The Kitchen is a non-profit arts centre in New York founded in 1971 by the video artists Woody and Steina Vasulka, who began presenting work in the former kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center in Greenwich Village. It moved to a SoHo loft at Broome and Wooster Streets in 1973 and in 1986 to 512 West 19th Street in Chelsea, a building it bought the following year; during renovations begun in 2022 it has run a satellite space at Westbeth in the West Village.
From the start its music series was programmed by the nineteen-year-old Rhys Chatham, who opened it in October 1971 with Laurie Spiegel on the Buchla synthesiser and premiered Two Gongs with Yoshi Wada, an hour of sustained metallic sound. On 11 March 1972 Tony Conrad premiered Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain there, using amplified long-string drone instruments he had built for the performers. Chatham returned as music director in 1977.