APRIL GORNIK

Her work ‘Weighing the Ocean (2018)’ on view in the exhibition exemplifies her charcoal drawing works which often excavate the power, force and tempestuousness of the sea.

April Gornik is an American painter whose atmospheric landscape paintings focus heavily on cloud formations over bodies of water. “Now I make my landscapes so that I can be in them,” the artist remarked. “That’s why I alter them [landscapes], that’s why I make them somewhat artificial, because I want to take possession of them.” Born on 1953 in Cleveland, OH, she studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, receiving her BFA there in 1976. Strongly referencing American Luminists like John Fredrick Kensett, the artist's work has gained significant attention and critical acclaim since her first solo exhibition. Gornik lives and works in Long Island, NY with her husband, the painter Eric Fischl. Her works are presently held in the collections of institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C, among others.

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

Tiravanija is often recognized for his role in “relational aesthetics,” a movement in art in which social interaction is key and the artist is a catalyst for social exchanges.

In addition to his performances, the artist has created wall drawings, sculptures, installations, and text-based works that often relate to his social initiatives. ‘Untitled 2009 (No Fire No Ashes)’, on view from the Collection of Craig Robins, is indicative of Tiravanija’s text-based paintings. The bold words are evocative and the artist has said that these text works might be viewed as slogans or ‘road signs’. Like a drive-by where small snippets of information might enter one’s consciousness. The phrase remembered is out of context and the scale of the work insists upon a embodied interaction with the phrase as poetry or an information. One must use their own experience to understand and assign significance to what is being read— whether we are reminded of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, recognize a warning for the end of times or a repudiation of destruction, or perhaps see a simple statement about the nature of fire and its alchemy.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s diverse artistic production eludes classification. He has accurately described it as “relational”: a body of work focused on real-time experience and exchange that breaks down the barriers between the object and the spectator while questioning the art object as fetish, and the sacredness of the gallery and museum display. Tiravanija is an Argentina born Thai artist who lives between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai, and his work carries strains of this nomadic existence, blending and re-combining different cultural contexts. Rather than insisting on a particular reality or truth, his work creates open-ended contexts for people to grapple with these questions themselves. The strength of Tiravanija’s work lies precisely in its ephemerality and the slippery ways it escapes definition; he takes the material of the every-day and re-stages it, allowing the viewer a perspective at once banal and deeply profound about the quickly fleeting nature of life itself. Tiravanija’s central focus has remained on exploring human interactions and bringing people together to share. In addition to cooking, the artist has constructed environments within the museum setting where guests can read or listen to music. He blurs the distance between the artwork and the viewer. His exploration of the communal role of art and everyday actions as art recalls Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture (art’s potential to transform society through human activity with language, thought, action, and objects).

TORKWASE DYSON

On view in the exhibition is ‘2000 Black’, ‘2000 Black #5 (Liquid a Place)’. Dyson’s unique curvilinear and rectangular hyper shapes, which can be found in her work across mediums, speak to infrastructures of liberation and resistance. She builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes, building surface, and configuring minimal geometric elements that lend a productive tension between image and object. The paint-handling producing various visual qualities using brushwork and other tools is made poetic by a juxtaposition of delicate marks and scored diagrammatic lines. This compositional rigor imbues the works with an architectural presence and optical gravity.

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies.​ Dyson’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Drawing Center, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Dyson’s recent work explores the idea that we as bodies are often the only water in the room, we navigate space and it imposes upon us as beings composed mostly of water. Simultaneously, Dyson understands water as a geography with an indelible tie to architecture and infrastructure. Growing up in Southeast Chicago, living in Mississippi, and studying the intractable damage of extraction have inspired Dyson to explore different water ecosystems by diving in the global south. The artist’s diving practice is in conversation with her research surrounding relationships between environmental liberation, structural violence, and the bodies of water that make up most of the planet. Her art, which often examines the meanings of poetic movement asserting humanity, is deeply informed by these ideas and practices. Through her dispersals of abstract forms, Dyson invites viewers into spatial and perceptual practices that affirm improvisation, indeterminacy, and migration.

PAULO NIMER PJOTA

On view is ‘Terror (2021)’, a large-scale work that employs the common tropes of terror, bats, pumpkins with grotesquely carved faces that seem to come to life, and strange resin claws that imply some unknown monstruous creature—these are symbols associated with the fall season, with the darkness of night, the day of the dead, the thinning of the veil between the living and the spirit realm.

