Live Performances by Kilo Kish, Ray Brady, Morgan Amirah Burns & Urban Word NYC
Friday, October 14, 2022 | 11:00pm - 12:00am

A live performance which expands on the ideas in American Gurl through movement and spoken word. The evening will feature a 3-part piece by Kilo Kish and music producer and composer, Ray Brady, and a dance collaboration with Morgan Amirah Burns (currently a grant recipient of the Merce Cunningham Trust). The evening will start with spoken word performances by girls from Urban Word NYC. Urban Word champions, centers, elevates young marginalized voices as leaders at the intersection of the literary arts and civic engagement. The event has been curated by Zehra Ahmed + Kilo Kish.

Every night in October, multi-hyphenate artist and performer Kilo Kish brings a new kind of Americana to the billboards of Times Square. Kish’s Midnight Moment American Gurl fuses pop culture, camp, and fantasy into a video work that centers the artist within conventional notions of the American Dream.

Assembled through the artist’s personal collection of vintage travel postcards, Kish collages animated vignettes with backdrops emblematic of American tourist stops, ranging from farmhouses and iconic bridges to resorts and airways. Central to each composition is the artist herself, resulting in a series of moving selfies that collapse space and time — complete with sumptuous costume changes, props ranging from ice cream cones to feathered fans, and wish-you-were-here vibes from her fictional, faraway places.

“With these pieces, I am interested in exploring how we can reimagine the American dream to include women of color along with our hopes and desires. These moving images represent the intersection of our past and present, exploring new ways of dreaming through their fusion.”
— Kilo Kish

American Gurl creates a visual bridge from the past to create expansive musings on the future, wielding the ever-persuasive powers of art and consumerism in the center of Times Square.

Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 90 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. This year, Times Square Arts is celebrating the ten year anniversary of the Midnight Moment series with a roster of all women and femme-expansive artists until April 2023.

American Gurl was created in collaboration with Matt Cowen, Ashley Furnival, and Rachel Graves.