Bronx native Rochelle Feinstein's work is deeply informed by abstraction, while also conveying a keen sensibility to contemporary culture, particularly to our everyday use of language. Over the last four decades, Feinstein has probed the relevance of the abstract painting tradition vis-a-vis a rapidly changing cultural environment. She has used the lexicon of abstract painting to approach subjects of both personal and social import.
A quiet man who supported himself doing odd jobs such as street vendor, jewelry designer, photography printer, and cab driver, Bronx native Alvin Baltrop left an important body of work after his untimely death in 2004 that only now is garnering the serious attention it deserves. Like the startling images of Peter Moore, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Gordon Matta-Clark, the photographs of Alvin Baltrop memorialize New York City at a breaking-point moment amid ruin and chaos.
It has been a long tradition among philosophers and writers to praise uselessness as a means to stress the importance of spiritual activities and creations without clear functional aims. Aristotle, for one, established early on that knowledge was valuable in itself, not for providing practical utility—a notion frequently forgotten today. To praise inutility, thus, has been a reaction to the materialistic values promoted by capitalist society, which has been criticized for its lack of moral and spiritual values.
Widely regarded as a pioneer of video art, peter campus creates complex installations that engage and amuse, while leading the viewer in a journey of discovery and self-awareness. From the early closed-circuit video installations he began making in 1971 to the more recent work, campus’ entire oeuvre deals with processes of perception and vision, exploiting the specific characteristics of both the electronic and the digital image. His work provides a unique experience for the visitor, who activates the work while exploring their own image.
Widely recognized for his large scale paintings that incorporate silkscreens of blown up drawings, Eddie Martinez has built a consistent body of work over the last decade successfully merging the tradition of American abstract painting with the energy of the street. In this new body of work, created especially for this exhibition, Martinez introduces yet a new element to his process in the guise of whiting out parts of the composition, a move that represents a significant point in his career.
What happens when an artist disengages, psychically if not ideologically, from the margins? Can those in the mainstream responsibly acknowledge and harness their status toward progressive art in the US and elsewhere? These pressing questions inform the narrative structure of the installation Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace, an imagined meandering to and from Hong Kong (and possibly back in time) from where Christopher K. Ho emigrated at age four.
July 25, 2018 to November 4, 2018
Over the last fifty years, Cuban artist Manuel Mendive has developed a sophisticated and pointed examination of the influence of African oral-based traditions on Cuba through the experimental lens of contemporary art. His multidisciplinary work, in particular performances, has become a vehicle for exploring the intersections between art, religion, philosophy, politics, ethics, and anthropology. At the Bronx Museum, Mendive will present a new body of works focused on his continued visual interpretation of narratives of Yorùbá-Lucumí culture and wisdom literature, extending to the universal ideas and relationships between humans and nature.
July 18, 2018 to October 14, 2018
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is proud to present an exhibition of works by Diana Al-Hadid organized in collaboration with San José Museum of Art curator Lauren Schell Dickens. On view at the Bronx Museum from July 18 through October 14, 2018, the centerpiece of Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter will be the monumental sculpture Nolli’s Orders (2012), inspired by Giambattista Nolli’s landmark 1748 map of Rome, the first of its kind to show the public spaces of the city.
June 6, 2018 to September 23, 2018
Photojournalist Randy H. Goodman captured life in the Islamic Republic of Iran during both the hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War. She returned in 2015, after thirty-three years, to photograph at yet another pivotal time in US - Iran relations — the signing of the Iran nuclear agreement. Her portraits and street scenes of WOMEN ONLY, from both periods, present a unique perspective on that country’s past and its future.
May 16, 2018 to July 18, 2018
This exhibition in honor of the late Tim Rollins takes as its departure point the concept of dialog that was central to his vision as an artist and educator. Deeply influenced by the educational theories of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, Rollins used dialog to bring out the truth in each pupil, harmonizing different voices in their varied nuances. Working as a Public School teacher in the South Bronx starting in 1981, his educational approach was pivotal in infusing a sense of pride and belonging among students that often felt alienated from the mainstream. For Rollins, the idea of dialog was also an integral part of his art practice, and we might consider the whole of his collaboration with K.O.S. as a sustained dialog not only among members of the group, but most importantly, with great interlocutors of the past, like W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka to mention but a few.
May 2, 2018 to May 28, 2018
Organized by The Bronx Museum of the Arts Teen Council, The Mind’s Abstraction features artwork created by New York City-based teen artists. Young people were invited to submit artworks expressing their personal perspectives on mental health, though an open call. From the submissions, Teen Council selected the artworks on display in this gallery for their annual exhibition.
