Starting off 2023 with shows in mind
Last days to see Adam Zhu's downtown tribute exhibit, Jack Shannon's Entrance show, Linda Troeller's erotic portraiture, and a lot of other shows I'm trying to seeing in 2023.
Happy New Year, all!
I had a lot more I originally wanted to share like below. These topics will be addressed in another newsletter issue, but as a teaser…
My experience going to the annual Poetry Project marathon at the St. Marks Church for the first time and seeing my mentors like Lucy Sante, Yoshiko Chuma, Juliana Huxtable, among many others speak for 5 hours.
Meeting photographer Bill Bystrua by chance and being gifted his 2018 Kickstarter funded portraiture book on ACT-UP activists across the world, the AIDS Activist Project. I also wanted to bring up the phenomenal podcasts and documentaries that have been foundational for me in understanding the movement’s activism and their powerful visuality.
Learning about Calafia Sánchez-Touzé’s work and picking up their recently published zine with Dashwood Books, A Slight Group (2022). I was hoping to unpack their work more and understand more the visual relationship they establish in the photographs to their parents and their self, hoping to find clarity on my own visual-language I develop with my family.
Adam Zhu’s Nice Daze exhibit at CCP Projects (17 Allen St., 2nd Fl.)
On view until tomorrow, Sunday 1/8
I’ve written about the exhibit’s simultaneous book release in my recent top ten photo-book write-up, but the physical exhibit is a New Year must see. Witness memories of downtown past from the last decade. Free, book price is $90.
Jack Shannon's Forest Cosmos exhibition at Entrance (48 Ludlow St)
On view until tomorrow, Sunday 1/8
Alright, this isn’t a photo show but Shannon’s work is hypothetically photographic. Your eye will get stuck in following the lines, circling, and movement of Shannon’s marks. Free.
Linda Troeller’s Self Power | Self Play: 50 Years of Erotic Portraiture exhibit at the Museum of Sex (233 5th Avenue)
On view until Monday 1/9
I’ve never been to the Museum of Sex but this exhibit will make me want to change that. The portraits by Troeller seem demanding of recognition for its courageous embrace of not just others’ sexuality, but also their gaze. Tickets start at $36.
Caroline Tompkins's Bedfellow book launch & signing at MAST Books (72 Ave. A)
Thursday 1/12 6pm-8pm
Palm* Studios has described the book here, “Over the past five years, Caroline Tompkins has been making images of her sexual desires and fears. Her forthcoming book, Bedfellow explores the relationship sex has with pleasure and danger. It holds two truths at all times – desiring men while fearing them.”
2022 Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist opening reception at Printed Matter (231 11th Ave.)
Saturday 1/14 2pm-5pm
Will include an impromptu signing with First PhotoBook nomination Oscar B. Castillo, artist of ESOS QUE SABEN (Those who know), published by Raya Editorial from Manizales, Colombia. Do not miss out on an exciting celebration of emerging artists, and an opportunity to join them in conversation.
Ralph Arlyck’s I Like It Here screening at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center (165 West 65th St).
Sunday 1/15, 3pm
Gus Aronson— filmmaker, photographer, and college friend— shared news of this release the other day, noting his involvement on the new autobiography documentary since 2017. I had the opportunity to work with Aronson on a friend’s senior thesis at Bard, along with Marina Gandour who I’ll be attending this screening with! $20 general admission, $14 student tickets.
Larry Fink exhibit at Robert Mann Gallery (14 E. 80th St.)
On view until 1/29
On my New Year bucket list to see this show and make more sense of Fink’s ability to fill the photo square in his own unique way. Free.
John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres’s Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits exhibit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (1040 Grand Concourse)
On view until 4/30, Free admission
The exhibit was recently featured in the New Yorker with a write-up by Hilton Als. Als gave a beautiful shoutout to Barbara Ess’s Just Another Asshole publication from the mid to late 70s, which triggered my feelings about current conversations on the East Village past. Als wrote about the culture surrounding Ahearn’s sculptural portraits inclusion in the iconic June, 1980 group show, the Times Square Show. He writes:
The show happened resolutely in the now—in an era when you could go out to pick up the newspaper, say, at Gem Spa, in the East Village, and run into friends who were enthusing about a John Sex performance or the latest issue of Just Another Asshole, and that conversation would lead to word of a show in another part of town and you wouldn’t get home until two or three in the morning, but what was wrong with that? Every event was a natural progression of the day itself; culture was an open field, and the best, most illuminating aspects of it weren’t defined or validated by commerce.
I appreciate Als’s nostalgia for an era— that I acknowledge I cannot attest to living through— that was about finding and stumbling on something happening, not blowing up, but simply existing and being exquisite. He speaks to an era where shows were something a friend of a friend told you about. There was no line around the block, no rope to block the public from the commercial line of consumers. I challenge the notion that we’ve left that era behind. I don’t think it’s too late for the counterculture art world to live on. With every blue-chip gallery opening and every NFT art show, I can find some graffiti head on Instagram advertising an obscure pop-up at some skate shop or another like-minded function. The counterculture is still there, but maybe its very secrecy is sacred. We can’t return to the 70s, but we can maintain its distaste for the white-wall gallery critic and its formal presumptions.
Jimmy DeSana’s Submission exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway)
On view until 4/16
Simply put, I still haven’t made the schlep out to Brooklyn Museum but as part of my New Year resolution, plan to make more ventures for art. This will be one of them. General tickets $16, student tickets $10, 19 and under free.
I also wanted to mention some things I’m looking forward to next month.
Projects: Ming Smith exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W. 53rd St.)
Opening Saturday 2/4, on view until 5/29
The artist and my close friend Bella Garcia has been assisting the Magnum photographer these last few months. Smith’s solo-exhibit will be paired with the release of a book on her long and extensive career defying any single label.
Audre Lorde/James Baldwin-through the lens of Claudia Rankine reading at Performance Space (150 1st Ave)
Monday 2/6 7pm
Again, not a photography show per-se, but an important and excellent program that will have visual concourse and discussion embedded within it. I found out about the event from author and the program’s co-producer Sarah Schulman who I’ve been following since her screening at Bard College of her 2012 documentary with Jim Hubbard, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. Per the program’s listing page, it’ll be “A 1984 conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin edited by Claudia Rankine. Read by Russell G Jones and Rosalyn Coleman Williams, directed by Dominique Rider Co-Produced by Tavia Nyong’o and Sarah Schulman.” Free with RSVP.
Tommy Kha’s Half, Full Quarter book release, published by Aperture
The book will be published Tuesday 2/7 with essays contributed by my two powerful mentors, artist and my former thesis advisor An-My Le and author Hua Hsu— who I am disappointed I missed out on having as a professor at Bard. Perhaps more exciting is that “An exhibition of the work will open at Baxter St in New York in February 2023” according to the publication listing.
And with that— till next time. Let me know what you want to hear more about and less about. Hoping to bring in new components soon, when I have time and focus.
Rainer