BE THERETea House ProductionsPresented by Brenda Taylor Gallery March 8, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pmMichele BrodyBrenda Taylor Gallery is pleased to present Tea House Productions: an interactive tea ceremony set in a Tea House built out of copper pipe and recycled tea bags.On Saturday March 8th, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm, artist Michele Brody will be inviting gallery viewers to enter into a traditional-based Tea House to sit for a while and share a cup of tea with her. Each participant will be asked to choose from an array of loose teas donated by Divinitea, Sympathy for the Kettle and Alice’s Tea Cup that will be spooned into special paper bags. While waiting for their pot of tea to brew, Ms. Brody will engage each participant in conversation, which will be recorded and saved in preparation for being transcribed onto the tea bag after it has been set out to dry, and eventually be incorporated into a Tea Quilt mural. Tea House Productions first premiered at last year’s 11th Annual D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival as an outdoor public art piece. For this project, Ms. Brody focused on the multi cultural phenomenon of tea within a contemporary New York City context, by retrofitting the ubiquitous street vendor cart into a mobile tea ceremony. For three days she invited festival participants and passersby into her cart to share a cup of tea within this new and unexpected environment. The project aims to set up at various sites throughout New York and other cities as an opportunity for the community to cross over boundaries between what is private and public. Within the gallery setting of Brenda Taylor’s space, she will be focusing more on the variety of methods in which the drinking of tea is practiced throughout the world as a transformative custom. These traditions can be as simple as a break from the work day during afternoon tea in Britain, to the welcoming of a stranger into one’s home in the Middle East, to the formalized ritual production of the Japanese tea ceremony in spiritual tea houses.
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