April 25, 2018 to July 1, 2018
Oded Halahmy: Exile is Home includes over 100 works representing Halahmy’s work from the mid-1960s to the present and features a selection of Judaica – handmade by the artist for Hanukkah and Sukkah celebrations with close friends. Halahmy currently lives and works in New York and Old Jaffa, Israel. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Oded Halahmy: Exile is Home is organized by guest curator: Margaret Mathews-Berenson, and made possible by the lead sponsorship of an anonymous patron and the additional support of the Bronx Museum’s Director’s Circle.
April 18, 2018 to September 16, 2018
Landing / Aterrizaje is solo show of Bronx artist Moses Ros’ sculptures on the Bronx Museum’s Sculpture Terrace. The work is inspired by recent migrations to the United States caused by environmental and manmade disasters and catastrophes that have wrenched people away from their homelands. In this series, Ros focuses on the Caribbean experience, creating large, freestanding sculptures based on a main staple and export of the islands, the platano (plantain banana). Using cut-out, plywood sheets to form a type of DIY “assembly kit” of the work, the large-scale, painted winged forms, along with the post-cut template panels that once held them are juxtaposed within the space.
November 8, 2017 to April 8, 2018.
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect includes over 100 artworks by the artist, rarely seen materials from his archive, and immersive film projections. On view beginning November 2017, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect is organized by Antonio Sergio Bessa, Bronx Museum Director of Curatorial and Education Programs; and Jessamyn Fiore, independent curator and co-director of the Matta-Clark Estate. Following the Bronx Museum presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France, the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia and the Rose Art Museum, in Waltham, Massachusetts.
November 8, 2017 to April 8, 2017
Inspired by the boundless humanism in Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Susannah Ray has developed a new series of photographs on the waterways of New York City. In his poem, Whitman calls out to the tides, the gulls, the ferry passengers, the light, the clouds, the ships, the sailors, the waves, the cities on the far shore. In his eyes, all humans are divine, their reflected faces anointed by “fine spokes of light” in the passing waters. At the Bronx Museum, Ray will present a selection of images captured specifically in the Bronx.
October 27, 2017 to April 29, 2018
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is proud to present an exhibition focusing on a series of new paintings by Angel Otero. On view at the Bronx Museum from October 25, 2017 through April 29, 2018, this exhibition will highlight Otero’s commitment to making paintings and sculptures that mine and celebrate key examples of the art of the past. Angel Otero: Elegies is organized by guest curator Christian Viveros-Fauné.
July 22, 2017 to October 22, 2017
Now in its fourth cycle, Bronx Calling: The Fourth AIM Biennial features the work of seventy-two emerging artists from the 2016 and 2017 classes of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program. AIM provides professional development resources to emerging artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area. The exhibition is organized by Aylet Ojeda Jequin, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; and the Bronx Museum’s Christine Licata, Director of Community and Public Programs; and, Heather Reyes, independent curator.
July 19 - October 22, 2017
Heidi Lau’s practice centers on the recreation of histories that have been lost to time. Colonial history, folk Taoist mythology and provincial superstitions provide essential source material through which her work explores homelessness and nostalgia. Painstakingly crafted and glazed by hand, her ceramic work is modeled after ritual objects, columns, funereal monuments, and fossilized creatures, while simultaneously deconstructing, and rebuilding these models into new hybrid forms.
February 17, 2017 to July 3, 2017
Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje is an exploration of contemporary Cuban art from the 1970s to the present that looks at how Cuban artists both on the island and abroad have grappled with issues of identity, community, and the urban experience. Bringing together over 60 works by more than 30 artists from the Bronx Museum collection and other U.S. institutions and private collections, the exhibition will feature many artworks that will be publicly exhibited for the first time.
March 1, 2017 to June 11, 2017
Love Thy Neighbor is the third and final part of The Neighbors, an exhibition series guest curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy for The Bronx Museum of the Arts. In this third iteration of the series, “the neighbor” is characterized as the figure of the “Other,” that is, an entity viewed as distinctly foreign from the community, but who ultimately plays a role in the group. By centering on the representation of cultural difference, Love Thy Neighbor is meant to be an occasion for considering alterity, for how diversity sensibly builds society. The exhibition features new work by visual artists Firelei Baez, Ignacio González-Lang, and Irvin Morazan, with the intent of exploring the cultural processes of “othering.”
March 1, 2017 to July 3, 2017
The seven-part painting Reflecting on the Familiar is Hauben’s attempt at capturing the sense of envelopment, enormity, and often, of the incomprehension that comes with living in the congested urban environment of The Bronx. Rather than depicting just a small portion of his expansive view, Hauben enlarges the scale to create a multi-faceted vision of the world around him.
