Judson Memorial Church, Greenwich Village, NY
0 Comments Published by Cedric Benetti on Sunday, May 2, 2010 at 5/02/2010 11:58:00 PM.
The church next to Washington Square was designed by architect Stanford White, and stained glass master John La Farge and features Italian Renaissance influences wedded to a basic Italianate form.
Sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens designed a marble frieze in the baptistry. Overall, the exterior and shape of Judson Memorial is said to resemble Santa Maria, a basilica in Rome, while the entrance is said to be inspired by the Renaissance church San Alessandro, built in Lucca in 1480. The 14 stained glass windows in the church's main sanctuary are the largest collection of major LaFarge windows in any one place in the US. The church is a national landmark.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Judson Memorial Church has supported a radical arts ministry. The church made space available to artists for art exhibitions, rehearsals, and performances. It also assured that this space was to be a place where these artists could have the freedom to experiment in their work without fear of censorship. In 1957, the Judson Memorial Church offered gallery space to Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Rauschenberg, who were then unknown artists. In 1959, the Judson Gallery showed work by pop artists, Tom Wesselmann, Daniel Spoerri, and Red Grooms. Yoko Ono also had her work exhibited at the Judson gallery.
The Judson Dance Theater, which began in 1962, provided a venue for dancers and choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer to create and show their work. Among others, these dancers and choreographers shaped dance history by creating postmodern dance, the first avant-garde movement in dance theater since the modern dance of the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1980s, the church sponsored political theater performances, such as those by the Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater. These performances included Insurrection Opera and Oratorio, performed in February and March 1984. In this performance, the Bread and Puppet Theater, under the direction of founder, Peter Schumann, used opera and the company's now signature oversized puppets to convey an anti-nuclear message.
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