Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials

Working across video, painting, and performance, Cheryl Donegan (b. 1962) explores the production and consumption of images in mass culture, middlebrow design, and art history. In her performance and video work spanning from the early ’90s to the early ’00s, Donegan often used her body as an apparatus for mark-making, parodying conventions of commercials and music videos while considering the politics of self-representation. Over the last decade, she has continued her exploration of the mediated image and her interests in surface, compressed space, and the mark’s indexical relation to the body in paintings and sculptures produced in her studio and in videos distributed on social media.

Donegan’s New Museum residency and exhibition, presented as part of the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY, tackle the ways and means by which our connections to the past are produced, fabricated, and renewed, particularly in fashion and art history. Scenes + Commercials comprises works from throughout Donegan’s career, bringing together key projects with others that represent new, though related, directions in her practice. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the Resource Center will feature a major new installation by Donegan, titled Concept Store, that displays garments, textiles, objects, videos, and works on paper she has created, alongside elements she has sourced from websites such as eBay and Vine. In these and other works, the artist engages in a process she calls “refashioning the readymade” by alluding to longer histories of repurposing in both art and culture.

The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, with Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator. The Concept Store installation is curated by Burton, with O’Keeffe and Alicia Ritson, Research Fellow.

Donegan’s residency includes a rich series of public programs that examine the exhibition’s themes of surface, compressed space, commercial desire, and self-representation.

Public programs

Panel: Fold, Screen, Skin: Contemporary Space in Contemporary Art
Saturday, January 23, 3pm
On negative space: “Something you can slip through. Slipping through the blank spaces between things. It’s that sense of drifting in space, again. Going places with kids—I think of going to the Flushing Mall in Queens with the kids, just to kill an afternoon, and being so surprised and fascinated by it, wandering through these back stairways with oddly juxtaposed materials and jerry-rigged spaces.” (Cheryl Donegan)*

Exploring slippages between tactile and virtual worlds, in this panel, artists and curators Howie Chen, Matt Connors, Jess Fuller, Josh Kline, and Andrew Ross will examine the compression of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surfaces of the screen and the canvas.

Panel: Refashioning the Readymade
Thursday, February 11, 7pm
On recombination: “Altering things is really, really pleasurable. And it’s a way of taking a risk. To change something, you risk something, you interact with it; changing a thing makes it more a part of you.”*

For this event, a panel of artists, designers, and writers, including Eric Mack, Mary Ping, and Emily Spivack, among others, will consider how online shopping, social media, performance, and legacies of craft have allowed them to push the boundaries between art and fashion in their recent work.

Screening and panel: Marjorie Keller’s Daughters of Chaos
Friday, March 11, 7pm
On Marjorie Keller: “Watching her films was like meeting a relative you never knew you had. There was this gravitational pull for me that I felt immediately. We have such a similarity in subject matter, and then also our editing style—she’s this sort of domestic avant-garde. It reminded me of early Chantal Akerman. She’s dealing with domesticity; Keller is bringing out every single one of those psychological elements, but she’s also got this avant-garde aesthetic. Most of the women who were doing aesthetically advanced work were just not picking baby showers as subject matter.”*

This screening of Marjorie Keller’s film Daughters of Chaos (1980) will be followed by a panel discussion on her legacy and unusual trajectory as an artist. Panelists will include artists Robert Buck, Alika Cooper, Cheryl Donegan, and Daphne Fitzpatrick, and film scholar P. Adams Sitney.

“EXTRA LAYER” fashion show, produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me
Thursday, April 7, 7pm
On pleasure: “Getting it where you need it, you know, finding it where you want it. I’m not down with the kind of pleasure that’s endorsed or enforced. Pleasure that you go out and get. And it gets you.”*

Cheryl Donegan will premiere “EXTRA LAYER,” a collection of outerwear commissioned by the New Museum and produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me, during this event.

*Cheryl Donegan from an interview by Johanna Burton, Sara O’Keeffe, and Alicia Ritson, December 18, 2015.

Support for Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials

About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.