Summer 2023 exhibitions

The New Museum presents four solo exhibitions opening on June 29, 2023. Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente brings together the artist’s large-scale, multimedia installations and sculptures created from the 1990s to today exploring issues of identity, race, gender, and social justice (Second Floor); Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance features new and recent work across film, sculpture, and installation alongside archival materials questioning established historical narratives in Vietnam and other formerly colonized countries (Third Floor); Mire Lee: Black Sun comprises a site-specific installation of new animatronic sculptures fusing the technological with the corporeal (Fourth Floor); and Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot reimagines the biblical story of Eve and Lilith through a newly commissioned painting and a sculpture created from the artist’s own body (Lobby Gallery). The summer 2023 exhibition program furthers the New Museum’s commitment to advancing critical dialogue about new art and new ideas through experimental commissions and benchmark exhibitions.

Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente
My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente is the most comprehensive exhibition to date by Pepón Osorio (b. 1955, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Philadelphia), featuring selected works from the 1990s to today. Known for his provocative, sweeping, multimedia installations, Osorio creates fantastical scenes inspired by everyday environments—from home interiors to barbershops to classrooms—that advance critical discussions on topics such as identity, race, gender, and social justice. Informed by his background in theater and performance as well as his experiences as a child services case worker and professor, Osorio’s richly textured sculptures and installations are deeply invested in political, social, and cultural issues affecting Latinx and working class communities in the United States. Installed on the New Museum’s Second Floor, this exhibition focuses on the elaborate environments that Osorio has been creating since the early 1990s, often developed through long-term collaborations with the individuals in the neighborhoods where they were first shown. My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente also premieres a new work, Convalescence (2023), which focuses on the difficulties of navigating the US healthcare system and the multiplicity of pathways toward healing.

Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente is curated by Margot Norton, Chief Curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and former Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum, and Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance
Developing projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving the factual and the speculative and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen re-works dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war, and displacement.

Nguyen’s New Museum presentation is the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition, following presentations at the Berlin Biennale, Dakar Biennale, Aichi Triennale, Manifesta 14 (all 2022) and the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, among others. Installed in the New Museum’s Third Floor galleries, Radiant Remembrance showcases a new film, Because No One Living Will Listen (2023), and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), alongside works from Nguyen’s broader practice. Drawing together conceptual threads from across the Global South via the interconnected histories of Vietnam, Senegal, Morocco, France, and the US, Radiant Remembrance envisions inherited memory and testimony as forms of resistance and empowerment.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator, with Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant.

Mire Lee: Black Sun
The New Museum presents the first US solo museum exhibition of the work of Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works between Seoul and Amsterdam, Netherlands). Installed in the New Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition debuts a site-specific installation featuring a variety of new sculptures. Composed of materials including low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerin, silicone, clay slip, and oil, Lee’s animatronic sculptures operate both like living organisms and biological machines. Drawing references from architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics, and evoking bodily functions and environmental decay, Lee offers an intuitive means to describe properties that exist between the realms of the technological and the corporeal: tenderness, desire, abjection, anxiety, and revulsion, among other states.

Titled after the Bulgarian-French feminist and semiotician Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun—a study of depression and melancholia—Lee’s installation debuts a body of kinetic sculptures housed in an architectural environment specially designed for the New Museum. Led by concerns of space, atmosphere, and materials, including fabric, steel, and clay, the tactile qualities of Lee’s newest work suggest emotional voids and psychological tensions.

This exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant.

Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot
For their first solo museum exhibition in the US, Wynnie Mynerva presents a site-specific installation created for the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. Through a gallery-spanning painting—the largest ever exhibited at the New Museum—alongside a sculptural element created from the artist’s own rib, Mynerva reimagines the Biblical origin story of Eve to envision gender-expansive futures.

Born in 1992 in Villa El Salvador on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, Mynerva grew up in an environment with  a strong history of activism, and where violence based on gender, sexuality, race, and social class was extremely prevalent. Responding to their most profound traumas and desires, Mynerva creates cathartic visions of revenge and emancipation—representations of a world in which sexual dissidence is praised as powerful political action. Their large-scale, colorful paintings depict bodies that hover on the edge of abstraction, refusing to be categorized, consumed, or controlled, and their radical performances and body modifications posit sexual transgression as a path to social transformation. Foregrounding the need to reexamine longstanding narratives, their New Museum exhibition Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot offers a joyful rejection of patriarchy and gender binarism.

Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.