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.

Organized by The Bronx Museum of the Arts Teen Council, Smells Like Teen Spirit features artwork created by New York City-based teen artists. Through an open call, young people were invited to submit artworks reflecting upon the experience of being a teenager today. From the submissions, Teen Council selected the artworks for their annual exhibition. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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). 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.