Solo exhibitions by Mika Rottenberg, Marta Minujín, and Lubaina Himid will fill the New Museum’s three main floors, along with the first New York museum exhibition by Diedrick Brackens in the Lobby Gallery; the Museum’s fourth annual Summer Art and Social Justice residency and exhibition by artists-in-residence Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith; and an installation by Sydney Shen in the Museum’s Storefront Window.
Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces
June 26–September 15, 2019
Second Floor
The first New York solo museum exhibition by New York–based artist Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) will premiere a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), alongside several recent video installations and kinetic sculptures. Employing absurdist satire to address critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings, manufacturing goods ranging from cultured pearls (NoNoseKnows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017). Together, the works in the exhibition trace central themes in Rottenberg’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the increasingly interconnected relationship between the mechanical and the corporeal.
This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.
Marta Minujín: Menesunda Reloaded
June 26–September 29, 2019
Third Floor
This exhibition by the epoch-defining Argentinian artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943, Buenos Aires, Argentina) presents the US debut of her most renowned work, La Menesunda. Over the past 60 years, Minujín has developed happenings, performances, installations, and video works that have greatly influenced generations of contemporary artists in Latin America and beyond. In 1965, Minujín and Rubén Santantonín devised the now-legendary environment La Menesunda. This intricate labyrinth of eleven distinct spaces sought to provoke visitors and spur them into action, offering new modes of encounter with consumer culture, mass media, and urban life. The New Museum’s presentation of the work will mark its second recreation, and its first-ever presentation in the US.
This exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator.
Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath
June 26–October 6, 2019
Fourth Floor
This exhibition marks the first solo museum presentation in the US by Turner Prize–winning British artist Lubaina Himid (b. 1954, Zanzibar, Tanzania) and debuts an entirely new body of work. A pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement, Himid has long championed marginalized histories. Working in drawing, painting, sculpture, and textile for over 30 years, Himid critiques the consequences of colonialism and questions the invisibility of people of color in art and media. The exhibition’s title borrows from the dictums of health and safety manuals but doubles as a subversive proclamation, and the works on view will examine how language and architecture inform a sense of danger, safety, fragility, and instability. The exhibition will premiere a new sculptural installation along with nine paintings on metal and a sound work by Magda Stawarska-Beavan, created in collaboration with Himid.
This exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator
Diedrick Brackens: darling divined
June 4–September 8, 2019
Lobby Gallery
For his first institutional solo exhibition in New York, Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX) presents a new installation of hand-woven textiles. Brackens’s weavings speak to the complexities of black and queer identity in the United States. Interlacing diverse traditions, including West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American south, Brackens creates cosmographic abstractions and figurative narratives that merge lived experience, commemoration, and allegory. He uses both commercial dyes and unconventional colorants such as wine, tea, and bleach, and foregrounds the loaded symbolism of materials like cotton, with its links to the transatlantic slave trade.
This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Curator, and Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant.
Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, Sable Elyse Smith: Mirror/Echo/Tilt
June 18–October 6, 2019
Fifth Floor
For the New Museum’s fourth annual Summer Art and Social Justice residency and exhibition, artists Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith have created Mirror/Echo/Tilt, a performance and pedagogical project that examines the language and gestures used to describe experiences of arrest and incarceration. Culminating a four-year artistic collaboration, the exhibition premieres a multichannel video installation that depicts performances developed with participants in intensive workshops and filmed in decommissioned prisons, empty courthouses, and other psychically charged spaces. The project also takes the form of a living curriculum practiced with court-involved youth, formerly incarcerated adults, and individuals otherwise vulnerable to the justice system. The exhibition features private workshops for community partners, public forums and readings, and a resource room with visions for justice facilitated by the New Museum Teen Apprentice Program, a summer youth employment program.
This exhibition is curated by Emily Mello, Associate Director of Education, and Sara O’Keeffe, Associate Curator.
Sydney Shen: Onion Master
April 30–September 1, 2019
Storefront Window
Sydney Shen (b. 1989, Woodbridge, NJ) creates sculptures and installations that evoke a sense of abject dread, informed by a range of historical and contemporary sources—including Peking opera, supernatural horror fiction, and the darkest recesses of the web. “Onion Master” reimagines an arcade claw machine with a bizarre prize: artificial onions. The lowly vegetable emits tear-inducing gas when sliced, to tragicomic effect. Combining the spirit of an amusement park with morbid cues from funeral parlors, the installation highlights the macabre within carnivalesque and Gothic imagery. The claw machine is at once enticing and deceptively simple; it is designed to give the impression that a player may be able to claim the prize, yet there is no way to play and no prize to collect.
This project is curated by Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant.