Paulo Nimer Pjota (São José do Rio Preto, 1988) lives and works in São Paulo. The starting point of Paulo Nimer Pjota’s works is the nature of collectively originated phenomena. He works with historic symbolism and imagery alongside pop iconography from contemporary culture. His works approximate a kind of visual collage, working with raw canvas, metal sheets, ceramic, and resin objects, we might consider the practice a kind of polyphonic dialogue. Pjota has said the work often reveals itself to him in the process of making. There is communion with ancient history in these pieces alongside deep reverence for the symbols of our time and the vernacular of our streets and our cities. The artist usually employs, large unstretched canvas’ and metal or iron sheets that incorporate detailed renderings of plants, vases, isolated words, cartoon and historical characters that ultimately form a master composition or constellation. Imbedded in this dialogue of images and objects emerges a larger commitment to storytelling about who we are and where we come from. Inspired by the traditional way that houses were painted where he grew up, the artist uses tempera to give pigment to his canvases with a clear deference for the creativity and cultural landscape of our everyday lives. Many of the works employ masks, gorgons, squash and pumpkins, and a multiplicity of vessels for carrying water or spirits, that the artist draws from pre-Columbian, African, and classical Greek art history. The archaeological artifacts are juxtaposed with cartoons, superheroes, graffiti tags, spills and stains and all manner of artifacts collected from our contemporary life. 

MAYA LIN

From this body of work, ‘The Deglaciation of the Laurentide (2018)’ will be on view. The melting of the Laurentide Ice Shell, which once covered much of the North American continent, is responsible for many of the contemporary bodies of water from the Artic to the Great Lakes. The seeming abstraction charts the melting and change in the Laurentide ice shelf in a shimmering reflective aluminum reminiscent of ice itself. For Lin, the idea of experience, movement, and nature are integral to her work, heightening spatial perception and environmental awareness. Her approach to artmaking often finds its origins in science rather than art, demonstrated in her application of satellite technology and cartographic

Extending on her investigations of land use and natural bodies of water, Lin created the site-specific work ‘A River Is a Drawing’ organized with The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York in 2018. In 2019, Lin’s exhibition ‘Flow’, organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum, expanded the site-specificity of her water works to Western Michigan, including ‘The Traces Left Behind (From the Great Bear Lake to the Great Lakes) (2019)’, a sprawling relief made of recycled silver.

Maya Lin critically engages with notions of site and place, exploring the development of systems to reflect on the environment, creating objects that invite contemplation—intellectual, sensorial, and physical—of the natural world. Lin’s creative inclinations were encouraged from a young age, and she spent much of her childhood in her father’s ceramics studio. She went on to study architecture and sculpture at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1981. She was trained as an artist and architect, and her sculptures, parks, monuments, and architectural projects are linked by her ideal of making a place for individuals within the landscape. She draws inspiration for her sculpture and architecture from culturally diverse sources, including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, and works by American earthworks artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Lin was thrust into the spotlight after winning a nationwide design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1982). Perhaps her most recognizable work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial allows the names of those lost in combat to speak for themselves, connecting a tragedy that happened on foreign soil with the soil of America’s capital city, where it stands. Lin’s longstanding environmental advocacy and her fascination with maps led her to begin exploring water as a precious resource in 2007, charting birds-eye views of major bodies of water such as the Hudson, Thames, and Yangtze rivers. These wall works, drawings, and large-scale sculptures have been produced using materials including recycled silver, glass marbles, and custom-made stainless-steel pins. Through her extensive historical and ecological research, Lin’s investigations of bodies of water led her to create the multi-sited and expansive project ‘What Is Missing? (2009)’, her final—albeit ongoing—memorial, which serves to raise awareness of environmental degradation and the biodiversity crisis.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

In ‘Places of Power, Waterfall’, we see the figure of the artist—she is famously present—this time poised almost like a Christ-figure her arms spread out while she stands beneath the rushing power of a waterfall. Framed by the whitewater and dressed all in white, the figure maintains a solemn countenance while her body seems to act as conduit for the energetic force of nature that engulfs her.

Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works. Her work has also been included in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992).  She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale or her video installation and performance ‘Balkan Baroque (1997)’, in which she hand-washed 1,500 cattle bones. Between 1976 and 1988, Abramović collaborated with German photographer and performance artist Ulay. She was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ‘The Artist is Present’, in which visitors sat across from Abramović in silent communion.

Abramović founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.

