ART CITIES:N.York-Greater New York

The exhibition ”Greater New York”, a asignature survey of artists living and working in the New York City area, returned for its fifth edition at MoMA Ps1. Delayed one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this iteration offers an intimate portrayal of New York by creating proximity between key histories of art-making and emerging practices.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive

Featuring the work of 47 artists and collectives, the exhibition “Greater New York” offers new insights and opens up geographic and historical boundaries by pinpointing both specific and expanded narratives of the local in a city that provokes a multitude of perspectives. Bridging strategies of the documentary and the archive on the one hand, and surrealism and fabulation on the other, the exhibition considers the ways that artists work to record social and personal experiences around belonging and estrangement. Drawing connections across the interdisciplinary practices of international and intergenerational artists, Greater New York examines the many ways that affinities are formed in relation to place and through time. Yuji Agematsu has cultivated a daily practice of walking and collecting scraps of debris-chewed gum, foil, bottle caps, feathers, thread—from city streets since 1980, when he moved to New York City from Japan. In the mid-1990s, he began assembling his daily foraged treasures within the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs: each cellophane pouch holds the residue of a particular path through space on a particular day. Influenced by his early involvement in music, including ten years studying with percussionist Milford Graves, Agematsu offers a picture and pulse of the city through his practice. Raised in Tunisia, Nadia Ayari uses representations of abstracted plant life, divorced from clear context, to hint at memories and depictions of specific locales. Her paintings often use seriality to develop nonhuman characters or “protagonists,” isolating and repeating motifs across multiple works whose surfaces she builds up with layers of minute brushstrokes. BlackMass Publishing is a New York–based collective that publishes zines and books of new and archival content by black artists and cultural producers. Printing “on anything as long as it’ll feed through the printer,” the collective produces new conversations on black cultural production across the diaspora, intermixing known and lesser-known, historical and contemporary, art, music, poetry, and critical writing in an improvisational manner. Their methods of sourcing, collecting, and distributing materials are essential to their work: they often pull from archives and special collections and then reinsert their books into those very institutions, helping to change the ways in which black histories are constructed and preserved.

Kristi Cavataro’s handmade, modular sculptures destabilize and disorient spatial coordinates. She cuts and solders stained glass before wrapping it onto various geometric forms, so that the resulting sculptures intersect, interlock, and conjoin in unexpected and improbable ways. Their tiled surfaces and curvatures at times suggest the city’s built environment, harkening to Art Deco forms common to urban public infrastructure. In fact, the works are non-referential, each its own original form with infinite possible permutations. Born in Hartsville, South Carolina, in 1955, Curtis Cuffie moved to Brooklyn at age fifteen. He became known in the 1990s for the impromptu performative sculptures that he installed on sidewalks, walls, and fences around Astor Place and throughout the East Village. Poetically titled and elaborately constructed from salvaged objects and trash, his works used the street as a generative site for materials as well as audiences, often interacting with passersby. At times, his installations were removed by the city or otherwise destroyed, but new works would crop up around the city soon after. Hadi Fallahpisheh’s photographic works result from private performances in the darkroom, where the artist uses a flashlight to “draw” on the surface of photosensitive paper. The resulting cartoon like drawings illustrate a cast of entangled domestic characters—usually a person, a cat, a dog, and a mouse. Their slapstick escapades and power struggles allegorize the travails of contemporary immigrants and the effects of cultural displacement, which Fallahpisheh, who was born and raised in Iran, has experienced firsthand. Raised in England after fleeing civil war in Nigeria, Rotimi Fani-Kayode moved to New York in 1980 to study at Pratt Institute. His photographs include conceptual and staged portraiture as well as travel and street photography. They explore interlocking themes of Black queer desire, erotic transcendence, and spiritual ecstasy—oftentimes drawing from the Ifá divination system of the Yoruba people. His own sense of dislocation and exile informs this inquiry into belonging.

