Everyone knows September is the month of art fairs, but Manhattan’s big attractions are just some of New York’s fall offerings. It’s not winter yet, so you can still catch the bottom of an artist-created birdhouse display near Prospect Park. Still, a group exhibition of politically charged textiles along Long Island Sound brings a jolt to an area otherwise awash with wealth. Our other highlights this month include an African healing sanctuary on Governors Island, colorful deconstructions of gender and sexuality, and broadcasts from a post-worker dystopia in Brooklyn.
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Gerardo Dexter Ciprian: Medicine of Love
Dominican artist Dexter Ciprian’s new solo exhibition transforms deeply personal objects into universal symbols of resilience. The artist takes apart family-owned furniture and repurposes it as beacons, bringing light to the island nation’s chronic discontinuities. Likewise, he recalls the bricks of his childhood home in the Bronx through pieces of Cuban soap, a versatile soap used throughout the diaspora. Named after a Dominican folk hymn, Love of Medicine is a meditation on the home remedy that becomes the first line of defense when there is no other support in sight.
Bronx Museum of the Arts (bronxmuseum.org)
1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx
Until September 4
Mis-formation
If there’s a kind of “gender-critical” ethos, Bushwick gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid is perpetuating it. Three contemporary Latino artists—Ad Minoliti, KC Crow Maddux, and Madeline Jimenez Santil—deconstruct the social constructs of gender and sexuality, taking the womb out of its traditional “feminine” context and presenting the binary as a callous and outdated formula. In the exhibition essay, Nicolas Cuello laments how queer and nonconforming artists of color have long faced a “historical accumulation” of stigmatized discredit, despite marginal recognition in cultural institutions. Mis-formation it is therefore the predecessor, offering bodily and formal experiments with room to breathe.
Tiger Strikes Asteroid (tigerstrikesasteroid.com)
1329 Willoughby Ave #2A, Bushwick, Brooklyn
Until September 11
Needle breakage
The aesthetic of sewing unites this group show of living and dead textile artists. Tapestries by the late poet Edel Adnan portray her longing life, contrasted with Philadelphia-based Tabitha Arnold’s powerful protest rugs and Mexican artist Margarita Cabrera’s cacti made from border patrol uniforms. Despite their different styles, a common textual foundation hints at the medium’s gendered and often political history. Needle breakage thus the work of marginalization is concentrated, and in turn the marginalization of work.
The Church (thechurchsagharbor.org)
48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor, Long Island
Until September 18
Eros Rising: Visions of Erotica in Latin American Art
10 artists at ISLAA’s Growing eros ruminates on the unpredictable joys of being truly comfortable in one’s own skin, trading outward sexuality for colorful abstraction. Skin tones in Wynnie Mynerva’s sparse watercolors are mirrored in Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s non-objective charcoal sketches, culminating in Oscar Bony’s photograph of two anonymous languages forever on the brink of contact. Influenced by the pastels of Argentine conceptualist David Lamelas, Growing eros it translates the simple act of touch into a revelation that can affirm one’s understanding of self and truth.
Institute for Latin American Art Studies (islaa.org)
50 East 78th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Until September 30
Not Listed: Underrated Women
Historian Michael Lobel recently pointed out the pitfalls at the center of the market of labeling artists as “forgotten”. Hence, Derfner Judaica’s Unlisted tells the stories of several Jewish modernists through the lens of patriarchal erasure. Expressionist portraits by Lithuanian artist Yuli Blumberg appear alongside abstract wild horses by Romanian painter Magdalena Rădulescu and jagged non-representational pieces by Nadia Gould and Gertrude Perrin. Presented in person and online, these colorful, provocative works expand our understanding of how war, faith, and immigration shaped mid-century artists, reinforcing that the “Women of Ninth Street” were hardly alone.
Derfner Judaica Museum (derfneronline.org)
5901 Palisade Avenue, Bronx
Until October 1
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: I kept much more than I wrote
Pamela Sunstrum has already lived many lives in the United States, Africa and Southeast Asia. But as her latest exhibition title reveals, much of that experience has yet to be expressed. Thus, individual painted canvases that include I have held – many of which are paired in diptychs or built into three-dimensional installations – together form a surreal picture of the absence of place. Layers of sun set denim jeans, volcanic mountains, palm trees and checkered tiles in visions of kaleidoscopic brilliance, as if drawing from overflowing wells of memory. Perhaps, then, the artist is more prepared to speak than she lets on.
Galerie Lelong (galerielelong.com)
528 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
September 8 – October 22
For the Birds
The phrase “birding” often carries a dismissive connotation, yet the Brooklyn Botanic Garden means it quite literally. Dedicated to its diverse bird life, For the Birds distributes colorful birdhouses created by artists throughout the grounds, all designed and placed specifically to foster community. From a blue heron fishing platform, to a trash crow’s nest and a small communal sculpture garden, these makeshift maisons serve the survival needs of every species and bring a little more color to the lush landscape.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden (bbg.org)
990 Washington Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Until October 23
LaJuné McMillian: Library of the Black Movement
The dynamics of LaJuné McMillian Black Movement Library The series synthesizes the black radical tradition and political unrest today. Using archives of motion capture data collected from misrepresented black performers and base models of the characters, McMillian recreates their movements while wearing neuron motion capture suits. Footage from their many workshops and public performances with artists Roobi Gaskins, Renaldo Maurice, Ntu, Roukijah Rooks and RaFia Santana show the entire facade of the Brooklyn Public Library lit up as they dance in front of a crowd of onlookers. Drawing from archival footage of people’s movements around the world, McMillian’s work disrupts the time between revolutions, warning us how quickly the attacks can return.
Recess (recessart.org)
46 Washington Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
September 15 – October 29
Elissa Blount-Moorhead and Bradford Young: Back and Song
On Governors Island, a two-person show examines the poetics of health in the African diaspora. Blount-Moorhead and Young collaborated on four-channel films and installations set within the dark and desolate Lower Gallery of the Arts Center, juxtaposing personal testimonies of doctors, nurses and health aides with clips of meditations and ritual performances. Equally critical and purifying, Back and Song rejects the dominant singularity of Western colonial medicine, rooting generations of Black healing in community and lived experience.
Arts Center (lmcc.net)
Building 110 at Soissons Landing, Governors Island, Manhattan
Until October 30
Rodrigo Valenzuela: New Works for a Post-Worker World
Two series of photos by Rodrigo Valenzuela, after work AND Guns, imagine what might have happened if machinery made workers obsolete. For each shoot, he assembled elaborate, dystopian sets of old wood and scrap metal, concocting surreal yet familiar representations of what he calls a “post-workers’ world.” Drawing heavily from conceptual art and communist theory, Valenzuela depicts industrialism as a dehumanizing force that led capitalists to believe that machines would replace an imperfect and increasingly demanding worker. Housed within a structure the artist built within the BRIC House, New Works for a Post-Worker World it portrays a public sphere where the cause of labor is defeated, and it looks quite frightening.
BRIC House (bricartsmedia.org)
647 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
September 22 – December 23
