Kenney Mencher

Robert Giard, Arthur Tress as Muse of Photography, 1978, as part of UNCANNY EFFECTS: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection. On view through April 19 EXHIBITIONS The Center THE WHITE SHIRT PROJECT BY JOSE RAMON February 6- April, 2020 Photographer Jose Ramon used black and white portrait photography to document and discuss PTSD and depression. Through a series of portraits each subject discusses their experiences with mental health and what they did and/or are doing to be their true selves. >>> Bronx Museum The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop Through February 9 LAST CHANCE to see The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop featuring over 120 photographs drawn from the Bronx Museum’s permanent collection and from private collections. In addition, the artist’s personal archive, housed at the Bronx Museum, will be shown to the public for the first time. A quiet man who supported himself doing odd jobs such as street vendor, jewelry designer, photography printer, and cab driver, Bronx native Alvin Baltrop left an important body of work after his untimely death in 2004 that only now is garnering the serious attention it deserves. >>> A.I.R CURRENTS: An Overwhelming Response Through February 9 CURRENTS: An Overwhelming Response, represent a plurality of voices from 19 artist exploring and pushing back against experiences and ramifications of gaslighting—or manipulations of reality—on individuals, communities, and culture. The title is drawn from Le’Andra LeSeur’s video work, An Overwhelming Response, which tracks the dismissals, denials, and violent backlash to Black women reporting sexual assaults. This title also evokes the artistic responses to the show’s open call, and the exhibition includes a diverse range of media encompassing sculpture, video, photography, painting, textile, and works on paper. Many of these artworks model healing and shifts in perception to bolster self-knowledge and solicit community support in the face of trauma. >>> The Vera List Center for Art and Politics And, Apollo: A Laboratory Through February 11 And, Apollo: A Laboratory, a work in progress by artist and Vera List Center Fellow Dean Erdmann, combines experimental documentary, video, and sculptures to connect autobiography to historical pasts that have produced current moments of social and political crisis. The narrative of And, Apollo is anchored in the Mojave Desert, the place where the artist grew up and the background for their exploration of Americana, the body, and queerness. >>> The York College Fine Arts Gallery (CUNY) & The Miller Gallery at the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL)  2020 SEQ BIENNIAL: WRITING HOME Opening: February 14 (RSVP required) February 14 – April 17 Statistics document the remarkable ethnic and cultural diversity of Queens, but relay nothing about what is it like to live/work/play within culture-fluid communities that are still becoming "home" for its residents. The 2020 Southeast Queens Biennial curators, Molaundo Jones and Margaret Rose Vendryes, invited ten artists with a significant connection to Queens to address literacy, identity, and environment with work that investigates ways of being an integral part of the borough’s fabric through visual art. >>> Jack Shainman Gallery  ANDY WARHOL PHOTOGRAPHY: 1967 - 1987 Through February 15 Warhol’s photographic oeuvre remains one of the most central and enduring aspects of his creative process which spaned three decades of the artist’s creative process.This exhibition creates a unique opportunity for viewers to appreciate this lesser known element of Warhol’s practice, the subjects and techniques of which shed new light on Warhol’s process and personal life. >>> P.P.O.W Jessica Stoller: Spread  Through February 15 Working in the realm of figurative sculpture, Stoller mines the rich and complicated history of porcelain, harnessing its links to power, desire and taste. Synthesizing the cultural, historical, and corporeal notions of the female body, Stoller expands the feminist visual vernacular and makes space for subversion, defiance and play. Deftly employing myriad techniques over the past six years, Stoller’s complex works are hand-built, thrown, carved, molded and ultimately fired multiple times to create richly colored surfaces. The works on view marry a dizzying array of the imagined, idealized and grotesque. >>> Asya Geisberg Gallery KATARINA RIESING: Razor Burn Through February 15, 2020 At first glance the work's infatuation with laborious detail