Esteban Cabeza de Baca, MFASO Lecture – December 18, 7pm

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Esteban Cabeza de Baca, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, 2nd Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

December 18, 7pm

Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b.1985) grew up in San Ysidro, one of the largest border towns between the United States and Mexico and the site of last year’s migrant caravan crisis. Esteban’s work emerges from his Mestizo culture in the Southwest United States. He has attended many residencies including the Carrizozo AIR, Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, the LMCC Workspace Program and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. His works are among public and private collections worldwide, including Harvard University, The Netherlands Bank, Stern Collection, and De Heus Collection. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Columbia University where he currently teaches painting. Esteban’s first NYC solo show “Worlds Without Borders” at Boers Li Gallery was featured in NYTimes as an Artist To Watch Now. He lives and works in Queens, NY.

Matt Merkel Hess, American Stoneware at Thomas Hunter Project Space

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Matt Merkel Hess, American Stoneware

Thomas Hunter Project Space
930 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY

Through December 20
Reception: December 13, 6:30-8pm

Snakes, eagles, political figures, and snack food collide in this new body of ceramic work by Matt Merkel Hess. Drawing on 17th to 19th century stoneware crocks, 20th century song lyrics, and recent political upheavals, Merkel Hess weaves together signs, symbols and forms that embody and embrace the American experience. The work draws particular inspiration from the slimy, grotesque world depicted in the 19th century snake jugs crafted by the Kirkpatrick Brothers of Anna, Illinois, along with the verdant, joyful stoneware crocks made by David Jarbour in Alexandria, Virginia in the 1820s. Building on Merkel Hess’s previous explorations of plastic, everyday containers such as 5 gallon buckets, this new body of work includes 2 liter soda bottles, Kool Aid Man pitchers, and wheel-thrown ceramic Cheetos bags, which all deepen and expand the artist’s exploration of what it means to be a ceramic vessel maker.

Matt Merkel Hess has exhibited widely and has work in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, Calif.; and the Nerman Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Born and raised in Iowa, he studied at the University of Kansas before moving to Los Angeles, where he received an MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010. Merkel Hess lives and works in New York City. For more information, please visit merkelhess.com

Gallery Cubed presents NEA: Network of Extraordinary Artists: Tutu Gallery (April Zhu) x Xingze Li – Through December 28

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Gallery Cubed presents NEA: Network of Extraordinary Artists: Tutu Gallery (April Zhu) x Xingze Li

Hunter East Harlem Gallery
2180 3rd Avenue and 119th Street
New York, NY

Through December 28

GALLERY CUBED (GC) is a portable pop-up, a 4 x 8 foot gallery in a box. The franchise kit includes hidden electrical power, easily replaceable parts, and manageable, stackable, flat-pack, space-saving, interlocking panels that are easy to assemble. Anyone can put together the pieces to make a sturdy, load-bearing exhibition space appear out of thin air. GC’s mission is to empower communities and artists through the transformative power of a sustainable art experience. More art for more people for less money.

Inside of the walls of GALLERY CUBED, Nathan Rayman presents his curatorial project, NEA: Network of Extraordinary Artists. The NEA supports international artists applying for the O-1 US Visa or Green Card by offering them opportunities to fulfill specific requirements—exhibitions, publications, panel participation, etc.—that prove their “extraordinariness” to immigration authorities. Like HEHG’s exhibition, The Extraordinary, the NEA is populated through an open call put out by GALLERY CUBED and selected by a jury of established arts workers.

The NEA will present a series of six solo exhibitions beginning on October 16, 2019 and rotating through March, 2020. The NEA began in 2019 and serves as an inclusive, generative network at a time when the US’s original NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts) is at risk of being dismantled and money is more often channelled through the secondary art market. In this environment of dwindling support and funding for art production, the NEA calls into question the metrics used to obtain the status of an “extraordinary” or “successful” artist. How is this lofty goal made even more difficult for non-residents? How can we re-imagine existing structures so that they might yield a more inclusive dividend of success rather than creating competition, scarcity, and rejection?

Polly Apfelbaum, Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture – Roosevelt House, December 11, 7pm

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Polly Apfelbaum, Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture

Roosevelt House Auditorium
47-49 East 65th Street
New York, NY

December 11, 7pm

The Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College is pleased to announce a public lecture by Zabar Visiting Artist Polly Apfelbaum, Wednesday, December 11, at 7pm at Hunter’s Roosevelt House Auditorium, 47-49 East 65th Street in Manhattan.