WANGECHI MUTU

On view in the exhibition are three works from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody

‘Underground Hornship (2018); ‘Mwotaji (The Dreamer) (2016)’ and ‘Howl (2006)’. These works exemplify her artistic practice centered around issues of ritual, race, consumerism, and the politics of identity. East African mythology, Afro-surrealist elements of science fiction and fantasy, critiques of African and female stereotypes, and universal notions of power, race, and colonialism are all present in her work. Among Mutu’s best-known works are her magazine-based collages, begun in 2002 and continuing today, depicting grotesquely beautiful hybrids of female figures and animal parts with distorted lips, eyes, and heads, such as ‘Howl’ which appears to be a shrieking bird-like feminine fantasy gorgon creature—a site of both desire and disgust.

‘Underground Hornship’ approximates an antler shed, the patina black with the tips of the horns in bronze. And finally, ‘Mwotaji (The Dreamer)’, a bronze female head with knots in her hair, that that lies resting peacefully on a Carrera marble support, reclaims the appropriated African masks that influenced a generation of modernist sculptors (most notably perhaps in direct reference to Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse). There is something of violence inherent in this decapitation, the head without its rightful body; but the features are calm, restful – and most importantly dreaming of futures perhaps not yet imagined.

Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work which engages issues of gender, race, art history, and personal identity. Creating complex collages, sculptures, and performances that draw from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of storytelling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage. The almost science fiction-like nature of her imagery has placed her work within the realm of Afrofuturism, and her practice is often discussed as providing an alternate course of history for people of African descent. Born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996, and subsequently her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000. In 2019, her exhibition The New Ones, will free Us, was featured as the inaugural Facade Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consisted of four bronze sculptures. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

MYRLANDE CONSTANT

The work on view in the exhibition is ‘Baron Cimitière’. In the Haitian pantheon of gods, the Gede are spirits of the dead or the underworld—often Papa Gede or Baron Samedi are understood to be the principal gods of death or the underworld. Baron Cimitière is another manifestation who is considered the guardian of the cemetery and protector of graves—he maintains the realm of the dead by keeping the living out and prevents the dead from venturing back towards the living. Like other manifestations of the Gede, he wears a tuxedo and top hat and often is seen smoking cigars. Constant shows him here as a light-skinned undertaker, lassoing a woman—the noose around her neck presumably leading her back towards the cemetery. Two other figures are oblivious to this action, on kneels by a gravestone praying to the ancestors. Another appears to have just left offerings of fruit to the ancestors and is poised to exit the scene. The entire border of the flag is adorned with candles, cups, and bottles—presumably ofo both water and alcohol and other treats—offerings to the gods.

Through her artistic innovations with drapo Vodou, the Vodou flag, Myrlande Constant (b. Port-au-Prince, Haiti) bridges spiritual and sacred ritual with contemporary creation. In traditional ceremony, a flag would be unfurled to signal the start of the ritual, the opening towards the spirit and ancestral realm, an invitation to the lwa being honored in the ceremony, as well as a signal to the participants that this was now the beginning of a sacred and spiritual moment and place. Constant has worked within the mostly male community of vodou flag-makers since the early ‘90s when she made a radical shift in the tradition by using glass beads instead of sequins. After three decades dedicated to the medium, Constant’s method and style has influenced every drapo Vodou artist working today. While drapo are created for us in Haitian voduo ceremonies, Constant’s flags are not only utilitarian --- but they are also too large in size for their usual application in ritual. Her energized, and crowded compositions merge contemporary culture with Haitian history and Vodou religion: Haitian lwas (gods or deities) are often shown alongside Christian saints (which are integral to the syncretized Vodou belief system). In most of her flags, Constant depicts the lwas and members of her community engaged in various activities both mundane and sacred.

ASTRID TERRAZAS

The exhibition features ‘La Fuente (para Sydney) (2022)’, a ceramic and tile fountain representative of the way individuals can build and become fountains of giving while still being replenished. The artist’s firsthand experience of how the Rio Grande River was used as a divider when it could have been a connector informs this work—ultimately Terrazas sees the fountain as a self-portrait that functions as a symbol of how we can redirect the power of water and harness it for the many.

Taking the form of painting, illustrated ceramic vessels, and mixed media sculpture, Mexican American artist Astrid Terrazas’ (b.1996) symbolic work re-writes worlds. Her visual language merges dreamscapes, Mexican ancestral folklore, lived experiences, and unearthly transfigurations in her own personal range of recurring motifs that function as artifacts of protection and evoke universal metaphors of transformation. Working in an illustrative, highly detailed style and often adorning her canvases with talismans, charms, and threadwork, Terrazas’ multimedia paintings resemble a visual dream diary full of transient figures, archaic symbols, and illogical narratives. Terrazas describes painting as “a process of finding and burying”, using her coded visual lexicon to deepen the emotional and psychological experience. For Terrazas, painting is akin to incanting: a process of casting spells and weaving new healing narratives to transmute histories.