March 1, 2017 to June 25, 2017
At the Bronx Museum’s Terrace, Arlene Slavin will present a group of sculptures from Intersections, a series that plays off the principle of the sundial. In these works, Slavin employs crisscrossed, translucent colored webs which remain stable, while the shadow created by the works is in perpetual change. In addition to the works on the Terrace, Slavin will also create a site-specific installation with colored films on the windows in the Museum’s Second Floor, producing a modern riff on stained glass.
June 7, 2017 to October 22, 2017
fifty five years
my life in blood and panels
and brown gay ink
Bronx-born Puerto Rican cartoonist and educator Ivan Velez exhibits a series of drawings related to comics, as well as his activist work spanning his thirty-year career.
Bronx-born photographer Clayton Frazier has balanced a career in special education and history with his work creating publicity and video presentations for companies such as CBS, Warner Brothers, Arista Records, the United Nations, in addition to his membership in the photographic and video unit of the New York District Attorney’s Office. For this exhibition, Frazier presents a series of photographs from his time in the music and television industry alongside documentary images from the island of Saint Dominique, known today as Haiti (as well as the Dominican Republic).
May 6, 2017 to November 2017
The Randall’s Island Park Alliance and the Bronx Museum of the Arts are pleased to present FLOW, an annual summer art exhibition located on Randall’s Island in New York City. FLOW is aimed at fostering appreciation of the history and ecology of the island through artistic expression. FLOW.17 will feature the Island of Empirical Data and Other Fabrications a series of site-specific installations conceived by Rose DeSiano, an alumna of the Bronx Museum's Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists.
In honor of Black History Month, the Bronx Museum is featuring four works by the Bronx-born photographer Morton Broffman.
This month the Bronx Museum highlights the work of Brazilian artist Öyvind Fahlström. Working in a wide range of media and themes, Fahlström avoided affiliation with any art category throughout his brief albeit productive career. Equally influenced by surrealism, pop art, situationism, and even documentary filmmaking, Fahlström borrowed imagery and styles from comics and the media to create original and relevant artworks that unmask the absurdities of modern society.
May 3, 2017 to May 29, 2017
Organized by The Bronx Museum of the Arts Teen Council, this exhibition features artworks by New York City-based teen artists responding to the notion of time.
Linda Cunningham explores the issues of time, transience, and contradictions through images of the shifting urban present. Environmental concerns juxtaposed against industry, urban blight, and the loss of the natural environment drive her practice, in addition to gentrification and the changing landscape of the Bronx, her home for many years.
As a participant of the 1980s generation of artists that came of out of the Instituto Superior de Art (ISA), in Havana, Quisqueya Henriquez was deeply influenced by the conceptual and experimental pedagogical model promoted by ISA at the time. With a career spanning over twenty years, Henriquez has carefully built a coherent body of work that sustains a critical dialogue with international currents while also sharply tuned to Caribbean contemporary life and culture. Henriquez’s first mid-career survey was organized by the Bronx Museum in 2007.
September 15, 2016 to February 19, 2017
Robert Raphael’s ceramic-based work draws on the complex history of decorative art, a tradition that intersects and runs parallel to the history of art. Rather than interpreting ornamentation as superficial, Raphael believes that the strength of decoration lies in its seductive nature and the complex meanings that often result when surface, mass, pattern, and cultural history conflate.
For the installation at The Bronx Museum of the Arts Raphael’s work focuses on classical ornamentation and its prevalence from historical time through to contemporary society.
July 13 to October 23, 2016
This summer The Bronx Museum of the Arts will present Art AIDS America, the first exhibition to examine the deep and ongoing influence of the AIDS crisis on American art and culture. The exhibition will feature more than 125 works in a wide range of media dating from 1981 to the present day, by artists including Félix González-Torres, Derek Jackson, Kia Labeija, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Martin Wong. The exhibition, on view from July 13 through October 23,2016, is organized by the Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
July 13 to October 23, 2016
In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited a series of drawings by French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman Georges Seurat. Frank Gimpaya was taken by the painter’s 1882 rendering of The Veil. He was inspired to create a photographic tableau of this drawing as a means of instruction for the photography classes he taught at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City, New Jersey.
July 13 to September 25, 2016
Caza: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, Alejandra Seeber is part of The Neighbors, a series of three small-scale, successive exhibitions of contemporary art organized by guest curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy for The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
What would it mean to tame art? And, what or whom would this taming of art serve? The group exhibition Caza—a word that in Spanish means “searching” or “hunting,” and is a homophone of “casa” (home)—is an attempt to respond to such questions, or an occasion to at least consider them.
On view at the Tampa Museum of Art.
Complicated Beauty, a survey exhibition of contemporary Cuban art from the 1970s to the present, will be the first of several Cuban art exhibitions at the Museum. Inspired by historic connections between Tampa and Havana, as well as the recent reopening of relations between the US and Cuba, Complicated Beauty will highlight several recent acquisitions to the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection, including Simply Beautiful by Mabel Poblet and Cada Sonido es una Forma del Tiempo (Every Sound is a Shape of Time) by Glenda León. Alongside these and other artworks from the Tampa collection, the exhibition will also include numerous loaned artworks from the collections of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and several private collections.
