about the kite
The Francis Kite Club is a public social club in the East Village of Manhattan founded by friends and co-conspirators. The Kite hosts a range of activities including live music, art, performance, craft, reading groups, and other uncommon events. The effort reflects our desire to escape the norms of our professional and social trenches.
Tuck yourself into a booth to sew, draw, meet with friends and comrades, or read a book in the late afternoon light.
Photo by Truce
art at the kite
At the Kite, you will find artist Nina Nichols' paintings of Manhattan after humans disappear. Native trees thrive and spirits inhabit this space. The far left canvas depicts a rocky peak in the Catskills in the dead of winter with the spirit of the living stump. Next to it, the fall owls, wild horse, and the disembodied hand. In the central canvas, Annie Sprinkle (the embodiment of ecological and corporeal freedom) and the Naked Bear (an early spirit described by the Iroquois) burn down the Merchant’s house, the oldest structure in Manhattan. To their right, the summer fawn and the giant cannibalistic head emerge from lush springtime woods. To the far right is the mummified arm of Antietam, an old spirit discovered on a battlefield in Maryland, amid the summer foliage and the spring wood stork. Manhattan is bursting with underground rivers, shifting limestone, wild birds and creeping forest dripping, germinating and spawning in rapid succession all around and underneath us in perpetuity.
Additionally, The Kite is pleased to show three paintings by the acclaimed artist and writer, Molly Crabapple. The works on view are from a series of portraits Molly painted in 2016 titled “Annotated Muses,” each dedicated to friends and co-conspirators. These muses — among them activists, writers, sex workers, journalists, porn stars, and witches — have provided Molly ephemera from their lives from airplane tickets and love letters to tarot cards and eviction notices, that paper the backdrop for the portraits. The muses are rendered large and bold on this detritus of life, making uncompromising eye contact with viewers. Exquisitely painted, the portraits are subsequently handed over to their subjects, each choosing how to complete their painting with their own words, in their own hand, upending the traditional role of the muse as mute inspiration for the artist. For more info on these and other works of Molly’s visit HERE.
“The co-founders’ organizing concept for the Francis Kite Club is nothing less than to offer, at once, the comforts of a home away from home and the productive discomforts of engagement beyond the rut of professional and social habit.”
“There is something bigger than beer brewing at the Francis Kite Club, a new haunt in the East Village whose artists hold performances, shape its programming and debate politics from their barstools.”
“Created by Laura Hanna, Kyp Malone, John McEnerney, Alice McGillicuddy, and Laura Raicovich, the bar at 40 Loisaida Ave. is a combo of uptown chic and downtown social club, with an ethos rooted in the spirit of community and the goal of becoming part of the neighborhood.”