and rich material - especially in the hand-embroidered gold thread, use of silk, or the exquisitely-rendered swirls of patterned stocking - seem inspired by a northern Renaissance luxuriance. Yet Riesing's insistence on close croppings, and sometimes awkward, unsightly (i.e. the show's title) or uncomfortably erotic aspects of the body, reveal surreptitious squirming. Even when we are turned on, we feel perhaps that we shouldn't be watching. The confrontational intimacy of such compositions is paradoxically reserved, as Riesing leaves plenty unsaid in her otherwise recognizable depictions. In a few images, hands reach out to grab a thigh or nipple, and we never know the relationship or gender - is it self-love, an erotic caress, or possessive grab? >>> Jack Barrett Gallery Quay Quinn Wolf: Tensions Through February 23 On June 25th, 2018 at 11:53 PM, a car at an intersection in downtown Brooklyn struck Quay Quinn Wolf and his partner. The resulting bodily injuries were minor; they were dismissed from the hospital with only small cuts and bruises, yet the psychological impact of the incident proved to be far greater. The incident is classified as a hate crime. The couple was intentionally struck with the driver speeding off after the incident. The memory of this night is the source of Tensions, and the resulting body of work, through its exploration of materials and their juxtaposition, examines the layered interpretation of the crime. >>> Company Gallery: 88 Eldridge Street Katherine Hubbard: Avoid glancing blows Through February 23 Avoid glancing blows, is a new body of photographic work by Katherine Hubbard. Working with a range of photographic techniques and image genres, Hubbard circulates questions of utility, leverage and the psychic resonance of a basement built out of the bedrock. Included in the exhibition are two large-scale silver gelatin photogram prints created with a camera-less process in a traditional black and white darkroom. The photogram images a well-worn polyethylene-coated woven tarp—a vernacular form, not considered for it’s surface, becomes a backdrop within the exhibition. Photographs taken underwater of legs shifting weight, side to side, as they tread water in efforts to maintain the buoyancy of the body are positioned on the floor and supported by armature of a double frame—small still life images of crow bars mirror this frame structure on the wall. >>> CLAMPART Jack Balas: Checkered Passed Through February 29 Jack Balas is an artist whose work primarily includes painting, drawing, and photography, often incorporating extensive textual elements. Balas produces paintings of athletic young men annotated and layered with numbers, anecdotes, and other disparate elements that offer a depiction of idealized masculinity in America through the lens of the artist’s personal experiences, as well as a contemporary counterpoint to the art-historical archetype of the female nude. Words, stories, and memories are an integral element of much of Balas’s paintings and works on paper. >>> The Armory Show Ronald Feldman Gallery: Group Show March 5 - 8 Ronald Feldman Gallery is pleased to present Cassils and Hannah Wilke as our Armory Show 2020 presentation. Cassils: Utilizing a combination of rigorous physical training, knowledge of kinesiology, and sports science, Cassils uses their body as a sculptural mass, manipulating it into forms that question our society’s gendered norms and expectations. Hannah Wilke: With great passion and acuity, Wilke incorporates a wide emotional range, which undoubtedly stemmed from her determination to speak for a more complex narrative of sexual freedom and self representation and against stereotypes and objectification. >>> Apexart SOULS GROWN DIASPORA Through March 7 Souls Grown Diaspora is an exhibition that explores a generation of leading contemporary visionary African-American artists from the wider United States, and situates their work into an art-historical lineage shaped by the Great Migration. The exhibition traces the migration: the movement spanning 1916 to 1970 in which six million African-Americans left the rural South for urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Oakland. Souls Grown Diaspora follows a new wave of artists, mostly self-taught, whose works address a range of revelatory social and political subjects. >>> MoMA Adam Linder: Shelf Life & Shahryar Nashat: Force Life  Through March 8 Linder’s Shelf Life is a choreographic work for six dancers. Using a variety of dance vocabularies—as well as costumes, props, and their