April 6 to May 30, 2016
Focusing initially on artists of African, Asian and Latin American descent, the Bronx Museum Permanent Collection was created in 1986 with the goal to reflect the borough's dynamic communities. Beyond The Veil focuses on an eclectic group of contemporary artists in the Permanent Collection whose works convey the complex mediation between the self and the other, between one’s allegiance to tradition and the appeal of globalism.
Spotlight: John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres
This exhibition highlights a group of sculptures by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres in the Bronx Museum Permanent Collection. Whether produced individually or in collaboration, this series of works convey both artists’ commitment to representing their local communities. John Ahearn moved from downtown Manhattan to the South Bronx in 1979 and began making his first casts of local residents at Fashion Moda, an alternative gallery that thrived in the South Bronx during the 1980s and early 1990s. It was during one of these live casting sessions that Rigoberto Torres met Ahearn. As it happened, Torres had already been introduced to casting and painting at his uncle’s statuary factory. At first, Torres volunteered as a model and later became Ahearn’s long-time collaborator. Over the span of a 30-year career, Ahearn and Torres have exhibited their work widely across the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
In addition to works previously collected by the Bronx Museum, the present exhibition also includes a suite of busts recently donated by Krasdale Foods, Inc. that were originally exhibited at their Community Gallery in the early 1980s. Transforming the everyday man, woman, and child into monumental works of art, these casts evidence the trust and respect that both Ahearn and Torres established with South Bronx residents.
March 2 to May 29, 2016
Since 2007 Michele Brody has been serving tea to the public through the interactive community-based project Reflections in Tea. The ritual performance of preparing loose-leaf tea within special paper filters is shared with individuals and groups. The participants’ conversations are then preserved by being transcribed onto the stained tea bags that have been dried and flattened, culminating in the creation of an ever-growing set of fluttering paper quilts. Through the experience of reading participants’ stories, Reflections in Tea reflects back to the public both a visual and visceral experience of their collective memories and experiences.
February 24 to May 8, 2016
Since the mid-1990s, Jill Baroff has been strongly influenced by Japanese architecture, which she categorizes as “floor-based,” as opposed to the West’s emphasis on verticality. During a six-month NEA fellowship in Japan, Baroff was captivated by the way light traveled across the weave of her tatami floor during the day; constantly changing the patterns of the mats and consequently affecting the shape and feel of the interior spaces she occupied. In 1997, for an exhibition in Germany, Baroff achieved the same kind of effect using corrugated paper. For the installation at the Bronx Museum Terrace, Baroff chose to work with tree trunks collected from a grove in Upstate New York.
February 3 to June 26, 2016
Widely recognized as one of the very few female pioneers of Land Art, artist Michelle Stuart is known for her nature-based art dating to the late 1960s and 1970s. Comparatively lesser-known are her remarkable photographic works, which constitute a crucial part of her oeuvre and have been her primary focus over the past several years.
Organized by guest curator Gregory Volk, the exhibition consists of twelve recent large-scale works—including a major wall piece created specifically for this exhibition—as well as two important pieces from the early 1980s that can be seen as precursors to Stuart’s later direction. This exhibition is the first museum treatment of Stuart’s photography-based works.
April 6 to June 26, 2016
The South Bronx Trades series, initiated in 2011 and still in progress, documents the active industries and manufacturing enterprises of Port Morris and Hunts Point, revealing to the viewer the unseen places and unheralded workers of the South Bronx. In contrast with the grim imagery often associated with the South Bronx, Fougeron’s photographs show us that industry persists and thrives in the borough.
April 6 to June 26, 2016
The works in Bronx Focus: Paintings by Valeri Larko serve as a record of the vibrant graffiti culture as displayed in structures throughout the borough now, and on the verge of extinction. Larko’s paintings remind viewers of a Bronx that coexists as both a city and nature reserve, capable of gritty and touching beauty, while also focusing on themes of memory, preservation, and expansion.
November 4, 2015 to March 13, 2016
Martin Wong: Human Instamatic will be the first museum retrospective of the work of Chinese-American painter Martin Wong (1946-1999) since his untimely death. The exhibition will offer the first in-depth assessment of Wong’s formal contributions as a painter, placing his work in line with such 20th-century painters as Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel, both renowned for their insightful portraits of the communities in which they lived. Co-curated by Sergio Bessa and Yasmin Ramírez, the exhibition will feature over 90 of Wong’s paintings with rarely-seen archival materials from the Martin Wong Papers at the Fales Library of New York University.
