From November 10, 2021, to March 20, 2022, the Bronx Museum will present Bronx Calling: The Fifth AIM Biennial showcasing the work of 68 early career artists from the 2018 and 2019 cycles of the Bronx Museum’s AIM Fellowship program. The fifth edition of Bronx Calling is co-organized by Ian Cofre (Director, PS 122 Gallery) and Eva Mayhabal Davis (Co-Director, Transmitter).
A long awaited, posthumous retrospective of artist Tina Girouard, a pioneer in performing art installations, dance, decorative art and video. Girouard played a catalytic role in the 1970s SoHo art scene in New York City, helping to found the experimental gallery 112 Greene Street and the artist-run restaurant Food.
As moving as it is complex, the multifaceted work of Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) restages a lost vision of Black selfhood and domesticity. His oeuvre has presented a formidable challenge to curators and scholars over the last thirty years for its unfinished tenor, a perception heightened by his untimely death due to AIDS-related causes at age 33. Although Ellis’ work was included in important contemporary surveys during his lifetime, including the 1989 exhibition Witnesses: Against Their Vanishing, organized by Nan Goldin, only now is it beginning to garner the attention it deserves. The exhibition Darrel Ellis: Regeneration offers the first comprehensive, scholarly survey of this pioneering artist, whose highly original merging of painting, printmaking, and photography anticipated current artistic interest in archive, appropriation, and personal narrative.
This large-scale survey exhibition will feature over 120 artworks and archival materials spanning four decades of the artists' careers drawn from the Bronx Museum’s Permanent Collection as well as from private collections. In addition, works in the artists' personal collections will be shown in public for the first time, together with rarely seen Polaroid photographs of the South Bronx residents portrayed in their sculptures. A catalog will feature a graphic novel about the people in the portraits, as well as amply illustrated essays by noted scholars. The interactive exhibition design will be created by Bronx-based architect Jorge Plazas (Sir David Adjaye's collaborator) and Darío Nuñez-Ameni (Bronx-born artist Vito Acconci's studio architect).
Abigail DeVille: Bronx Heavens examines the myths and realities of local, familial and ancestral histories and the convoluted notion of freedom in a country fraught with oppression and racism. In particular, The Bronx has served as a sanctuary for immigrant and migrant communities over the last 120 years, including for Abigail DeVille and several generations of her family who have lived in the area and were part of the Great Migration. With a humanizing lens, DeVille’s work utilizes found materials and detritus to unearth forgotten narratives of communities of color. When these communities seek to reach another realm in pursuit of happiness, what does freedom mean? DeVille describes freedom as “amorphous, shapeshifting, and elusive” as her work further explores issues of identity, culture, and class.
Celebrating the Bronx Museum’s 50th anniversary, this exhibition pays homage to the generosity of hundreds of supporters who have contributed to our Permanent Collection now encompassing 2,500 works of art in all media. The thematic layout of the exhibition will present new acquisitions, alongside seldom seen treasures with a strong emphasis on art that relates to the Bronx, the Latinx experience, the African diaspora, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These permanent holdings testify to the Bronx Museum’s ambition to provide enriching experiences, connections and engagement with great art for the benefit of our Bronx communities and beyond.
Starting at the young age of fifteen, Brooklyn born photographer Jamel Shabazz identified early on the core subject of his lifelong investigation: the men and women, young and old, who invest the streets of New York City with a high degree of theater and style, mixing traditions and cultures. Despite following a celebrated tradition of street photography that includes Gordon Parks, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, it is to his credit that Shabazz has been one of the first photographers to realize the joyous, infectious potential of youth culture in neighborhoods such as East New York, Cypress Hill, East Flatbush and Bed-Stuy. A formidable archive of New York’s diverse communities in the outer boroughs, this exhibition pays homage to Jamel Shabazz’s illustrious career of over forty years documenting the vibrant interaction of New Yorkers with their neighborhoods.
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is expanding outside with #SeeMeBronx, an interactive project about visibility, intersectionality, and identity. The project kicks off the Museum's 50th anniversary, which is focused on visibility as a tenet of social justice. As we take off into our next fifty years, we hope to reaffirm our mission as an admission-free, liberated space for communities to come to enjoy art and have important conversations. #SeeMeBronx was created as a way to spark conversations within our many intersecting communities about identity, equity, and inclusion. Sometimes the best way to dive into dialogue is by asking tough but important questions. We hope you will join us in shaping the conversation with your queries.
For over two decades, Biggers has been developing a singular body of work that is deeply informed by African American history and traditions, and sustains a rich dialog with contemporary art on a national and international level, referencing urban culture, the body, sacred geometry, and American symbolism. The title of the Bronx Museum exhibition, Codeswitch, refers to both the artists’ quilt series known as the Codex series and to the idea of code-switching itself, or shifting from one linguistic code to another depending on the social context. The Codex series includes mixed media paintings and sculptures done directly on or made from pre-1900 antique quilts.
While celebrating Parlá’s roots in the hip-hop energy of the Bronx, this series of paintings address the suffering caused by redlining policies, the waves of displacement imposed by gentrification, and structural racism. It’s Yours encourages viewers to question ownership in New York’s rapidly changing neighborhoods. In addition to large-scale paintings in the museum’s gallery, the exhibition features Parlá’s sketchbooks and drawings from age ten to seventeen as well as site specific responses in the lobby and outdoors that seek to integrate the museum with the city.
This online exhibit presents art created and curated in the 2020 Teen Summer program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in July-August 2020. Throughout the four weeks of this paid intensive program, two cohorts of 12 teens discussed art, the role of museums in New York City, and their experiences during the coronavirus pandemic, and participated in virtual studio sessions during which these pieces were created.
The exhibition is organized in four sections:
Alicia Grullón’s new series of photographs, March to June: At Home with Essential Workers, continues her exploration of the self-portrait as a participatory process. Through her work, she documents her experience as a woman of color as well as a member of a community at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.
This online exhibit was curated by the 2019-20 Teen Council cohort at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in May 2020. REVERSE REVERSE: BRING IT BACK, BRING IT BACK invited teen artists throughout New York City to submit work reflecting their experiences, memories of, and nostalgia for the last two decades.
The exhibit is organized in four sections:
