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Riley Hooker: Body, Language
July 6, 2024–January 31, 2025
Kiyan Williams: Vertigo
July 6, 2024–October 31, 2026
Nathan Young: Tune It Or Die!
July 6–September 3, 2024
Germane Barnes: Identity Column
July 6, 2024–October 31, 2026
Beom Jun Kim: Other Places
July 6, 2024–October 31, 2026
Jimenez Lai: Outcasts from the Underground
July 6, 2024–October 31, 2026
Art Omi announces six new exhibitions opening on July 6, 2024.
The Summer Season Opening Party features a noise performance by Nathan Young and barbeque with Kiyan Williams featuring special guests Nile Harris, DonChristian Jones, ms. z tye, and sound design by Kumi James.
Art exhibitions
Riley Hooker: Body, Language
Body, Language is the first New York solo exhibition of Riley Hooker (American, b. 1982). It will feature an installation of interconnected inflatable structures for sitting titled SIT(UATION), commissioned sculptures, printed matter, and vinyl “footnotes” at the scale of the building installed across the institution’s walls, ceiling, and floor. The inflatable forms—produced in collaboration with architect Nick Meehan—evolved from Hooker’s publishing practice, and are calibrated for reading. They draw from the rich legacy of pneumatic design, and its entanglement with utopian imaginaries and social change. The structure pushes back against the conservatism of the typical “museum bench,” in order to—as McKenzie Wark has written about the project—“suggest another space-time for another life.”
To design the forms, Hooker turned to postmodern seating, fidget toys, sex manuals, and emergency shelters. In addition to existing built forms, the work borrows a formal logic from plasmodial life-forms, particularly cellular “Slime Mold,” its curious form of collective intelligence, and its ability to form collective bodies capable of sophisticated logistics in times of crisis.
On July 27, Art Omi will present “Crisis Carnival”—part symposia and part variety show—expanding on the exhibition’s themes with talks and performances by Accidental Dread, Sophie Becker, Nick Meehan, Journey Streams, and more. A series of artist editions will be released in conjunction with the project; the first is available here.
Kiyan Williams: Vertigo
What is set in motion by a double, a shadow image, a reenactment?
In their practice Kiyan Williams (American, b. 1991) splits, cuts, twists, and tilts monumental forms, creating earthen ruins appearing in various states of suspended entropy. This exhibition brings together new and recent work that set the stage for a world thrown off balance. Vertigo (2024), reconfigures three neoclassical columns, collapsing the towering forms that evoke power and dominance. Removed from their function as structural support for government buildings, the columns stand off-axis and yet on balance, as if toppled over during an extreme (weather) event.
The exhibition also features Ruins of Empire (2022), the artist's first large-scale sculpture, which appropriates the Statue of Freedom, a historic bronze that sits atop the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. In Williams’ recreation, the earthen sculpture sinks into the earth 15 degrees off center. Wild plants grow abundantly around both pieces, with bees and bugs humming in the tall grass. In the installation, Williams has introduced amaranth, a resilient plant that flourishes even in the disturbed and nutrient-deprived soils of urban ruins, and is classified as a “noxious weed” by state and federal agencies.
Williams considers their public artworks as collaborations with human and non-human forces that transform subtly within their environments. The sculptures' textured surface shifts in hue as a response to rain and heat; the tactile works are sensitive and responsive to the “touch” of elements. Set against a luscious landscape, the works in Vertigo evoke an archeological site from a speculative future where monumental forms and structures of power are remade and reclaimed by an entanglement of fugitive plant, insect, animal, human, and non-human life.
Nathan Young: Tune It Or Die!
Tune It Or Die! marks the first New York solo exhibition of Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee, b. 1975). It premieres a newly commissioned series of scores and reimagined flags titled Black Flag for an Imaginary Peyote Chapter, inspired by the iconography of the Native American Church and symbolism of peyotism, a medicine and sacrament in the church.
