Leidy Churchman: Crocodile / Nil Yalter: Exile Is a Hard Job / Acting Out: Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection

For its summer 2019 season, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) will present three new exhibitions: Leidy Churchman: Crocodile, Nil Yalter: Exile Is a Hard Job, and Acting Out: Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

Leidy Churchman: Crocodile, the most extensive survey of work by Leidy Churchman (b. 1979, Villanova, PA), will illustrate the ideas and drive toward reinvention and experimentation at play in this emerging artist’s work. Ranging from figurative representation to gestural abstraction, and from monumental landscapes to more intimate portraits, Churchman’s works channel his preoccupations: his artistic and literary influences, friendships, moods, surrounding landscapes, and the visual iconography of divergent religions and philosophies. Including over 60 paintings, it will focus on Churchman’s recent work while situating his practice within a longer trajectory through the presentation of projects such as Snakes (2011), a performance on video, and the “hardbacks” (2010), a series of intricately painted book covers. Crocodile will also feature a newly commissioned large-scale floor painting by Churchman.

Crocodile will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Dancing Foxes Press and CCS Bard, featuring original essays by curators Ruba Katrib and Arnisa Zeqo, and critic Alex Kitnick, as well as a conversation between Leidy Churchman and Lauren Cornell.

Crocodile is curated by Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at CCS Bard.

Nil Yalter: Exile Is a Hard Job (organized by the Museum Ludwig, Cologne in cooperation with CCS Bard) will be the first solo US museum exhibition of work by Nil Yalter (b. 1938, Cairo), who has been a pioneer of socially engaged art since the 1970s. Born in Cairo, the artist grew up in Istanbul and has been living in Paris since 1965. Yalter’s work emerges from political situations such as daily life in a women’s prison and the living conditions of immigrant workers. Using a quasi-anthropological methodology, she reflects the lives of these individuals in a form that is both poetic and documentary. Exile Is a Hard Job charts a path from Yalter’s early abstract paintings through her socially engaged projects and groundbreaking experiments with video and performance. Many of the issues at the heart of her projects—displacement, discrimination, exploitation—define our present. Her pioneering work began to focus on these topics at an earlier moment and stands today as an historic example of art that creates connection across experiential and subjective difference.

Exile Is a Hard Job originated at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne as Yalter’s first major retrospective, opening March 8, 2019. At the Hessel Museum of Art, the exhibition will focus on her prolific period from the late ’60s to the early ’80s, and will include over 20 of her most significant projects from this time. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue edited by Rita Kersting, including essays by Lauren Cornell, Fabienne Dumont, and Övül Durmusoglu, as well as an interview with Nil Yalter. In German and English, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.

Exile Is a Hard Job is curated at the Museum Ludwig by Rita Kersting and at the Hessel Museum of Art by Lauren Cornell.

Acting Out: Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection takes its prompt from Leigh Ledare’s The Task, a single-channel film of a three-day Group Relations Conference—a social psychology method developed by London’s Tavistock Institute—that the artist organized in Chicago in 2017. In addition to directing the film crew, Ledare assembled the 28 participants and secured the collaboration of 10 psychologists trained in the method. During a sequence of small and large group meetings, the group studies its own self-made social structure—an abstract “task” that allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires, and the biases individuals import into the group, as well as conscious and unconscious group dynamics. Building upon this gripping portrait of current social dynamics and discontents, the exhibition includes works by artists in the Marieluise Hessel Collection at CCS Bard including Larry Clark, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, Lorraine O'Grady, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence; historical works that reverberate with themes raised by Ledare’s film and its participants. The exhibition also includes a selection of journals, diaries, and planners that the artist Lyle Ashton Harris kept from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s, displayed publicly for the first time.

Acting Out: Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection is co-curated by Tom Eccles, Executive Director of CCS Bard, and Leigh Ledare, with assistant curator Rachel Vera Steinberg.

Exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, the CCS Bard Arts Council, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends. Major support for Nil Yalter: Exile is a Hard Job provided by Lonti Ebers. Publication support for Leidy Churchman: Crocodile generously provided by Matthew Marks Gallery.

Exhibition summer hours are Thursday through Monday from 12pm to 6pm, Saturdays until 7pm. Guided tours of the exhibitions are available on July 20, 21, 27, and 28 at 4pm, no reservation required. All CCS Bard exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public. 

Free chartered bus available from New York City for the opening on June 22. For reservations and information call T 845 758 7598, or write ccs@bard.edu.

*Design: Linked by Air. Images: (1) Leidy Churchman, Untitled (Billboard of an Empty Bed), 2018. Collection of Milovan Farronato. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London / Piraeus. Photo: Lewis Ronalds. (2) Nil Yalter, Le Chevalier d’Éon (detail, still), 1978. Seven photographs, two paintings: acrylic on paper, two Polaroids, video. © Nil Yalter Photo: Nil Yalter. (3) Lyle Ashton Harris: Gail Burton and Peggy Nelson, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, late 1980s. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York. Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. (4) Leigh Ledare, The Task, 2017. Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.