Pick Up Performance Co. 

Incorporated in 1978, Pick Up Performance Co. (PUPC), is an artist-driven performing arts producing organization founded by David Gordon. In 1992, PUPC’s Board unanimously voted to expand the mission to include writer/director Ain Gordon, creating a dual-artist Co-director leadership structure. Since David Gordon’s passing in 2022, Ain Gordon continues as (artistic) Director. Ain Gordon’s current productions are “Relics and Their Humans” and “Condolence”.

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In 2023 Ain Gordon and Producing Director Alyce Dissette (since 2002) established “friends & family,” an initiative offering multiple artists/projects with previous PUPC connections producorial infrastructure. To date these have included collaborative projects led by John Kelly, Emily Coates, Wally Cardona, and Moe Angelos.​

For more than forty-five years, PUPC has facilitated significant performance works via multi- year production/development models in partnership with leading performance venues, community organizations, and universities including: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, Baryshnikov Arts, 651 Arts, The Harbor School, La MaMa ETC, New York Live Arts, Performance Space New York, the Urban Memory Project, and HERE (all NY); Arizona Arts Live, Krannert Center (IL), UCLA Center for the Art of Performance, William Way LGBT Community Center (PA), the Mark Taper Forum (CA), International Festival of Arts & Ideas (CT), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Transylvania University (KY), Flynn Center (VT), Williams College (MA), and Wexner Center (OH), to cite a few. Over the decades, PUPC projects have been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Howard Gliman Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Con Edison, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Jerome Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many others. Collectively, PUPC artists and projects have garnered a recent Creative Capital award, 5 Obies, 3 Bessies, 3 Guggenheims, 5 MAP grants, a Doris Duke Award, and, 3 National Endowment for the Arts American Masterpiece Awards, among many others.

The Pick Up Performance Co. recently launched a multi-year initiative, the “LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project” led with 11 LGBTQ+ downtown NYC artists who have had had an indelible impact on New York City’s culture over the past 50+ years, They are Five Lesbian Brothers (5-member collective Moe Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, Lisa Kron), Ain Gordon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Richard Move, Lola Pashalinski, and Carmelita Tropicana; together they form a multi-faceted perspective on a rich and highly influential era, one that blossomed during what some regard as the last gasp of physical bohemia–which later coincided with the AIDS epidemic that devastated their generation’s collective voice. Since the project’s inception, the national landscape has forcefully shifted toward a pervasive suppression and erasure of LGBTQ+ culture, intensifying the importance of preserving the work of these artists for future generations.
More information is available at https://www.lgbtqartistsarchive.org