Digital Photography
Sweet Flypaper Gallery
Hunter North Building, Floor 11
68th Street and Lexington Avenue
New York, NY
Through April 3
The Sweet Flypaper Gallery is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition: Digital Photography.
Participating Artists: Mika Arava, Solange Buon, Randy Cordoba, Tran Nguyen, Chanel Pegeron, Emilia Pesantes, Masha Puchkoff, Hazel Rivera, Sabrina Sakai, Nikki Ho Ching Wong, and Shotaro Yagura
The Sweet Flypaper Gallery is named in memory of Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) whose collaboration with poet Langston Hughes, published in 1955, was titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life and is considered by many as one of the most influential photography books of the 20th century. Together with Mark Feldstein (1937-2001) he started the photography program in the department of Art at Hunter College in the 1970’s and taught there for 34 years until his death at age 89.
Roy DeCarava was an internationally renowned photographer best known for his black-and-white images of daily life in Harlem and portraits of jazz legends. DeCarava studied painting and architecture at the Cooper Union School of Art and the George Washington Carver Art School before turning to photography in the 1940s. In 1952, he became the first black photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, where he was honored with a one-person exhibition in 1996. In 2006, he received the National Medal of Arts, the highest award the U.S. government gives to an artist. There is vivid testimony to how supportive and sensitive he was with his students and we wish to remember him for his dual role as teacher and artist by naming this gallery the Sweet Flypaper Gallery.
Fr. Frank P Sabatté: Life Threads
Thomas Hunter Project Space
Thomas Hunter Building
68th Street and Lexington Avenue
New York, NY
Through April 6
The Thomas Hunter Project Space is pleased to present an exhibition of tapestries by visual artist Fr. Frank Sabatté.
“My work is a merger of “random-stitch” and “free-motion” embroidery. Random-stitch embroidery was developed by Chinese embroiderers as a divergence from the traditional methods of embroidery. Free-motion embroidery is used in the garment industry for embellishing clothing. The painstaking process involves layering threads of various colors to determine value and tonal qualities. The end result is a sense of translucence in the skin tones. An industrial sewing machine is used to layer the threads over a carefully rendered drawing. There is no computer assistance whatsoever, the sewing machine acts as a “brush” to apply the various colored threads.”
Fr. Sabatté is the Director of Openings Artist Collective and Senior Curator of The Gallery at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, both based in New York City. An ordained Priest of the Roman Catholic Church, Sabatté is also the Artist-in-Resident with the Paulist Fathers in New York City. He graduated with a BA in Art from the University of California in Los Angeles, and an MA in Theology from Catholic University, Washington.
Wendy White, MFASO Lecture
Hunter MFA Studios, 2nd Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
April 11, 7pm
The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey
Curated by Javier Rivero Ramos and Sarah Watson
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
Hunter West Building
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10013
Through May 6
The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey foregrounds the relationship between Downey’s artistic and pedagogical practices as illustrated in his works from the series Life Cycles and Mi casa en la playa, produced in the early to mid 1970s while Downey was teaching at Hunter College and Pratt Institute. These works address Downey’s concerns and theories around architecture, ecology, cybernetics, and feedback. Downey sought to redefine architecture as the wielding of invisible forces—physical, social, and psychic. In his assignments, he likewise challenged his students to reconsider their potential as producers of social change through the transformation of space.
The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey is made possible by the generous support from the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Carol and Arthur Goldberg, and the Leubsdorf Fund.
Madeline Hollander, Sean Raspet, Sam Lewitt at The Artist’s Institute
132 East 65th Street
New York, NY
Through May 25
Madeline Hollander’s New Max will be performed every Saturday from 2-6pm.
This spring, the Artist’s Institute’s program brings us closer to the surprising, unstable, and powerful capacities of matter. In the physical sciences and economics, we sometimes call this kind of work energetics―the study of the way that energy flows through a system. For the art field, an emphasis on energetics reorients aesthetics to material expression, sometimes a material expression that exceeds that of the artist’s own imagination or will. Through artworks, talks, and other events this spring, the Institute’s fellows are engaging with energy as an animating force. Energy has the capacity to synthesize molecules. Energy heats up a room.
Queenie: Selected artworks by female artists from El Museo del Barrio’s permanent collection
Hunter East Harlem Gallery
2180 3rd Avenue at 119th Street
New York, NY
Through June 23
Tania Bruguera, Margarita Cabrera, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Melba Carillo, Marta Chilindron, Alessandra Expósito, Iliana Emilia Garcia, Dulce Gomez, Cristina Hernández Botero, Carmen Herrera, Jessica Kairé, Carmen Lomas Garza, Evelyn López de Guzmán, Anna Maria Maiolino, Ana Mendieta, Marina Núñez del Prado, Liliana Porter, Raquel Rabinovich, Scherezade, Nitza Tufiño, among others.
New artwork commissions by Melissa Calderón, Alessandra Expósito, and Glendalys Medina.
QUEENIE features a selection of artworks by female artists across various media from the permanent collection of El Museo del Barrio. The exhibition highlights the institution’s collection with a particular focus on the female artists and QUEENIE takes its title from a sculpture by Alessandra Expósito. The exhibition brings together works which prompt a multifarious dialogue around society and gender through the artists’ varying perspectives and experiences. As part of the exhibition, HEHG has invited four NYC-based artists to respond to the exhibition with a new commission that further explores the connections among the collecting process, societal change, and a gendered experience.
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