October 24, 2015 to January 17, 2016
The exhibition reflects on the legacy of constructivist art as reinterpreted by contemporary artists. Featuring works by Vito Acconci, Joseph Albers, Paul Chan, Marcelo Cidade, Glenn Goldberg, Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Jobim, Jarbas Lopes, Dennis Oppenheim, and Liliana Porter. In addition, a group of chairs by Mary Heilmann especially commissioned by the Whitney Museum suggests the connection between art and design.
October 15, 2015 to February 14, 2016
The Bangladeshi American Creative Collective (BACC) is proud to present Transitions: New Photography from Bangladesh. With the rise of factories, investors, and development, the landscape of Bangladesh is changing. This exhibition will feature nine Bangladeshi photographers whose work reflects a diverse group of people, shifting economies, and changing lands. Its aim is to not only to collect and exhibit photography as art; but also as ideas about the country of Bangladesh.
September 26, 2015 to February 14, 2016
Trees Are Alphabets considers how the sun, rain, wind, and soil constantly transform the shapes of trees since evolving in primeval forests. Artist E. J. McAdams sees in these transformations a vision of an epiphenomenon – like a text – that is forever changing. For the duration of the exhibition, McAdams will write with tree branches, in the hope to make space for a resonant poetic emanation to emerge out of this human-tree collaboration.
July 9 to September 20, 2015
Curated by Bronx-based artists Hatuey Ramos-Fermín and Laura Napier, Bronx Calling: The Third AIM Biennial features the work of seventy-two emerging artists engaged in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program (classes of 2014 and 2015). AIM provides professional development opportunities for emerging artists residing and working in the New York metropolitan area.
July 2 to October 18, 2015
Organized by guest curators Johanna Fernández and Yasmín Ramírez, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York was the first museum survey to examine the radical social group founded by Puerto Rican youth in New York and Chicago in the 1960s. The Young Lords’ impactful political activities, community-focused initiatives, and spirited affirmation of Puerto Rican identity inspired both a generation of artists active during this era and artists working today.
May 30 to November 2015
The Randall’s Island Park Alliance, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Made Event are pleased to present FLOW annual summer art exhibitions along the shoreline at Randall’s Island Park in New York City. FLOW is aimed at fostering appreciation of the shoreline through artistic expression, while calling visitors to interact with and care for the Park’s island environment. Each year, FLOW features site specific projects by participants in the Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists.
May 28 to June 14, 2015
An exhibition of teen artwork curated by The Bronx Museum Teen Council: "As millennials we grew up under the influence of video games; they taught us all about secrets and boundaries. They showed us that secrets make the game interesting, and we learned how to destroy and build boundaries in order to access those secrets. Secrets and boundaries are significant because they make us human. In a world without secrets and boundaries, we would be unable to distinguish between our inner and outer selves. This exhibition showcases artwork that explores these themes alongside works from the museum's permanent collection."
May 21 to July 12, 2015
The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (MNBA) have announced an unprecedented joint arts initiative that is the culmination of years of planning and collaboration. Wild Noise: Artwork from The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes represents the most extensive visual arts exchange between the two countries in more than 50 years, and will include major exhibitions at MNBA and the Bronx Museum; an artist exchange with U.S. artist Mary Mattingly and Cuban artist Humberto Diaz; a teen exchange program; a series of educational and public programs; and the publication of a dual-language publication that will extend the impact of Wild Noise beyond the audiences that participate directly in the initiative.
March 29 to June 14, 2015
The selection of works presented in Jaime Davidovich: Adventures of the Avant-Garde charts the artist’s transit through different iterations of the avant-garde; from an early exploration in the monochrome’s possibilities and spatial concerns that would also later inform his site-specific works of the late sixties and early seventies, to the video works of the of the same period up until the 1990s, which not only pioneered the use of television as a medium but also addressed themes such as identity, diaspora and globalization.
March 26 to June 21, 2015
Featuring three new works, the terrace installation Please Touch conveys artist Raul Mourão's awareness of the city, with its characters, architecture, objects and accidents. Displaced from their original sites and stripped of any function, mundane street elements are further altered in shape and scale by the artist. With its humorous nods to constructive and conceptual art, Please Touch entails active contemplation from the spectator, in that it extends familiar objects into the arena of the nonsensical.
March 19 to June 21, 2015
The recent announcement of a new re-engagement policy between the United States and Cuba has increased the level of expectation as to what the future of the island will be. While this new political openness will undoubtedly attract new markets and an influx of foreign investment, truly creative solutions for the local communities and their diverse culture will have to come from within. By featuring a selection of works from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection, the exhibition Cuba Libre! suggests that contemporary Cuban artists have already been engaged in this discussion, providing thoughtful materials for their audiences to ponder on their diversity and rich historical legacy.
