In Performance: Jesse Paris Smith, Rebecca Foon & Nikolai Fraiture

In response to the exhibition ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’ at Hauser & Wirth 22nd Street, we are thrilled to present an evening of live music and poetry from Jesse Paris Smith, Rebecca Foon and Nikolai Fraiture.
The performance will also include readings of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Elizabeth Bishop, delivered by Catherine Goodman and Eric Karpeles.
‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’ presents a series of new, large-scale paintings by the British artist, where her characteristically expressive brushwork yields animated surfaces that pulse with the dynamic energy of their making. For Goodman, the studio is a place of spiritual meditation. Each painting represents an act of intimate transmutation—a way for her to turn closely held memories and personal vulnerabilities into newfound stability.
This event is free, however, due to limited capacity, reservations are required.
About Catherine Goodman
For more than four decades, Catherine Goodman CBE has developed a unique visual language that communicates a powerful visionary response to her lived experience and memory. Goodman’s intensely expressive painting process uses strongly pigmented oil paint, brushwork, oil sticks, drips and washes to create atmospheric and immersive paintings which explore both figuration and abstraction.
Central to Goodman’s artistic process is the act of drawing directly from life, her intimate knowledge of the old master painters and drawing from film, where she immerses in the legends of the modern cinema age. In Goodman’s words, “drawing can bring about a sense of unity and create a portal into other realms of consciousness”. This daily practice roots her mark-making in observation and informs and enriches her paintings.
About Eric Karpeles
A Fellow of the Czesław Miłosz Institute at Claremont McKenna College, writer, painter, and translator, Eric Karpeles has given the Weintraub Lecture on Polish Culture at Harvard, the Frank Lecture in the Humanities at Yale, and the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. He is the painter of both The Mary and Laurance Rockefeller Chapel of Hope and Remembrance at The HealthCare Chaplaincy (1996) and The Sanctuary (1994), a traveling installation of a 30 x 50’ painted room dedicated as a meditation and memorial space for the HIV/AIDS community. The author of ‘Paintings in Proust’ (Thames & Hudson, 2008), Karpeles has spoken widely on the subject, having given the annual Proust lecture at the Center for Fiction in New York and addressed the Proust Society of America in San Francisco. He has published three books about Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski with New York Review Books and Thames & Hudson, respectively. Articles by him have appeared in Brick, New England Review, and The New York Times. He is the translator of Proust’s Overcoat (Ecco Press, 2010).
Karpeles initiated, organized and led separate community readings of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ in three different states, in which fifty-two chosen readers declaimed a numbered verse. He was commissioned to paint a large backdrop for an international gathering of Elizabeth Bishop scholars in Ouro Preto, Brazil, and lectured on the poet’s own paintings at an NYU colloquium. He has worked as an onstage interviewer with subjects as varied as Stephen Sondheim, W. S. Merwin, Anna Deveare Smith, and Michael Tilson Thomas, and collaborated on a book of mathematical equations and Hebrew quotations used as a prop in a film by the Coen Brothers.
About Jesse Paris Smith
Jesse Paris Smith is a writer, producer, Grammy-nominated composer/musician, Co-founder of climate action organizations Pathway to Paris and 1000 Cities, and Founding Ambassador of the NY International Antiquarian Book Fair. Jesse is based in NYC.
About Rebecca Foon
Rebecca Foon is a musician, artist, producer, and Co-founder of climate action organizations Pathway to Paris and 1000 Cities. She co-founded the Juno Award winning band Esmerine, is a contributing collaborator in Colin Stetson’s Sorrow ensemble, and a former member of Canadian post-rock group, A Silver Mt. Zion. Foon is also a photographer, painter, and maker of large-scale lightboxes. The lightboxes are meant to serve as portals to the natural world, reminders of the future we must strive to avoid: a world where our experience of nature exists solely as memories.
About Nikolai Fraiture
Nikolai Fraiture is a musician, songwriter, producer, and a co-founder of the Grammy-winning band The Strokes. When not touring the globe, he is the frontman and creative force behind Summer Moon and one half of Arts Elektra, a music and arts project he founded with his brother, NYC artist Pierre Fraiture, whose mission it is to “Do Music. Do Art. Do Good.”
About Pathway to Paris
Pathway to Paris is a non-profit organization based in the USA, founded by Jesse Paris Smith and Rebecca Foon in 2014 as a way to bring musicians, performers, artists, filmmakers, and poets into the climate movement. They have curated, produced, and hosted events and festivals all over the world, amplifying milestones of the climate movement and supplying their audiences with tangible tools for local action. In 2017, the organization launched their 1000 Cities Initiative for Carbon Freedom to push cities around the world to develop and implement ambitious climate action plans to move to 100% renewable energy/zero emissions, as soon as possible. In 2024, 1000 Cities received non-profit status in Canada. Now in the 11th year of Pathway to Paris, both organizations are focused on continued efforts to bridge the arts and climate action, educational programming, and climate research and development tools including their Carbon Budget Calculator and Climate Action Rating System for Cities. Nikolai Fraiture has been an active collaborator and contributor since 2022.

Photo of Rebecca Foon by Curtis Perry; Photos of Jesse Paris Smith & Nikolai Fraiture by David Andrako

Host or Publisher Hauser & Wirth New York