Central to the project is an altered dirt bike that Young will play as an instrument in a series of performances titled Tune It Or Die! (2024). The bike’s revving engine—played solo as well as joined by other motorcycles—will become a new noise composition, continuing Young’s interest in Indigenous sonic agency and in unnerving frequencies with insurrectionary potential. The work’s title comes from a patch rumored to have been worn by seminal minimalist composer La Monte Young.
Architecture exhibitions
Germane Barnes: Identity Column
Identity Column, making its North American debut at Art Omi after its world premiere at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, is one in a series of three new works titled Columnar Disorder designed by architect Germane Barnes. Upending the triumvirate columnar order—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—in favor of a new trinity—Migration, Labor, and Identity—Barnes counters millenia of glaring architecture erasure by recentering underrecognized African contributions, particularly from North Africa. Unbound by conventional columnar design rules, Barnes’ Identity Column highlights historical narratives from the African Diaspora by collapsing architecture, archeology, and anthropological disciplines into traditional sculptures. Inspired by typical African hairstyles such as cornrows, box braids, and dreadlocks, Identity Column celebrates Black hair, Black form, and Black joy. Identity Column, sculpted from a single block of black marble through digital and hand procedures, is a full-scale representation of Diasporic lineage, culture, and materiality standing as a monolith in the Sculpture & Architecture Park.
Beom Jun Kim: Other Places
Other Places creates a sunken outdoor room carved into the earth for visitors to enjoy as a space for quiet contemplation or social interaction. The architectural folly presents architecture in negative form as an act of subtraction from the land. Although symmetrical and square in its purest form, Other Places is made of earth and grass, so the experience is ever changing throughout the course of the day and from season to season. Visitors will naturally leave their imprint on the grass surfaces; over time the sharp edges and flat faces will erode and slowly return to the earth as a physical embodiment of memory and forgetting.
Jimenez Lai: Outcasts from the Underground
Jimenez Lai unearths intentionally obfuscated artifacts and the narratives they illuminate with the newly commissioned work Outcasts from the Underground. Inspired by the outdoor display of a local precast concrete manufacturer, the work is comprised of prefabricated concrete items designed to be buried, such as septic tanks, catchment basins, and basement staircases. Waste, seepage, and other matters below ground: these precast parts are the outcast characters we put to sleep the moment they are brought into life. Lai stacks these building elements on top of one another, creating a towering assemblage of Duchampian readymades resembling an exquisite corpse, a Surrealist drawing exercise. By reversing the intended orientation of the everyday building materials that make up the work, Outcasts from the Underground prompts visitors to consider what forms, ideas, and energies might be invited into our realm by exposing that which is traditionally obscured.
Curatorial credits
Riley Hooker: Body, Language, Kiyan Williams: Vertigo, and Nathan Young: Tune It Or Die! are curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Senior Curator, with Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant.
Germane Barnes: Identity Column, Beom Jun Kim: Other Places, and Jimenez Lai: Outcasts from the Underground are curated by Julia van den Hout, Senior Architecture Curator, with Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant.
About Art Omi
Art Omi supports international artists across disciplines, serving as a lab space that nurtures and commissions forward-thinking projects in nascent stages of development and catalyzes expanded contexts for significant works due for critical reappraisal. A non-profit arts center in New York’s Hudson Valley, Art Omi welcomes visitors to experience the intersections of art, architecture, and nature in its 120-acre Sculpture & Architecture Park. With more than sixty works in a bucolic setting of rolling farmlands, wetlands, and woodlands, and rotating exhibitions in the Newmark Gallery, Art Omi creates a sanctuary for the public and the artistic community alike to celebrate the transformative quality of art.
Art Omi offers five discipline focused residency programs for international artists, architects, dancers, musicians, and writers and translators, hosting more than 2,000 residents from over 100 countries since its founding in 1992.
Art Omi engages with the local community through a thriving arts education program, beloved by families and children, and praised by educators for its pedagogical innovation.
Free to all, Art Omi is open daily, year-round.