February 26 to June 14, 2015
Three Photographers from the Bronx showcases work by three Bronx-born photographers who captured significant moments of societal and urban change in the borough and across the country during a period marked by important social, cultural and political transformations. The exhibition features over 80 works, from depictions of daily life in the Bronx and Far Rockaways in the early 1950s, to images of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, to a searing look at Bronx community protests in the early 1980s. Together these works create an exchange across three distinct and intertwined moments, exploring the legacy of community activism and urban change and launching a dialogue surrounding the challenges the Bronx and similar communities continue to face today.
Craft And Colony: from the Arachnae Series by Aristides Logothetis presents a new large sculpture by New York-based artist Aristides Logothetis created in 2014 that deals with issues related to the many ways visual signs are coded through culture, and then used as support of systems, constructs, and power hierarchies. Since the 1990’s Logothetis has produced a diverse body of work incorporating sculpture, painting, photography, collage, and installation that explore visual perception and its relationship to a reordered, very personal combination of formalism, narrative, process, and metaphor.
Bosco Sodi’s paintings and sculptures play with notions of experimentation and material spontaneity. In his latest installation, Sodi utilized the remains of sculptures damaged during Hurricane Sandy as a foundation to create new, durable artworks that could transcend the limits of time. The waterlogged remnants were clumped onto a circular base, creating a cluster of stalagmite shapes over a period of time, which were then cast in bronze. For Sodi, the physical process involved a balance of chance and minimal control, where the “goal is to find the accident that is achieved when many variables are involved.”
Suture is the culmination of Michael Joo’s ongoing research about Cameron’s Line, the geological rift that straddles from Manhattan and the Bronx, through Ridgefield, Connecticut, and ultimately into Vermont. As in Joo’s recent exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, the artworks on display at the Bronx Museum are site specific and conceived specifically for its lobby space. Joo is interested in alternative ways of looking at and depicting the land, using a vast array of photography and media techniques to match each location’s unique physiognomy.
Over the course of its forty-year history, the Bronx Museum has drawn together a significant collection of prints and graphic-art works, guided by its mission to give visibility to artists of African, Asian, and Latin American descent. For these artists, the print medium has been an invaluable tool for channeling their aesthetic and political concerns. Due to its mass reproducibility, economy, ease of distribution, and collaborative character, printmaking has long been considered a vehicle for social agency and has played a major role in politically mobilizing different communities and constituencies.
First shown in 1991 at MoMA PS1 as part of the exhibition And the Mind Grew Fingers, S- T- A- B- is an installation composed of welded rolled steel angle, steel plate and red vacuum formed letters that spell the word “stab” in fragments. S- T- A- B- can be seen as the diagram of a street fight, reflecting Oppenheim's goal to emulate the emotional, stuttered speech that occurs in extreme situations. The Bronx Museum's installation will present the entire work on its North Wing terrace.
The Bronx - Paris - Los Angeles - early 1990s - hip hop. This culture of music, dance, art and fashion is forever in its nascent and most authentic in Here I Am: Photographs by Lisa Leone. From Nas in the first studio recordings for what would become his iconic debut album Illmatic, to Snoop on the set of his first video, from ingénue Debi Mazar on the subway to Grandmaster Flash at a RockSteady reunion, Leone’s photographs open portals to the sounds, places and, most importantly, the people who forged and continue to influence the energy that is hip hop.
In 2011, Kremer was granted access to the construction site of One World Trade Center, where he photographed until 2013. Kremer’s Concrete Abstract series aims for an individual and universal response to the destruction and rebuilding of the World Trade Towers. In each piece, he edits, dissects, layers and arranges a multitude of images to build unique and evocative abstract compositions. In some of the work, he includes details from images of the public record directly following the attacks. In conjunction with his solo exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery, and the opening of the new building, The Bronx Museum of the Arts along with The Museum of the City of New York and The Brooklyn Academy of Music will show individual images from the series.
SuperPuesto is a temporary pavilion by Terence Gower commissioned by The Bronx Museum of the Arts in collaboration with the Andrew Freedman Home for Beyond the Supersquare, the first U.S. museum exhibition to examine the complicated legacies of modernist architecture in Latin America and the Caribbean through the perspectives of 30 contemporary artists. With the goal of providing an immersive space for visitors to experience the exhibition’s artistic and architectural themes, SuperPuesto also serves as an annex for educational and public programs related to Beyond the Supersquare.
Location: Andrew Freedman Home Garden, 1125 Grand Concourse between 166th and McClellan Streets, Bronx
Sarah Sze’s Triple Point (Planetarium), one of the works created for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, will be on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts from July 3 to August 24, 2014.
