About ‘Rita Ackermann. The Chemical Alphabet’
In the Chemical Alphabet paintings, Rita Ackermann takes on a new source of vocabulary: letters from a Semitic alphabet. The structure of each symbol serves as an anchor for each composition.

The configuration of the letter, painted in acrylic green chalkboard paint on a canvas primed by multiple silkscreen prints, allows the surface to be built through Ackermann’s chalkboard method: layers of pastel and chalk drawings are erased, washed away, and redrawn until multiple states of the painting coexist on the canvas.

Here, the picture advances through accumulation and erasure. At the center of this constructive destruction, the letter remains, its meaning shifting with the evolving image around it.

What stays visible is not the frozen image but the chronicle of its becoming.

About Rita Ackermann
Born in Budapest in 1968, Ackermann studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts before moving to New York in 1992 to attend the New York Studio School. Immersing herself in the city’s collaborative cultural landscape, her work, at once graphic, bodily and charged with the psychic textures of youth culture, quickly became associated with New York’s raw artistic scene.

Over the past three decades, Ackermann’s conceptual and recursive approach has allowed her work to move fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Drawing, painting, printmaking, music, and video coexist within her expanded practice, while improvisation, disruption, and formal negation drive images to disappear and re-emerge as unstable traces. Shaped in part by her engagement with cinema, her work treats sound as image and image as vibration, echoing Godard’s proposition that one must sometimes ‘listen to the image and look at the sound.’

About Elizabeth LeCompte
Elizabeth LeCompte is a co-founder and the director of The Wooster Group. LeCompte studied fine arts and art history at Skidmore Women’s College before teaming up with actor Spalding Gray in the 1970s to make the first Wooster Group theater pieces. In 1980, they formally founded The Wooster Group as an artist-led company along with Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith. Since then, LeCompte has created over fifty theater, film, and media pieces which challenge convention with their structural, technological and visual experimentation. Among her honors, LeCompte has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize, the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the Skowhegan Medal, and honorary doctorates from the New School for Social Research and the California Institute of the Arts. In 2025, LeCompte received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale and in 2026, the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

About Kate Valk
Kate Valk began working with LeCompte and The Wooster Group in 1979. Since then, she has performed and/or acted as dramaturg in all of the Group’s productions. In addition to performing, Valk has directed three works with the Group and founded two arts education programs: an in-school theater residency at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Middle School in Chinatown, which she led from 1992 to 2019, and the Summer Institute, a free three-week workshop for public high school students, now in its 31st year. Valk was a Rolex Arts Mentor in 2008-09; other honors include a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to several OBIE and BESSIE awards, Valk received a 2026 OBIE Theater Award for Lifetime Achievement.

About The Wooster Group
The Wooster Group, led by founding member and director Elizabeth LeCompte, is a company of experimental theater and media artists. Since 1975, the Group has created more than 40 theater works and 22 media pieces, all developed and presented at the Group’s home, The Performing Garage on Wooster Street.

Theater productions directed by LeCompte include: Rumstick Road (1977) developed with Spalding Gray around his family history; the dance For the Good Times (1982); L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (1984), a wry look at American hysterias around witchcraft, drugs and communism; Brace Up! (1991), based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters; Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1996) performed in an abandoned Broadway theater; House/Lights (1999), a mash up of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and Joseph Mawra’s cult film Olga’s House of Shame; To You, the Birdie! (2002), Racine’s Phèdre, translated by Paul Schmidt specifically for the Group; Hamlet (2006) for the digital age; the Cavalli opera La Didone (2008); a faithful version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré (2009); Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room (2015); The Town Hall Affair (2017), based on Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s film Town Bloody Hall; A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique) (2018), an homage to Polish theater artist Tadeusz Kantor; Bertolt Brecht’s “learning play” The Mother (2021); and Nayatt School Redux (2023), a re-visioning of one of the Group’s first works.

Kate Valk has directed three Wooster Group works based on record albums: Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation (2014), The B-Side: Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons (2017), and Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (2024), the latter two made in collaboration with Eric Berryman.

Recent theater productions include Symphony of Rats (2024), a re-imagining of Richard Foreman’s play, co-directed by LeCompte and Valk. The newest work, L.S.D. (…just the high points…) Renovation, is based on the Group’s 1980s production and will premiere in January 2027.

Media pieces by The Wooster Group, all directed by LeCompte, include: White Homeland Commando (1992), made for television; Wrong Guys (1997), a surreal noir; and the 360° audience-activated video installation, There Is Still Time . . Brother (2007).

The Wooster Group has been included in numerous museum and gallery shows, among them three Whitney Biennials, “The Body Electric” at the Walker Art Center, and an exhibition devoted to the Group’s work at carriage trade in 2019-20. The Group created an original performance Who’s Your Dada?! to close the 2006 Dada show at the Museum of Modern Art, and for the opening of the new Whitney Museum in 2015 made a piece, Ribbon Cutting Ceremony. The Group recently began a costume archive project to catalog the unique designs from their productions.