Dolores Furtado investigates relations between the body, form, and history through a physical and spiritual process of direct engagement with matter. Her resin, ceramic, and paper pulp sculptures tend to deliberately expose traces of the artist’s hand as marks of the intensity of the production process. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Julio Galán was among the most internationally recognized representatives of neo-Mexicanism, a movement of artists interested in reclaiming traditional features of Mexican culture, including Catholic imagery, a preoccupation with death and suffering, a strong surrealist tradition, and images typical of popular markets. Galán, who was born in Northern Mexico in 1958, was also obsessed with the representation of sexuality and pain, which manifested in his practice through a sustained exploration of self-portraiture.Doreen Garner’s visceral sculptures unearth historical traumas that echo into the present, focusing on the long history of medical racism in the United States. From the time of the transatlantic slave trade, Black people have been systematically denied medical care and forcibly subjected to dangerous procedures without anesthesia. Garner states, “The era that I reference in my work is a period where Black people were not only enslaved, but were also used as test subjects. Avijit Halder’s photographs explore the fluidity and shifting legibility of identity; they also register a search for home in the wake of loss and displacement. The photographs on view evoke a symbiotic exchange between the artist and his friends as they wrap themselves in his late mother’s saris, which Halder carried with him when he moved to the United States from Kolkata, India.

Athena LaTocha’s monumental landscapes are inspired by memories of the wilderness of Alaska, where she was born and raised, as well as long drives to visit North Dakota and Michigan, where her family comes from. She creates representations and site-specific molds of the natural environment, engaging the history of landscape painting through abstraction. Working flat on the ground, LaTocha uses industrial materials like bricks and shredded tires—found discarded on the sides of highways—to manipulate pigments, debris, and elemental materials like lead and earth, and to mark the surface of her landscapes. In contrast to art historical interventions upon the landscape Tammy Nguyen investigates the intersection of geopolitics, ecology, and myth in her paintings and artist books. Her works are dense with foliage and characters built up from ornate patterning that is both seductive and sinister. Drawing from a range of sources that are traditional as well as contemporary, Nguyen brings ancestral thinking to bear on present day understandings of ecological destruction. Often looking specifically at the effects of contemporary globalization and capitalist development on Southeast Asia, where her family is from, her works suggest the interconnected fates of humanity and the environment in the age of existential climate disaster.Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Regina Vater lived intermittently in New York City during the 1970s and ’80s. There, she began to make conceptual art, films, and performances that explore the intersection of urban ecologies, nature, ritual traditions, and diasporic experience. In Luxo-Lixo (1973-74) (luxury garbage), Vater intersperses photographs of trash on New York City streets, in both wealthy and low-income neighborhoods, with images of storefronts and people shopping. First shown in the 1976 Venice Biennale, the film connects themes of waste and excess to a culture of consumerism.

Participating Artists: BlackMass Publishing, Diane Burns, Kristi Cavataro, Curtis Cuffie, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Raque Ford, Luis Frangella, Dolores Furtado, Julio Galán, Doreen Garner, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Robin Graubard, Milford Graves, Bettina Grossman, Avijit Halder, Bill Hayden, Steffani Jemison, G. Peter Jemison, E’wao Kagoshima, Marie Karlberg, Matthew Langan-Peck, Las Nietas de Nonó, Athena LaTocha, Carolyn Lazard, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Hiram Maristany, Servane Mary, Rosemary Mayer, Alan Michelson, Ahmed Morsi, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marilyn Nance, Diane Severin Nguyen, Tammy Nguyen, Shelley Niro, Kayode Ojo, Paulina Peavy, Freya Powell, Raha Raissnia, Andy Robert, Shanzhai Lyric, Regina Vater, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Lachell Workman.

Photo: Shanzhai Lyric. Canal Street Research Association in retail drag. 2020. A history of the area is mapped out in found objects. Pictured here are “Lady Liberty” by Betty Roytburd, a paper rose by Nothing Man, oyster-inspired ceramics by Ruby Chang alongside oyster shell candles, skyscraper souveniers and bootleg perfumes in the form of stilettos walking through the landscape. Image courtesy the artists. Photo: Parker Menzimer

Info: Curatorial team: Ruba Katrib, Serubiri Moses, Kate Fowle and Inés Katzenstein, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens, NY, USA, Duration: 7/10/2021-18/4/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri & Sun-Mon 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-20:00, www.moma.org