Sze’s work attempts to navigate and model the ceaseless proliferation of information and objects in contemporary life. Incorporating elements of painting, architecture, and installation within her sculpture, Sze investigates the value we place on objects and explores how objects ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit. Sze’s U.S. Pavilion was consistently cited as one of the standout national pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Drift is based on Joo’s meditation on Cameron’s Line, an ancient suture fault that traces the edge of the continental collision that initiated the formation of the Appalachian Mountains. The line is defined by a belt of marble that connects Inwood in Manhattan, Morrisania in the Bronx, the Sawmill River in Westchester County, and the Housatonic River Valley in Connecticut and Massachusetts, as well as the famous quarries of Vermont. Curated by Richard Klein and Alyson Baker.
Michael Joo: Drift is on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum from April 6 to September 21, 2014. The companion exhibition Drift (Bronx) will be on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts from June 20 through September 21, 2014.
Beyond the Supersquare explores the indelible influence of Latin American and Caribbean modernist architecture on contemporary art. The exhibition features over 30 artists and more than 60 artworks, including photography, video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, that respond to major Modernist architectural projects constructed in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1920s through the 1960s. Beyond the Supersquare examines the complicated legacies of modernism through architecture and thought—as embodied by the political, economic, environmental, and social challenges faced by countries throughout Latin America—through the unique perspective of artists working today.
Shyu Ruey-Shiann works with different materials and media to explore themes related to our environment. The installation One Kind of Behavior is inspired by the quasi-mechanical movements of creatures such as the hermit crabs. The artist sees in the random opening and closing of their shells on the beach, a stark contrast with contemporary society where things move at high speed. Additionally, the fact that hermit crabs occupy shells discarded by other species becomes another source of interest to the artist, who sees in this special relationship a metaphor for our human condition. Contrasting man and animal behavior, One Kind of Behavior asks us to consider the environmental consequences of our mechanical impulses on nature.
From Puerto Rico to the South Bronx, the casita, or “little house” in Spanish, is the social centerpiece and focal point of many community gardens. New York Restoration Project (NYRP), in partnership with the Urban Air Foundation, enlisted TEN Arquitectos and engineers at Buro Happold to rethink the traditional casita as a modular kit of parts. NYRP staff will work with members of the Willis Avenue Community Garden in Mott Haven, Bronx, to assemble the pilot structure in their garden in Spring 2014.
Bronx Lab: Performing the Library displays the outcome of a workshop, entitled "Performing the Library," held in the Summer of 2013 at the Università Iuav di Venezia (IUAV) as an intensive 3-weeks university-level studio whose aim was to design one or more "library" spaces. A video about the workshop’s activities and process accompanies boards illustrating the students’ projects, and study models that contain objects belonging to members of their own families, which were used to establish spatial relationships as conceptual stage-sets for future buildings.
The Randall’s Island Park Alliance, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Made Event are pleased to present FLOW annual summer art exhibitions along the shoreline at Randall’s Island Park in New York City. FLOW is aimed at fostering appreciation of the shoreline through artistic expression, while calling visitors to interact with and care for the Park’s island environment. Each year, FLOW features site specific projects by participants in the Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists.
The series of paintings Veterans conveys rarely told personal stories of American men and women from the U.S. Military. The paintings, interviews conducted by the artist, and the accompanying stories by Sophie Rand convey the pressing need for a civilian awareness of the realities and experiences of veterans from current and past generations. The ten paintings selected for this exhibition focus primarily on Bronx residents, including portraits of Leroy Archible and Carmen Rodriguez, who were instrumental in introducing Talbot to veterans in the Bronx.
Featuring works by: TSENG KWONG CHI, HUMA BHABHA, JAMEL SHABAZZ, LUIS GISPERT, AARON SISKIND, TEHCHING HSIEH, SARAH LUCAS, DAVID S. ALLEE.
A comprehensive survey of the works of American sculptor Tony Feher, this exhibition features key artworks that use everyday objects and found materials in a post-minimalist aesthetic, displaying the richness and complexity of Feher’s investigations. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph and reveals Feher's very personal vocabulary developed and refined over the past decades. Organized by Claudia Schmuckli, Director and Chief Curator of Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.
Born in Recife, Brazil, Paulo Bruscky began his career in the late 1960s, becoming involved with the international mail-art movement and participating in Fluxus exhibitions around the world. In the following decades, he experimented with new media and performance. Bruscky’s work reflects a continuous engagement with Recife and its culture, filtered and documented in the artist’s books, photographs, and other media. Organized by Antonio Sergio Bessa, Director of Programs at The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
The Bronx is considered one of the most diverse communities in America, as well as the home of Hip Hop and Salsa. For the families who have called this borough a home, Orchard Beach remains a treasured respite from the sweltering confines of the concrete jungle. Lawrence’s portraits of these summertime regulars celebrate the pride and dignity of those who frequent Orchard Beach.
