Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Celebrates The Power of Transformative Art at Annual Dinner

The Downtown Dinner. Image Courtesy of LMCC.

This year’s gala will honor multidisciplinary artist Taylor Mac and present awards to LMCC alumni Keisha Bush, Juliana F. May, and Jean Shin.

New York–Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) is pleased to announce the 2025 edition of its annual fundraising gala, The Downtown Dinner, which will take place on Monday, April 28, from 6 – 10:30 p.m. at Cipriani 25 Broadway.

Each year, The Downtown Dinner brings together civic and business leaders with groundbreaking artists, curators and cultural partners who play a crucial role in realizing LMCC’s mission. Funds raised through the gala directly support New York City’s artists and ensure public access to the arts, contributing to the sustainability of a robust cultural community and a vibrant future.

Since 2002, The Downtown Dinner has stood as a beacon of philanthropy and a cornerstone of springtime festivities in Lower Manhattan. With each passing year, the event has grown, drawing over 400 of the City’s most influential figures from the realms of business, civic leadership and culture.

This year, LMCC is honored to celebrate the achievements of internationally decorated artist, performer, playwright, director, and lyricist Taylor Mac, whose resistance to conformity and categorization represents the best of New York City’s arts. Mac joins past esteemed recipients, including Bill T. Jones, Twyla Tharp, Julie Mehretu, and Steve Buscemi.

Hosted by James Tigger! Ferguson, with music from Jonathan E. Jacobs, aka The Vintage DJ, the evening’s entertainment will include a special performance from honoree Taylor Mac and ensemble sharing selections from “Bark of Millions”: Taylor’s original rock opera meditation on queerness (co created by composer and longtime collaborator Matt Ray). The gala will also feature an immersive tasting by LMCC alumni Elisabeth Smolarz through her recurring installation, Ice Cream Window.

This year’s gala precedes LMCC’s robust season of programming, which will feature its annual River To River Festival, the Workspace and Arts Center Residency Open Studios, and several public programs and exhibitions that will soon be announced. Taylor Mac will headline the River To River Festival, which will feature events dispersed throughout the entire summer with a special focus on programming related to climate, sustainability, and ecological resilience. Programming highlights include a screening of Mac’s film 24-Decade History of Popular Music at the World Trade Center Oculus on July 12, in partnership with The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Mac will also star in a one-night-only performance, presented in partnership with Battery Park City Authority.

The 2025 LMCC Honorees are:

● Taylor Mac

2025 Liberty Award for Artistic Leadership

● Jean Shin

2025 Michael Richards Award for Visual Art

● Juliana F. May

2025 Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts

● Keisha Bush

2025 Sarah Verdone Award for Writing

ABOUT LMCC

Founded as Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, LMCC serves, connects, and makes space for artists and community. Since 1973, LMCC has been the champion for independent artists in New York City and the cultural life force of Lower Manhattan. We envision New York City as a place in which artists and communities in dialogue are creating a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.

ABOUT TAYLOR MAC

Taylor Mac is the first American to receive the International Ibsen Award, is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of the Kennedy Prize (with Matt Ray), the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert Award, a Drama League Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, the Booth, two Helpmann Awards, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obies, two Bessies, and an Ethyl Eichelberger. An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is the author of Bark of Millions and The Hang (with composer Matt Ray); Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil The Musical; Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; A 24-Decade History of Popular Music; Bark of Millions; Prosperous Fools; The Fre; Hir; The Walk Across America for Mother Earth; The Lily’s Revenge; The Young Ladies Of; Red Tide Blooming; The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac; and the revues Comparison is Violence; Holiday Sauce; and The Last Two People on Earth: an Apocalyptic Vaudeville (created with Mandy Patinkin and Susan Stroman).

ABOUT KEISHA BUSH

Keisha Bush is a multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of No Heaven For Good Boys, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the Scholastic children’s book My Family Tree. In her visual art she explores the divide between written, oral, and visual storytelling through the mediums of fabric and acrylic. She has a business degree from Bentley University, an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and a Master of Theology degree from Harvard Divinity School. She has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Moulinà Nef, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Lion’s Roar Magazine, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and Electric Lit. She teaches writing at the Center for Fiction. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ABOUT JULIANA F. MAY

A Guggenheim and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Juliana F. May has created ten major works since 2002, including eight evening-length pieces with commissions and encore performances from Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Barnard College, The New School, Joyce SoHo, The American Realness Festival and Abrons Arts Center. May has been awarded grants and residencies through The Map Fund, The Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, FCA, Gibney Dance In Process and The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. In 2002, May received her BA in Dance and Art History from Oberlin College, and, in 2012, she received an MFA in Choreography from the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. May served as the Artistic Advisor for New York Live Arts’s Fresh Tracks Residency Program from 2017-2019 and 2024 present. May’s work Folk Incest was nominated for a 2019 New York Dance and Performance Award for outstanding production as well as touring to ImpulsTanz in Vienna, Austria. Juliana’s most recent work Family Happiness, co-commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and Abrons Arts Center, premiered in May of 2023 and had encore performances in 2024 at The Chocolate Factory Theater. May’s next work, Optimistic Voices will premiere in November 2025.

ABOUT JEAN SHIN

Known for her sprawling and often public sculptures, artist Jean Shin transforms accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity and community engagement. Often working cooperatively within a community or region, Shin amasses vast collections of an everyday object or material—Mountain Dew soda bottles, mobile phones, 35mm slides—while researching its history of use, circulation and environmental impact. Distinguished by this labor-intensive and participatory process, Shin’s epic creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges. Recent projects focus more closely on sculptural forms that employ organic elements–namely fallen trees– that exist within natural environments. As such, her body of work includes several permanent public artworks commissioned by major agencies and municipalities, such as the MTA’s Second Ave Subway in NYC, Brooklyn Public Library, and the Perelman Arts Center, World Trade Center, NYC. Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the US, Shin works in Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, New York. She is a tenured Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute and holds an honorary doctorate from New York Academy of Art. Shin’s work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where in 2020 she was the first Korean-American woman artist featured in a solo exhibition. Shin has received numerous awards, including the Frederic Church Award for her contributions to American art and culture.

ABOUT ELISABETH SMOLARZ

Elisabeth Smolarz is a conceptual artist and curator living and working in Queens. Her photo and video works demonstrate how consciousness and perception are formed as a result of larger social structures. Smolarz is founder/director of Spectral Lines, an artist-run salon in Ridgewood, NY. In 2020, Smolarz founded Ice Cream Window, a seasonal ice cream shop at the Karlssonwilker design studio, adding a delicious dimension to the community she fosters.

ABOUT JAMES TIGGER! FERGUSON

Known as “The Godfather of Neo-Boylesque,” James Tigger! Ferguson has performed in NYC since 1988 & around the world since 1993. He is a pioneer in the 1990s burlesque renaissance and winner of the 1st-ever “Mr. Exotic World/Best Boylesque” title at the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. He has performed numerous original works with Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz, Penny Arcade, Target Margin Theater, Talking Band & other award-winning geniuses. Tigger! has also headlined burlesque festivals all around Europe, Australia, North America & South America. His act was banned in Rome.