Saturday October 31st, 1-3pm
Marni Kotak: Samhain, The Spirit of Halloween (Ajax’s 9th Birthday Party)
Location: In front of the Artist’s home
To attend, please RSVP to rsvp@microscopegallery.com

Courtesy of the artist

Marni Kotak invites the public to join her and her son Ajax for “Samhain, The Spirit of Halloween,” the 9th annual birthday party and performance taking place as part of her ongoing project “Raising Baby X.” This year’s event draws inspiration from the traditional Gaelic cultural festival of the harvest, Samhain. The event will be held outdoors in front of the Kotak’s Bushwick home, as many in New York are doing at this time, adhering to social distancing, sanitary, and other safety protocols for COVID-19.

The front of Kotak’s apartment building will be installed with balloon arches and pillars, hay bales, leaves, lit jack-o-lanterns, and a giant balloon sculpture of a pumpkin-headed character Samhain, to celebrate the spirit of the Halloween, the harvest and the cycles of life and death and rebirth. The party will feature socially-distanced pumpkin carving for Ajax and his friends, with each child or participant having their own sanitized carving station. Pizza and birthday cake will also be served to celebrate the birthday. After the festivities, children in attendance will be invited to the nearby park to play.

Ajax will be dressed as Samhain, based on representations of the character in Ray Bradbury’s “The Halloween Tree” and “Ghostbusters,” in a costume he made himself out of paper mache, styrofoam, fabric and other materials. Kotak and her husband, artist Jason Robert Bell, will also be dressed in original costumes referencing traditional Gaelic costumes, with Kotak as the High Priestess of Samhain and Bell as the horned God Cernunnos. Everyone is encouraged to attend in costumes as well!

The event marks the beginning of the 10th year of Kotak’s “Raising Baby X,” in which Kotak re-contextualizes the raising of her son as performance art. Kotak views this work as central to her wider body of work considering everyday life as art and its rituals, accomplishments and achievements as personal triumphs to be shared and celebrated. The long-term project began with her son’s Ajax (aka Baby X)’s birth on October 25, 2020, during her solo exhibition and performance “The Birth of Baby X.” The project has evolved in recent years to a collaboration between mother and son.

Marni Kotak: “Samhain, The Spirit of Halloween (Ajax’s 9th Birthday Party)” takes place on Saturday October 31st, 1-3pm. To attend please rsvp to rsvp@microscopegallery.com.

Face masks, social distancing and following other safety protocols of the event are required.

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Marni Kotak is a multimedia and performance artist presenting everyday life being lived. She has received international attention for her durational performances and exhibitions, most notably “The Birth of Baby X” (2011) in which she gave birth to her son as a live performance and “Mad Meds” (2014) during which the artist slowly withdrew from psychiatric medications prescribed for postpartum depression. In “Treehouse” (2017), Kotak — who had just experienced a devastating fire in her home — created a refuge for herself and others to pause from the overwhelming aspects of life. For “Dancing in the Oval Office” (2019), the artist invited the public to join her in her version of the oval office to dance for a more open, inclusive, and peaceful society. Kotak’s works have also appeared at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile, Artists Space, Exit Art, Momenta Art, English Kills Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, among others. She has performed extensively in the US and abroad. Kotak’s work appears in “The Art of Feminisim: Images that shaped the Fight for Equality”, 1957-2017 by Helena Reckitt (Chronicle Books, 2018) and “Blackwells Companions to Contemporary Art: A Companion to Feminist Art “(2019) among other publications. Grants include Franklin Furnace Fund Award and the Brooklyn Arts Council among others. Marni Kotak received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College.