Polly Apfelbaum is best known for her “fallen paintings”: large, colorful, floor-bound works composed of hundreds of petals of brilliantly dyed fabric. She has exhibited steadily since her first one-person exhibition in New York in 1986, exploring the boundaries between high art and handicraft, in particular the varieties of quilting and weaving that modern art dismissed as decorative, as craft, or as women’s work. Her most recent works, woven rugs and printed wallpapers, move color and pattern across the floor and onto the wall. They evoke both a history of modern color painting and mid-century interior design, and the handmade work of older craft traditions.

Polly Apfelbaum is represented by Galerie Nächst St. Stephen in Vienna and Frith Street Gallery in London, and her work was the subject of a major mid-career survey that opened in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and traveled to the Kemper Museum in Kansas City and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, an Anonymous Was a Women Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and other museums nationally and internationally.

About the Judith Zabar Visiting Artists Program
In November 2007, Hunter College received a generous commitment to establish the Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Program Fund. The Fund has allowed Hunter to bring a series of internationally recognized artists to campus to work directly with students in the MFA program, in master classes, critical seminars, and private tutorials, providing students with the unique opportunity to interact with top practitioners in the field. Zabar Visiting Artists also present public lectures where they discuss their work, engage in conversation with members of Hunter’s faculty, and with Hunter’s broader student community and the general public. Past Zabar artists have included: Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Julie Ault, Robert Barry, Dawoud Bey, Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Rochelle Feinstein, Charles Gaines, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Martin Kersels, Jeff Koons, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Tracey Moffatt, Matt Mullican, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul Pfeiffer, William Pope L., Walid Ra’ad, Yvonne Rainer, Allen Ruppersberg, Doris Salcedo, Shahzia Sikander, Michael Smith, Frances Stark, Fred Tomaselli, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Stanley Whitney.

Inflatable Deities perform Mourning of the Living Past – December 15, 4pm

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Inflatable Deities perform Mourning of the Living Past
part of MFA Thesis Exhibition Part II:  ̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶e̶z̶ ̶f̶a̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶t̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶e̶z̶ ̶p̶a̶s̶s̶e̶r̶

Hunter MFA Studios, 2nd Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

December 15, 4pm

curated by Nicole Kaack
Inflatable Deities (Jessica Mensch & Emily Pelstring) will perform Mourning of the Living Past – a 25min. multimedia piece that includes a live soundtrack, dance numbers, costume changes and analog special effects.
Synopsis: It is the year 4999. Two Scientists have been sent through time and space to the year 5999 to gather research data on the evolution of a brain-eating virus. They discover that the virus has evolved to take on an anthropomorphic form. This manifestation of the Virus has integrated itself into the economic system, in which flesh functions as the new currency. The Scientists follow the virus and discover how Flesh is collected and traded. They report on their mission through a machine that translates their speech into image.

Remembering Robert Morris – Roundtable and Screening at Leubsdorf Gallery, December 5, 6:45pm

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Remembering Robert Morris
part of Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects

Hunter MFA Studios, 2nd Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

December 5, 6:45-8:45pm

Roundtable and screening of Robert Morris’s 1971 film Neo Classic

Robert Morris (1931 –2018) was a long-time Hunter College studio faculty member and an alumnus of the college. Celebrating Morris’s work and his legacy at Hunter, this event will include a presentation on Hunter’s current exhibition Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects (on view at the Leubsdorf Gallery until Dec. 1, 2019), by exhibition curator Sarah Watson; a screening of Morris’s 1971 film Neo-Classic; a roundtable conversation led by faculty and alumni discussing Morris’s influence on the department; and a reception.

The event is free and open to the public.

El Salón at HEHG, December 6, 7-9pm

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El Salón
part of The Extraordinary

Hunter East Harlem Gallery
2180 3rd Avenue and 119th Street
New York, NY

December 6, 7-9pm

Curator and organizer Eva Mayhabel Davis will host her communal event, El Salón at HEHG. El Salón is a gathering to share ideas, food, conversation, and acknowledgement of presence. This assembly travels to various spaces and collaborate to host forums on various contemporary arts and cultural topics. Most of the time as a nutritious and soulful potluck. Each evening contextualizes artists, collectives, creative endeavors, personal journeys and histories.

Loie Hollowell, MFASO Lecture – December 4, 7pm

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Loie Hollowell, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, 2nd Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

December 4, 7pm

Loie Hollowell’s (b. 1983, Woodland, California) paintings, originating in autobiography, explore themes of sexuality, often through abstractions of the human body and an emphasis on female forms. With strong colors, varied texture, and the symmetry of sacred geometry, her works evoke bodily landscapes and allude to iconography such as the almond-shaped mandorlas found in medieval religious painting.

