My Current Exhibition Watchlist
Two photo-heavy group shows at the Whitney, Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner at Baxter St., New Photography 2023 at MoMA, + lots more
Hi all,
It’s been a moment since I’ve shared any new happenings and goings on, but with the recent end of the New Yorker’s “The Goings on About Town,” it seems ever-important to scope out current photography and related exhibitions. With the departure of in-print listings of exhibitions, performances, etc., I recall looking through my mom’s old issues and seeing my favorite NYC bands from high school get written up for an upcoming show and sending it to them, and they get psyched. It seems like events and exhibits will still get their online post on the New Yorker’s website, but there’s something really exciting about imagining older folks in a place like the Upper East Side turning a page and reading a short paragraph advertising a Show Me The Body show in Brooklyn. ‘Tis an end to print readers getting a slice of unanticipated culture.
Last week, I made it to the closing day of the group show Intimate Strangers at Yancey Richardson Gallery which included LaToya Ruby Frazier, Justine Kurland, Zora J Murff, and Larry Sultan, among others. This was my favorite exhibition in recent history at Yancey Richardson (525 W. 22nd St.) where I thought the connecting theme of family felt natural throughout the photographs, and not forced onto the photographs. Each print could’ve been read as entering an artist’s family album. Afterward, I went to see Blueprint, the 2022 Yale MFA photography graduate group show, organized by Antwaun Sargent at AMANITA (313 Bowery, on view through 8/27), located inside the former CB's 313 Gallery, and former-former CBGB Record Canteen.
The following day, I took a bus up to Kingston for the opening reception of Brenda Ann Kenneally’s solo exhibition, Upstate Girls at the Center of Photography in Woodstock’s Kingston Headquarters (474 Broadway, on view through 10/22). I anticipated meeting Kenneally at the reception and brought my copy of Upstate Girls (Regan Arts, 2018) which was virtually sold out except for Amazon Canada after being listed as one of 2018’s top 10 photography books by the New York Times.
Now, here are the exhibitions on my mind that I need to go check out—
Vân-Nhi Nguyen: 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner at Baxter St at Camera Club of New York
126 Baxter St., on view through 9/1
Awarded the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Hanoi & Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam based artist photographs sitters in domestic spaces in front of lively wallpapers, pointing to an identity physically in/on the wall. The photographs remind me of Deana Lawson's attention to the corner in domestic space, bringing and pointing energy into the corners of apartments and homes. The wide-angle photographs contain an intimate space. The gallery evokes the textures of the wallpapers in the photographs by mimicking the very paint and pattern.
New Photography 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art
11 W. 53rd St., on view through 9/16
As part of their “New Photography” series, this group exhibition— curated by Associate Curator in the Department of Photography, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Kaitlin Booher, and Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Photography, Samuel Allen— focuses on photographers and artists with ties to Lagos (Èkó), Nigeria. The exhibition features artists Kelani Abass, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Yagazie Emezi, Amanda Iheme, Abraham Oghobase, Karl Ohiri, and Logo Oluwamuyiwa. Unfortunately, I missed the opening reception this past May, but I still have a couple of weeks to make a visit.
Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart / Mi corazón latiente at the New Museum
235 Bowery (3rd Floor), on view through 9/17
Curated by the Chief Curator at Berkely Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Margot Norton, and Chief Curator at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, Bernardo Mosqueira, Osorio’s solo exhibit focuses on the elaborate multi-media environments and installations that the artist prepares in dialogue with the neighbors and inhabitants of the places they’re shown. While not explicitly photographs, these labeled “multi-media environments” possess very photographic qualities, like looking into someone’s lived space, a room. They are a physical portrait of a space without needing to be photographed, but rather experienced.
[R]Evolution of Hip Hop, 1986-1990: The Golden Era at the Universal Hip Hop Museum
610 Exterior Street (Next to Pizza Studio), free admission all of August
While this exhibition on the history of Hip Hop seems year-round, in honor of the genre’s 50th anniversary this month, admission is totally waived. The show is curated by Chief Curator, Paradise Gray, Co-Curators, Pete Nice & Sen Yon Kelly, Sound Curator, Elai Turbo, Music Programming and Founding Board Member, Cutman LG, Associate Curator, Martha Diaz, and Associate Video Curator, Pamela French.
Writer and friend Lei Takanashi posted some pictures from the exhibit on his Instagram, and I’m excited to go check out the photographs, ephemera, and artifacts saved from the making of Charlie Ahearn’s classic documentary, Wild Style (1983)— among other graffiti-adjacent and concert-related pictures. The UHHM recently lent their collection to the gallery Legacy NYC on Orchard Street for their recent Summer exhibit, 50 Years of Hip Hop Fliers which included a wide variety of fliers for music video and film screenings, performances (like one at the destroyed East River Amphitheater), club nights, and beyond. There’s less than a week to take advantage of the free admission to the UHHM, so reserve your tickets online as soon as possible.
Inheritance at the Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street (6th Floor), on view through 2/2024
My initial intrigue with the exhibit was seeing my former college advisor An-My Lê listed alongside so many other familiar lens-based artists’ names like Widline Cadet, John Edmonds, Deana Lawson, Ana Mendieta, Sophie Rivera, and Kara Walker. I realized it wasn’t exclusively images or photographs. The group show, curated by Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney, Rujeko Hockley, covers a wide range of mediums and formats including photography, sculpture, video, painting, and in between— for instance, Todd Gray’s work which defies the simple tradition of a single photograph framed by a singular frame. The show’s forty-three artists with works from the 1970s to the present seem to create an ecosystem of textures, gestures, sounds, and vibrations in weaving through Faith Ringold’s literal weavings to the environmental photographic weaving of Le’s landscapes to the physical occupation of space of Beverly Buchanan’s Tom’s House (1995), a sculpture made from wood and tin.
Trust Me at the Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street (3rd Floor), on view through 2/2024
It’s a double whammy at the Whitney with another group show and one that’s entirely lens-based artists. Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney, Kelly Long has brought together a rich blend of intergenerational artists from those having exhibited in a number of retrospectives like the late Barbara Hammer alongside artists who are publishing their first major monographs this year, like Genesis Báez. The show’s theme of depictions of bond and attachment in all meanings (ancestral, familial, platonic, or romantic) unites artists across generations in their nuanced gestures of signaling one’s lineage or relationship to self or space. The show presents a contemporary instance with D’Angelo Lovell Williams’s photograph linking Blackness and queerness but also invokes queerness in the context of cruising in Manhattan’s Hudson River piers with a landscape by the late Alvin Baltrop. In other metaphors of bond, artist and activist Lola Flash connects with her friend Ray Navarro, a fellow ACT UP member in a 1991 posthumous, conceptual portrait of him, in Flash’s recognizable “cross-color” process. Báez, Baltrop, Flash, Hammer, and Lovell Williams are joined by Laura Aguilar, Moyra Davey, Muriel Hasbun, Marry Manning, Dakota Mace, and Jenny Valivas, who exhibited alongside Báez at Justine Kurland’s studio last Fall/Winter.
That’s all I have for now. Let me know if there’s anything I need to check out.
Cheers,
Rainer