Upcoming Exhibitions

Perspectives 179: Alvin Baltrop

On View:  Friday, July 20, 2012 – Sunday, October 21, 2012

Perspectives 179: Alvin Baltrop is the first major museum exhibition of work by this African-American photographer. Baltrop’s practice unfolded in the late 1960s amid a period of turbulent cultural, social, and political upheaval. As a young man, the artist was given a twin-lens Yashica camera that he would subsequently use to create an intimate visual diary as well as to chronicle the fleeting world around him.  During his enlistment in the Navy, Baltrop created a body of experimental and documentary photographic work that would later inform his most recognized body of photographs, those of the Westside piers of New York. Upon returning to New York in the early 1970s, Baltrop immersed himself into the decaying, urban landscape and in doing so, created an extensive body of work of street scenes reminiscent of Helen Levitt’s New York of the 1940s. Unlike that era, the city had become a post-industrial wasteland with many manufacturing buildings left vacant.  No other site embodied this more than the piers located along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. 

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Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope)

On View:  Saturday, August 11, 2012 – Sunday, November 4, 2012

Jane Alexander’s hybrid mutants speak to the porous borders between humans and other forms of animal life. Alexander acts as a surveyor mapping the forces, interests, and passions at play in human behavior. Her sculptures, installations, and photomontages are firmly rooted in her South African experience. They also transcend their locality, revealing the disparity felt every day around the world between the rhetoric of peace and decorum and the human capacity for oppression and violence. Alexander’s body of work throws into relief the asymmetric relations and practices that preclude access for so many people to a free and dignified existence.

Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) is a major exhibition of  works by important South African artist Jane Alexander and is organized by the Museum for African Art (MfAA), New York, and supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. It is guest curated by Pep Subirós.

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Perspectives 180: New Video from China

On View:  Saturday, November 3, 2012 – Sunday, February 17, 2013

Since the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1978, China has become the world's fastest growing economy.  Parallel to this economic growth has been the unprecedented production of art. While the majority of contemporary art practices have centered upon the traditional genres of painting and sculpture, the expansion of work in video and new media has been rapidly evolving.  Perspectives 180: New Video from China presents a cross-section of work by a new generation of artists from China working in video and video installation.  A separate program of cinematic work by emerging artists will also accompany the exhibition. 

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Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

On View:  Saturday, November 17, 2012 – Sunday, March 3, 2013

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art chronicles the persistence of black performance in the field of visual arts.  While black performance has been largely contextualized as an extension of theater, black visual artists have integrated performance into their work for over five decades, generating a repository of performance work that has gone largely unrecognized until now.  Radical Presence provides a critical framework to discuss the history of black performance traditions within the visual arts beginning with the “happenings” of the early 1960s, throughout the 1980s, and into the contemporary practices of a new generation of artists. This exhibition is organized by Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver.

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