Hollowell has been the subject of numerous one-artist exhibitions and has been featured in over twenty group exhibitions, including After Effect, held at Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2016), and Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, which opened in May 2018 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and traveled to the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut, in 2019.

Gallery Cubed presents NEA: Network of Extraordinary Artists: Yen Yen Chou – Through December 4

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Gallery Cubed presents NEA: Network of Extraordinary Artists:
Yen Yen Chou

Hunter East Harlem Gallery
2180 3rd Avenue and 119th Street
New York, NY

November 13 – December 4

GALLERY CUBED (GC) is a portable pop-up, a 4 x 8 foot gallery in a box. The franchise kit includes hidden electrical power, easily replaceable parts, and manageable, stackable, flat-pack, space-saving, interlocking panels that are easy to assemble. Anyone can put together the pieces to make a sturdy, load-bearing exhibition space appear out of thin air. GC’s mission is to empower communities and artists through the transformative power of a sustainable art experience. More art for more people for less money.

Inside of the walls of GALLERY CUBED, Nathan Rayman presents his curatorial project, NEA: Network of Extraordinary Artists. The NEA supports international artists applying for the O-1 US Visa or Green Card by offering them opportunities to fulfill specific requirements—exhibitions, publications, panel participation, etc.—that prove their “extraordinariness” to immigration authorities. Like HEHG’s exhibition, The Extraordinary, the NEA is populated through an open call put out by GALLERY CUBED and selected by a jury of established arts workers.

The NEA will present a series of six solo exhibitions beginning on October 16, 2019 and rotating through March, 2020. The NEA began in 2019 and serves as an inclusive, generative network at a time when the US’s original NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts) is at risk of being dismantled and money is more often channelled through the secondary art market. In this environment of dwindling support and funding for art production, the NEA calls into question the metrics used to obtain the status of an “extraordinary” or “successful” artist. How is this lofty goal made even more difficult for non-residents? How can we re-imagine existing structures so that they might yield a more inclusive dividend of success rather than creating competition, scarcity, and rejection?

Speculative Architecture and the Commons – November 23, 2-6pm

Morning+Observatory+-+Exercise+Complex

Speculative Architecture and the Commons
part of Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects

Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 E. 68th Street
New York, NY

November 23, 2-6pm

Inspired by our current exhibition, Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects, this event will bring together artists, writers, and designers/architects/planners for an afternoon of conversations focused on feminist, queer and POC visions of speculative architecture and its liberatory potential to reimagine the commons. Panelists will present on their work, introduce interactive technologies and activities to the audience, and discuss themes from their work. A reception and tour of Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects by exhibition curator Sarah Watson to follow.
Featuring:

Nyasha Felder, will present on her architectural collaborations with artists and her design for the Education Pavilion for the North Philly Peace Park.

Glenn Cantave and Idris Brewster, who collective work as Movers and Shakers will present on their Augmented Reality Monument Tours and the work they are doing with their AR projects in schools.

Natalia Nakazawa will present on her curatorial, pedagogical, and artistic interest in artists’ interpretations of the city, based in part on her curation of the 2015 exhibition Translated Cities.

Cheryl J. Fish, PH.D. will present on June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 “Architextual” Collaboration” Skyrise for Harlem.

Essye Klempner, For The Birds at Thomas Hunter Projects – Through November 23

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Essye Klempner, For The Birds

Thomas Hunter Project Space
930 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY

Through November 23

For the Birds is a presentation of ceramics and works on paper by Essye Klempner, Hunter College’s 2018 Artist-in-Resident.

Last summer, Klempner placed ceramic bird baths with nude figures bathing throughout New York’s private and community gardens. Referencing silent films such as “Ecstasy” with Hedy Lamarr, Klempner relies less on verbal language, and predominantly on the gesture of the actor. Using the minimal visual information provided from grainy film, Klempner completes the figure missing from the still shots. Other figures are acquired from photographs, such as a friend playing chess, or through observation of a lover bathing after a long work week.

Another body of work to be presented is sunprints, a camera-less photographic process by which Anna Atkins helped develop to identify plant life. Klempner considers the making of the work as being closer to the traditions of still life and en plein air painting, as the works are made outdoors with natural sunlight. She draws from the local-scale of material gathered through her walks in the city: fallen leaves from trees, weeds like Queen Anne’s Lace, and keys or coins collected in her pockets. Plexiglass is then used to firmly press the objects for closer contact with the light-sensitive paper, which is also included in the final viewing of the print with scattered mushroom spores.

These entities welcome us to the world growing in microbiomes of the urban condition.