"Two Moon July: Film and Video from the Kitchen’s Archive"

Before it became a high-end shopping district for tourists, Soho was the Bushwick of its day, an artist's neighborhood that managed to remain that way for some 20 years between the 1960s and '80s (an indication, perhaps, of how slowly the gears of gentrification turned back then). One of the area's cultural mainstays was the Kitchen, the multimedia center currently located in Chelsea. Founded as an outpost to promote video as an art form, the Kitchen expanded into presenting performance, music and dance, thanks to its longtime location on the corner of Broome and Wooster Streets. It was there, in a second-floor loft space, that the Kitchen became the incubator for such well-known talents as Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones and Philip Glass. The video Two Moon July, which aired on PBS in 1987, turned out to be a valedictory to the Kitchen's Soho era: an artfully edited compilation of archival footage documenting the key productions mounted there during its formative years.