum Fjord and serve us Oracle Dumplings, a sort of fortune cookies baked with oracle answers to our questions inside.

Follow Will and Heather’s instructions and show up at Damhus Å Havn on Sunday and get the answer to your most urgent question!

Everyone is welcome for a nice afternoon in Damhus Å Havn - dress for the weather and bring some coffee - we have cups! :)

Join Dirty Time on Flux Island (Governors Island) for a day full of activities celebrating dirt and dirtyness!

We’ll start with a dirt collecting session from 1-3: Bring soil from somewhere in your life that is important to you or that has a good story behind it. We’ll accession your dirt into our traveling Dirty Library and you can tell its story on our Dirty Library Hotline. You can also listen to other people’s Dirty Stories.

At 3pm we’ll begin meandering. Join Dirty Time on a guided meditation/Dirty Walk where we’ll get up close and personal with Governors Island’s dirt, and eventually make our way to the Governors Island Dirtball Court and play a little dirtball (bring a ball–any ball–if you’ve got one) together to warm up/get our juices flowing for….

Dirty Karaoke at 5:30pm! This is when we sing our hearts out, railing against the impending doom of climate change. Bring your favorite song about dirt, death or destruction and we’ll help each other keep our spirits up.

***

Dirty Time is Walker Tufts & Heather Kapplow Dirt is a time capsule–it holds a record of everything that’s ever happened. And it’s a time machine–it breaks you down and shoots you into the future. But it’s here right now too. It feeds you and it eats you.

Dirty Time is here to guide you on a journey. You have been taught that dirty is bad, but it’s not true. Dirty is good. It’s very, very good. Dirt is your companion, your portal to the past and the future. And here’s a dirty little secret: there is no clean that’s not dirty. Not the cloud, not the Metaverse, and definitely not the screen. Dirty Time is here to help you recognize your glorious, delicious dirtiness–your connection to all time through dirt. To help you feel your rootedness and to get you sprouting. Join us on the journey!

Contact Point is a site-specific, geo-located, alternate reality sound-and-sugar piece, hovering at a place that was visible from Kapplow’s bedroom window as a child, and where a violent and surreal event involving a raft of ducks was once witnessed. The event occurred during a time period when Kapplow was extremely concerned about the possibility of being a “Star Person” (an alien-human hybrid species posited by New Age authors Brad and Francie Steiger).

Contact Point’s audio features the voices of several autonomous solar-powered "sounder" devices collectively produced in a workshop led by Daniel Fishkin in Aarhus, DK in August 2021. 

Alpha60 is a program of science-fiction inspired AR work scattered along the Emerald Necklace in Boston, MA curated by Michael Lewy, in collaboration with Hoverlay and Boston Cyberarts Gallery.

Alpha60 will launch in May 2022 and run until September 30, 2022.

Opening at Boston Cyberarts Gallery May 22, 2022 12-2:30pm

Presented by Mobius, "One Minute Solos" is coming back from hiatus on May 17th, 2022 at the Lilypad in Cambridge, MA! Starting at 8pm, artists will perform one-minute long, finished solo performance pieces in rapid cyclical succession. I'll be performing a simple, but heartfelt new piece called Auscultation for the occasion. "One Minute Solos" is curated by Jimena Bermejo. $10 suggested donation.