News and Events

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

The Artist’s Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, New York
November 28, 7pm

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fall 2018

205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

Part I, November 10 – December 2, 2018
Part II, December 15 – January 6, 2019

Jordan Artim

Patricia Ayres

Amanda Brown

Joseph Burwell

Amy Butowicz

Nathan Sinai Rayman

Kyle Utter

Corey Allen

Alison Kizu-Blair

Michelle Hernandez Vega

Lili Jamail

Jessi Li

Wai Ying Zhao

Jason Rondinelli

Christopher Roberson

Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971

Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY

October 4 – November 25

Organized by Howard Singerman and Sarah Watson with Agnes Gund Curatorial Fellows Clara Chapin, Marie Coneys, Miles Debas, Jazmine Hayes, and Tess Thackara.

Acts of Art and Rebuttal revisits the 1971 exhibition Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal, which was organized by members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition at Acts of Art, a small, artist-run gallery in Greenwich Village. The original exhibition was mounted in response to the Whitney Museum’s refusal to appoint a Black curator for their survey Contemporary Black Artists in America.

The exhibition at Hunter presents ten of the 47 artists from the original Rebuttal show, including Benny Andrews, Vivian Browne, Betty Blayton-Taylor, James Denmark, Cliff Joseph, Richard Mayhew, Dindga McCannon, Ademola Olugebefola, Haywood “Bill” Rivers, and Frank Wimberley. It is a selection intended to represent the stylistic diversity of the original exhibition, with works ranging from sardonic social satire and biting figurative expressionism to Yoruban-inspired symbolism and lyrical abstraction.  Through these artists, the exhibition also traces a network of organizations and groups that supported the aspirations of Black artists and the community in the 1960s and early 1970s, among them: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition; the Spiral group; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Black nationalist artists’ group Weusi; and the Black women’s artist collective Where We At. Through its survey of the history of the short-lived Acts of Art gallery and the events leading up to the Rebuttal show, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue explore the intersections between Black cultural communities and cultural politics in Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and Harlem in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Jessye McDowell: Future Sets

Thomas Hunter Project Space
930 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY

Through November 22
Opening Reception: November 16, 6-9pm

Thomas Hunter Project Space is proud to present “Future Sets”, by Jessye McDowell. McDowell works across digital platforms to examine the interchanges of cultural mythologies, lived experience and digital life. She received an MA in Media Studies from the New School University in NYC, and an MFA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Animation at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her recent work uses 3D modeling to create highly-rendered still and moving images, which repurpose and combine diverse genre cues – from sources such as landscape painting and video games – in “hyperreal” virtual tableaux.

David Reinfurt, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
November 14, 7pm

Rivka Galchen

The Artist’s Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, New York
November 14, 7pm

Yoshua Okón, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

November 9, 7pm

New Scholarship in African American Art History

The 2018 Evelyn Kranes Kossak Symposium

Roosevelt House, Hunter College
47-49 East 65th Street
New York, NY

November 2, 9:30 am – 6 pm

In conjunction with the exhibition Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, at Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery, the Department of Art and Art History is hosting a day-long symposium devoted to recent scholarship in African-American Art History.  Acts of Art and Rebuttal revisits the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s stance against Whitney Museum’s Contemporary Black Artists in America show, and the exhibition they helped organize in response at Acts of Art, a small, artist-run gallery in Greenwich Village.  The Acts of Art exhibition Artists in Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum: Black Artists in Rebuttal spoke to issues of identity, visibility, and the politics of representation.  Those issues continue to engage both critical art histories of African American Art in the postwar period, and current art practice.

Participants:

LeRonn P. Brooks, assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York

Bridget Cooks, associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and Department of Art History at the University of California Irvine

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Cheryl Finley, associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University

Cherise Smith, chair and associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Executive Director of the Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Tobias Wofford, assistant professor in Department of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University

The symposium is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

To reserve: https://new-scholarship-in-african-american-art-history.eventbrite.com

Hollis Frampton’s “A Lecture,” 1968

The Artist’s Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, New York

November 2, 6:30pm

Geoffrey Batchen: Light and Dark

Hunter MFA Studios, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
October 23, 7pm

Dan Fox: Limbo

The Artist’s Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, New York

October 24, 7pm
This is a talk about getting by when you can’t get along. A talk for writers and artists who find themselves in No-Man’s Land, the Twilight Zone, the Upside Down, the wasteland, the badlands and the boonies. On the sidelines, on the bench, on hold, on standby, out-of-sync, in the wings, up the creek, in a ditch, in a fix, in a funk, in stasis.

Drawing on his new book Limbo—a memoir, a meditation on creative block, a cultural history of limbo, and companion for the isolated, delayed, stranded, stymied and those in the dark—Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art. In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, what happens when you’re plain stuck? How do you get out of your own way? Questions will be asked. Answers will be stumbled over in the dark and cursed at.

Frances Stark, Zabar Visiting Artist

Stephen Mueller: Orchidaceous Closing Weekend Events

205 Hudson Gallery
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

October 27, 4-8pm

4:00 PM | Artist-led walkthrough with Josh Blackwell, Carrie Moyer, and Arlene Schechet

6:00–8:00 PM | Closing reception with performance by Ariana van Gelder

Stephen Mueller: Orchidaceous presents a rare look into the late painter’s oeuvre during a period of rigorous creative transformation. The exhibition traces Mueller’s formal and conceptual evolution from his high-octane, impetuous gestural work from the late 1980s to the spatial complexity, exquisite color and sensuous facture of his late paintings. With over 40 paintings and works on paper, this will be the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date.

Curated by Carrie Moyer and Sarah Watson with Agnes Gund Curatorial Fellows Evan Bellantone and Sophia Ma and Hunter MA and MFA students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate

Rein Jelle Terpstra, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

October 17, 7pm