Your concise art guide to New York for March 2022

There’s a “what if…” energy electrifying some of the most exciting exhibits in New York this month, speculative propositions ranging from “What if we saw architecture as an unstable pastiche? to “What if recuperation could occur through gender choice?”, from “What if bodies devoid of subjectivity acquired otherworldly abilities?” to “And if the indices of representation changed? Asking “what if” can be a galvanizing and powerful thing; As you attend these shows across the city, let yourself be overwhelmed and fizzled with the possibilities of the question.

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Installation view of The black index at Hunter College Art Galleries, Leubsdorf Gallery, 2022. Alicia Henry, “Analogous III” (2020) (photo by Stan Narten, courtesy of the artist)

When: until April 3
Or: Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Gallery (132 East 68th Street, Lenox Hill, Manhattan)

Reviewed by Hyperallergic in its UC Irvine iteration, this traveling exhibit features the media work of six artists, including Titus Kaphar and Kenyatta AC Hinkle, who challenge harmful colonialist and classificatory conventions around black figuration in the United States while offering thoughtful alternatives. “Black people should not exist visually solely in relation to violence, crime and racial hatred,” said exhibit curator Dr. Bridget R. Cooks. Los Angeles Times. “We exist in other ways and these artists are trying to portray those ways to us or remind us that there are other ways to see ourselves, to find ourselves in American culture.”

Image from Carlos Motta and Tiamat Legion Medusa, “When I Leave This World” (2022) (courtesy the artist, PPOW Gallery New York and OCDChinatown, New York)

When: until April 10
Or: OCDChinatown (75 East Broadway, Chinatown, Manhattan)

This two-channel video installation is the brainchild of Bogotá-born New York artist Carlos Motta, whose work explores queer or otherwise marginalized counter-histories and alternative futures, and Tiamat Legion Medusa, an artist from trans texan performance passing by. /his pronouns and underwent a major body modification operation to transform into a dragon, a bodily protest against humans and what they stand for. Medusa relays her personal and political story in one video, while in the other, the two artists are suspended in space by transgressive means (hooks and Shibari).

Susan Meiselas, ‘The Star Tease, Tunbridge, Vermont’ (1975) © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos (courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures Generation)

When: until April 16
Or: Superior Image Generation (16 Main Street, Ground Floor, DUMBO, Brooklyn)

Susan Meiselas is perhaps best known for her documentation of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, but her photographic career first took off with Carnival strippers (1972-75), a visual record of strip artists, their employers, and customers at small-town East Coast summer carnivals. Painting a nuanced picture of his subjects, Meiselas represented the performers on and off stage and ensured their voices were represented through recorded interviews and photo consultations. Due to a recent discovery of stored rolls of color film, images from the series are exhibited in vivid colors for the first time.

Installation view of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Mirage Necklace at Artists Space, 2022 (photo by Filip Wolak, courtesy the artist and Artists Space)

When: until April 23
Or: Artists’ Space (11 Cortlandt Alley, Soho, Manhattan)

Cinema has long celebrated the art of swindling. With a focus on Monte’s three-card trick, Pittsburgh-based multidisciplinary artist and writer Lyndon Barrois Jr. taps into the vast archive of cinematic depictions of duplicity, double-dealing, and sleight of hand in his first solo exhibition. institution in New York. Transforming borrowed cinematic images into precisely arranged paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations, the artist explores the many flavors of subterfuge at formal and narrative levels.

Kia LaBeija, “Mourning Sickness” (2014) (courtesy the artist and Fotografiska New York)

When: until May 8
Or: Fotografiska New York (281 Park Avenue South, Flatiron, Manhattan)

In her first solo exhibition at the museum, Kia LaBeija (“Kia”), artist, performer and former Mother General of LaBeija’s iconic house, presents tender autobiographical photographs and self-portraits alongside personal archival documents and ephemera. . Through her vulnerable visuals, Kia, who was interviewed by Hyperallergic in 2020, opens a window into her experience of coming of age as a queer, HIV-positive woman of color involved in New York’s Ballroom scene. prepare my heart is dedicated to the artist’s late mother, Kwan Bennett, an AIDS activist.

Charles Ray, “Mime” (2014), Kunstmuseum Basel (photograph by Josh White © Charles Ray, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery)

When: until June 5
Or: The Met Museum (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

Quality trumps quantity in this spare presentation of 3 photos and 16 sculptures, spanning five decades, by Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray, a “sculptor’s sculptor” who produced approximately 100 works in total in course of his career – and is currently also the subject of exhibitions at Glenstone, the Center Georges Pompidou and the Bourse de Commerce. Spaced out in an echo of the artist’s saying “Space is the sculptor’s primary medium”, the works on display in this focused survey range range from an open aluminum box that riffs on the minimalist cube to figures in stainless steel referencing Mark Twain. finn blueberrya complex and problematic American cultural touchstone.

Kay WalkingStick, “The San Francisco Peaks Seen from Point Imperiale” (2021) (image by JSP Art Photography, courtesy of the artist and Hales, London and New York)

When: March 4–April 16
Or: Hales Gallery (547 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

While we might (rightly) be inclined to associate paintings of epic North American landscapes with the acquisitive violence of manifest destiny, artist Kay WalkingStick, who is of Cherokee and Anglo-Saxon descent, painted landscapes throughout his six-decade career to instead explore and honor the relationship between Indigenous peoples and nature. The multi-panel oil paintings on display, all made within the last ten years, cover North American views with meticulously researched Indigenous patterns and designs that reference the people who once or currently inhabit the area.

Tenet, “Frame 2 (Hot Pipe/Transition Strip)” (2021) (courtesy the artists and CUE Art Foundation)

When: March 5–April 2
Or: CUE Art Foundation (137 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

With a focus on 19th-century housing built with working-class, immigrant, and non-white residents in mind, Tenet, or New York collaborative duo Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge, consider the pastiche of architectural styles of New York, in which various social, material and aesthetic histories come together awkwardly. Funny sculptures and architectural assemblages – a pillar is inexplicably made of fruit, a pipe winds its way like a living being – underline the strange animosity of the buildings.

Dewey Crumpler, “Sundown” (2020) (courtesy artist and Derek Eller Gallery)

When: March 17–April 23
Or: Derek Eller Gallery (300 Broome Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

Since the 1990s, Bay Area artist Dewey Crumpler has been painting and drawing The Hoodies, anthropomorphic sweatshirts that act as bodiless proxies for black subjects — perhaps foremost, black boys and teenagers. That they cross space in Skittles-colored vehicles, brandish smartphones to photograph “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” by Pablo Picasso (1907) and “American People Series #20: Die” (1967) by Faith Ringgold at the MoMA , or gather at a protest with homemade signs that read “The Thang” and “Being Non Being,” Hoodies are particularly compelling.

Installation view of Hassan Sharif: I am the unique artistMalmö Konsthall, Sweden, 2020 (photo by Helene Toresdotter, courtesy Alexander Gray Associates)

When: March 17–April 23
Or: Alexander Gray Associates (510 West 26 Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Emirati conceptual artist Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), who worked through the media but is most closely associated with his sculptural waste installations, gained recognition for his caricatures and political cartoons in the 1970s. Pointing out that the critical figuration remained an important thread in Sharif’s mature work, late paintings, influenced by expressionism, depict decontextualized and distorted politicians who appear manic at press conferences or raise their hands in empty ambiguous public gestures of meaning.

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