voices—the performers interpret three concepts that together form what Linder describes as a “nervous system of dance”:  Nashat’s Force Life consists of four works: a video titled Blood (what is authority); a horizontal sculpture titled Barre (are you nervous in this system); and two marble sculptures titled Brain (you no longer have to simulate) and Brain (do you feel nervous in this system). >>> Queer Thoughts BRI WILLIAMS: SEBBEN CRUDELE Through March 21  The title of the exhibition is taken from a popular operatic aria that the artist learned in her middle school church choir. The lyrics recount the pain of a betrayed lover, who remains faithful despite her beloved’s cruelty. “Only if I am accepted by you, I am beautiful. I don't deserve to feel worthless, Still you are the only thing I love. I love you but you cause me pain.” Cruel love, a condition to be endured dutifully, is taught early, and with consistency. In Williams’ sculptural work, allegorical found objects develop abstract forms through material processes of degradation and subsequent preservation. Encased in translucent soap like insects trapped in amber, the objects lose their distinct shapes and bleed out pigmentation, developing secondary characteristics akin to oxidation or decay. >>> Peter Blum Gallery Nicholas Galanin Carry a Song / Disrupt an Anthem Through March 28 Nicholas Galanin works from his experience as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist, simultaneously exploring his Indigenous identity and contemporary art practice. With a keen observation of past and present, Galanin exposes intentionally obscured collective memory and barriers to the acquisition of knowledge while celebrating the resilience and strength of Indigenous people and their culture. As Galanin says, the exhibition’s title implies that "to carry the songs of Indigenous people, to carry the songs of the land, is inherently disruptive of the national anthem." Expressing his art through sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance, and textile-based work, Galanin asserts cultural, political, and creative sovereignty for Indigenous people. >>> PROGRAMS AND EVENTS Quad Cinema That Tender Touch (1969, US, 88m DCP) Thursday, February 6, 7PM Screening is part of COMING OUT the Quad cinema’s monthly series which survey of lesser-known landmarks of LGBTQ film history in this new monthly series. This rediscovered camp gem is a classic example of the lesbian exploitation genre, also affectionately known as “Dykesploitation”. Lovers Marsha (Bee Tompkins) and Terri (Sue Bernard) share a contented life together before dissatisfaction invades their wood-paneled So-Cal apartment and Terri runs off to have a “normal” married life in the suburbs with Ken. Unearthed and preserved by queer film historian Jenni Olson, That Tender Touch offers much more than steamy surface-level pleasure, it also stands as a valuable Stonewall-era lesbian snapshot for a contemporary audience. >>> P.P.O.W In Conversation: Katarina Riesing, Jessica Stoller, & Paddy Johnson Saturday, February 8, 4:30-6PM On the occasion of Katarina Riesing, Razor Burn and Jessica Stoller, Spread P.P.O.W is pleased to invite you to a conversation with the artist, and Paddy Johnson. The discussion will explore the ways in which both artists show aspects of the female body usually shunned or demonized with in our societies contemporary conception of femininity and beauty. >>> Film Forum BEANPOLE Through February 11 Critics hailing the second film by 27-year-old Russian director Kantemir Balagov describe it as “intense,” “intimate,” and “rewarding” (The Hollywood Reporter) and as “ferocious and extraordinary,” during which “you quite often have to remind yourself to breathe” (Variety). Two young women (one so tall and slender she’s referred to as Beanpole) are nurses in a Leningrad hospital, immediately following the end of World War II. A film about relationships between broken people, living in a ravaged nation after a catastrophic war – BEANPOLE exudes deep empathy for its characters in the face of many obstacles fate has thrown in their path. This is a film about Russian history and the Russian soul, about overcoming loss and inventing new ways to get through each day. >>> The Center TARIK CARROLL AND THE EVERYMAN PROJECT Tuesday, February 11, 6:30PM $10 suggested donation Join us for a special conversation with Tarik Carroll where he will present and discuss his work as a photographer and visual artist, and his ongoing work titled The

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