Addressing themes not often united in contemporary art exhibitions, the Bronx Museum of the Art’s stellar presentation of Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter (July 18—October 14, 2018) challenges the viewer to consider architecture, the female body, and public space. Organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, a curator at the San José Museum of Art, the exhibition weaves these elements into a conversation…
-
-
An Interview with Artist Nasrin Sheykhi
I was first intrigued by the Iranian artist Nasrin Sheykhi’s collage drawings and then by her story, and how she has navigated a perilous path as an immigrant to the United States with acerbic wit. Sheykhi did not speak until she was three years old and when she began to speak it was when her mother taught her how to…
-
The Work of Post-Memory in “This Happened Here” at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
“The horror of looking is not necessarily in the image but in the story we provide to fill in what is left out of the image.” -Marianne Hirsch [1] A recent survey conducted in February 2018 by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 49% of Millennials cannot name a single concentration camp or ghetto among the dozens…
-
Smashing Windows: Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Intersectional Feminism, and Black Empowerment
Never shy about her political stance, Beyonce openly endorsed candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, making clear her belief that the future is female. Her album Lemonade, which Beyoncé produced the same year and complemented with powerful video content, illustrates her feminist stance through explicitly political, but also personal references. One of the most memorable scenes from Lemonade…
-
Art World Meets Instagram
In a gallery off to one side in the ongoing (through May 28, 2018) retrospective on the photography of Stephen Shore at the Museum of Modern Art is a row of iPads linked continuously to Shore’s ever-changing Instagram account. While Shore’s work has always strived to replicate quotidian experiences, it feels strange to scroll through the account while surrounded by…
-
An Interview with Hu Xiangqian
In early November, IFA MA student Cindy Qi interviewed Hu Xiangqian, whose work is currently exhibited at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU as a part of the fall Duke House Exhibition chin(a)frica: an interface, on view through February 18, 2018. Hu Xiangqian (b. 1983) was born in Leizhou, Guangdong Province and graduated in 2007 from Guangzhou Academy of Fine…
-
Unpacking the Layers of Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined
When visitors step into the Whitney’s first-floor gallery, which currently houses Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined, they risk forgetting that they are standing in a museum. There is a softness to the space that distances it from the rest of the building, its warm lighting and the pink color of the walls evoking a feeling of intimacy that is…
-
The Usable Past
The Usable Past: “The concept that a self-conscious examination of historical figures, moments, and symbols can shape current and future political formation.”[1] This is how the Whitney defines the title of one of five galleries in their ongoing permanent collection exhibition An Incomplete History of Protest. The works in the gallery present memory and nostalgia as both powerful and yet…
-
A Collection Out of Context?: Archer M. Huntington’s Hispanic Society of America in Spain
After drawing immense summer crowds, the most recent traveling exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Tesoros from the Hispanic Society of America, Visions of the Hispanic World, closed its doors. The show truly was a museum within a museum – a mise en abîme of the New York City-based Hispanic Society of America within the galleries of…
-
Housewife: Jennifer Rubell’s Conceptual History of the Modern Woman
Jennifer Rubell’s Housewife, an installation at the Sargent’s Daughters gallery on the Lower East Side, attempts a conceptual history of modern femininity. In the simplest terms, the show is a meditation on the seeming universality of white, middle-class femininity. However, to critique Rubell’s stark visual vocabulary in this way fails to acknowledge that her work nevertheless touches a certain comprehensive…