State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 is a thorough investigation of seminal conceptual and related avant-garde activities in the late 1960s and early 70s and the critical interchange between artists living in the Golden State. The exhibition demonstrates the immense changes in artistic practice that coincided with the burgeoning number of art schools...
Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial features the work of seventy-three emerging artists engaged in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program (classes of 2012 and 2013). AIM provides professional development opportunities for emerging artists in the greater New York City area. The multi-site exhibition will be presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wave Hill, and 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Organized by Gabriel de Guzman, Elizabeth M. Grady, and Lia Zaaloff.
A year ago, Todd Heisler—a New York Times staff photographer, who’s twice won the Pulitzer Prize for photography—and Susan Hartman—a journalist, whose stories have been featured in The New York Times, Newsday, and The Christian Science Monitor—collaborated on a photo essay about an extraordinary prayer call, which unites members of the Ebenezer Assembly of God Church in the Bronx...
Does style define man? For centuries, style has been the focus of debate whether concerning writing, behavior or fashion. Around the late 1970s, the term “wild style” began to circulate among graffiti artists in the South Bronx to denote the kind of graphics involving complex, interlocking letters with aerodynamic forms. Coined by the legendary Tracy 168, the expression became associated with the rise of graffiti art in New York City, specifically in the Bronx, in the 1970s and that ultimately became a global movement. Started as an underground movement, the “wild style” is now part of the mainstream, studied as an art form and exhibited in museums all over the world. Bronx Lab—Style Wars features a number of works that reflect on that era to pose the question of what is today’s style.
Artists include Afrika Bambaataa, Henry Chalfant, Lady K Fever, Keith Haring, Dr. Lakra, Valerie Larko, Glendalys Medina, Johnny Perez, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Rigoberto Torres, Tats Cru
The MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with The Bronx Museum of the Arts presents the first United States museum survey of the work of Chilean-born video artist Juan Downey (1940–1993). Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect features a selection of key works by this under-recognized pioneer of video art. A fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual studies in 1973 and 1975, Downey played a significant role in the New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
Ranging thematically over several decades of the artist’s work, the exhibition includes early experiments with art and technology that mark a shift from object-based artistic practice to an experiential approach seeking to combine interactive performance with sculpture and video. Along with this foundational early work, the exhibition also features Downey’s video installations of the 1970s and 1980s. These combine an autobiographical approach with the style of anthropological documentary—one of his most important contributions to the medium. In Downey’s later work, the intellectual and historical myths of European culture, as well as the roots of Latin American identity, are explored in complex video work that utilizes associative visual metaphors, collage-like techniques, and non-linear narrative.
In his two major series of works, Video Trans Americas and The Thinking Eye, Downey subjects the canonical and historical narratives of Western art to rich technical, visual, and intertextual analysis. In Video Trans Americas, begun in 1971, Downey anticipates much of the current interest in urbanism, post-colonial theory, and locality in contemporary artistic practice by mixing anthropology with autobiography. The Thinking Eye, a series made for public television, subjects the foundational concepts of Western culture—including the idea of the self—to linguistic, psychoanalytic, art historical, and semiotic interpretation, all through Downey’s mastery of video technology.
Presented in collaboration with The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect is organized by Valerie Smith, Curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The exhibition will travel to the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ (September 24–December 31, 2011) and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York (February 12–May 20, 2012).
All images: Juan Downey Estate, Courtesy of Marilys B. Downey
smARTpowers, an initiative of the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by The Bronx Museum of the Arts, sends 15 U.S. artists abroad to work with local artists and young people around the world to create community-based art projects. Selected artists design and implement programs within a 45 day period in cooperation with local arts organizations in China, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kosovo, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Venezuela.
smARTpower artists are strongly encouraged to create a tangible legacy of the work, to remain in country, through a variety of visual arts media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video, installation, photo-based work, public art, and interdisciplinary projects. Projects emphasize participatory work and address a full range of relevant subjects including, but not limited to, women's empowerment, the environment, health, education, and civic engagement.
June 3 to September 5, 2016
New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas explores issues of identity, media, race, and popular culture through sculptures, photographs, and text-based works. He often appropriates recognizable imagery from advertisements and branding campaigns in order to question the ways in which commercial media distorts the ways in which audiences see themselves and each other.
June 16, 2016 - Ongoing
Bronx Terminal Market, in collaboration with The Bronx Museum of the Arts, will showcase a new community mural inspired by scenic outdoor locations in the Bronx.
May 14 to November 2016
FLOW.16 – this year’s sixth annual exhibition – will be open to the public from May-November, and will feature installations reflecting and encouraging interaction with Randall's Island Park’s history and environment. This event is created with support from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
