October 12–March 30, 2024
Opening Reception: October 12, 6:30–9:00 pm

Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Entrance between Lexington and Park Avenues
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12–6 pm

In the mid-1960s, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) began embracing joyously transgressive modes of performance, film, and installation that championed marginalized persons and their culture. Created while Oiticica was self-exiled to New York in the 1970s, the immersive 1973 installation series of Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa–Programa in Progress, or Cosmococas, operate on multiple levels to transform pop and underground culture into a psychedelic experience. Made in collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Neville D’Almeida (b. 1941), for each of the five original Cosmococas the artists crafted two sets of instructions: one for public institutional presentations and, in an anti-elitist effort, another for display in private homes. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cosmococas, the artist’s nonprofit foundation, the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, has organized a year-long celebration for 2023, during which the series has been installed in cities around the world. 

The Hunter College Art Galleries have joined the initiative to present Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococas at the Leubsdorf Gallery from October 12, 2023–March 30, 2024. This exhibition features the United States premiere of two private Cosmococas and includes archival material to provide historical context for the layers of political commentary embedded in the subversive, psychedelic series. 

Curated by Daniela Mayer. The exhibition was developed in conjunction with a two-semester independent study by Hunter College MA Art History students Thais Bignardi, Rowan Diaz-Toth, and Angelica Pomar. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Hunter College Foundation with additional support from Lisson Gallery, Leon Tovar Gallery, and Sokoloff + Associates.

Click HERE for digital zine & additional reading.
Click HERE for library guide to the exhibition reading room.

Every exhibition is a collaboration. Sincere thanks to all those listed below and the many others who contributed to the development and production of Cosmic Shelter.

Curators: Daniela Mayer with Thais Bignardi, Rowan Diaz-Toth, and Angelica Pomar. 
Hunter College Art Galleries: Harper Montgomery, Katie Hood Morgan, Tara Ohanian, and Phi Nguyen
Art Installation: Phi Nguyen with Joseph Gannon, Cannon Michael, Jules Oñate, Kevin Fusco, George Simonds, and Holden Pham
Exhibition Design: Liz Naiden with Daniela Mayer
Installation Photography: Argenis Apollinario 
Publication and Graphic Design: Natalie Wedeking
Technology and AV: Liz Naiden
Translations: Gustavo Aguiar (labels/essays), Patricio Orellano (Jardim de Guerra)
Website: Tara Ohanian

Special thanks to Neville D’Almeida, Cesar Oiticica Filho and the Projeto Hélio Oiticica for their collaboration.

C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction

February 2–April 29, 2023
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12–5 pm

Opening Reception: February 2, 7–9 pm

Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Entrance between Lexington and Park Avenues

Born to a family of scholar-officials at the twilight of the Qing dynasty, C. C. Wang (Wang Chi-ch’ien 王己千, 1907–2003) mastered the traditional ink and brush techniques in Republican Shanghai and immigrated to New York City in 1949. There he sought to preserve the tradition of classical Chinese painting through engagement with new ideas, materials, and forms. Drawing inspiration from past masters in the history of Chinese painting, as well as New York’s artistic climate in the wake of World War II, Wang advanced breakthrough transformations in ink painting.

C. C. Wang is best known as a preeminent twentieth-century connoisseur and collector of pre-modern Chinese art, a reputation that often overshadows his own art. Held twenty years after the artist’s death, C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction recenters Wang’s extraordinary career on his own artistic practice to reveal an original quest for tradition and innovation in the global twentieth century. Spanning seven decades, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s distinctive synthesis of Chinese ink painting and American postwar abstraction.

In concert with the exhibition, the Hunter College Art Galleries are producing a comprehensive catalogue published in collaboration with the Weisman Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota and Hirmer Publishers. This book is the first retrospective monograph on the renowned artist, collector, and connoisseur C. C. Wang and features texts by scholars Wen-shing Chou, Daniel M. Greenberg, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, and Arnold Chang with additional contributions by Hunter College Graduate Art History candidates and an undergraduate student from the University of Minnesota. Support for this publication is provided by the Wolf Kahn Foundation and Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation on behalf of artists Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn.

Curated by Wen-shing Chou and Daniel M. Greenberg with Hans Hofmann Graduate Curatorial Fellow Margaret Liu Clinton.

C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction was developed through a two-semester curatorial seminar at Hunter College led by Professor Wen-shing Chou with M.A. Art History students Thais Bignardi-Engstrom, Carolyn Bishop, Rawls Bolton, Jeremy Gloster, Sophie Kaufman, Emerald Lucas, Lindsey Poremba, and Mia Ye.

C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction is made possible by the generous support of the James Howell Foundation, the Leubsdorf Fund, the Wolf Kahn Foundation and Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation on behalf of artists Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn, and the Renate, Hans, and Maria Hofmann Trust.

Please find the full press kit here. For further press inquiries please contact Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, at swat@hunter.cuny.edu.

Dennis Delgado
Alicia Henry
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Titus Kaphar
Whitfield Lovell
Lava Thomas

Curated by Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine.

Exhibition and tour organized by Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York in collaboration with the University Art Galleries at UC Irvine, Palo Alto Art Center, and Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

For more information about The Black Index programming and exhibition tour visit: https://www.theblackindex.art/

“‘We exist in other ways… to see us, to find us’ – UC Irvine debuts ‘The Black Index’ exhibition” in the LA Times January 16, 2021.
“Six Black Artists Test the Limits of Portraiture” in Hyperallergic February 19, 2021
“The Black Index” in 4Columns February 25, 2022

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce the traveling group exhibition The Black Index featuring the work of Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas. The artists included in The Black Index build upon the tradition of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonialist images. Using drawing, performance, printmaking, sculpture, and digital technology to transform the recorded image, these artists question our reliance on photography as a privileged source for documentary objectivity and understanding. Their works offer an alternative practice—a Black index—that still serves as a finding aid for information about Black subjects, but also challenges viewers’ desire for classification.

The works in The Black Index make viewers aware of their own expectations of Black figuration by interrupting traditional epistemologies of portraiture through unexpected and unconventional depictions. These works image the Black body through a conceptual lens that acknowledges the legacy of Black containment that is always present in viewing strategies. The approaches used by Delgado, Henry, Hinkle, Kaphar, Lovell, and Thomas suggest understandings of Blackness and the racial terms of our neo-liberal condition that counter legal and popular interpretations and, in turn, offer a paradigmatic shift within Black visual culture.

The Black Index is dedicated to David C. Driskell.

TOUR DATES

University Art Galleries at UCI
January 9, 2021 – March 20, 2021 (online only)
https://uag.arts.uci.edu/exhibit/black-index

Palo Alto Art Center
May 1 – August 22, 2021

Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin
September 16 – December 12, 2021

Hunter College Art Galleries, Leubsdorf Gallery
February 1 – April 3, 2022

ABOUT THE PUBLICATION

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Hunter College Art Galleries with Hirmer Publishers are producing a comprehensive full color illustrated catalogue (available spring 2021.) Edited by Bridget R. Cooks and Sarah Watson, the publication includes a  comprehensive curatorial essay by Bridget R. Cooks PhD., with additional essays by CalvinJohn Smiley, PhD. Assistant Professor in  the Sociology department at Hunter College, CUNY and Sarah Watson, as well as artist bios written by Re’al Christian, Hunter College MA Art History/Curatorial Certificate Candidate and Ella Turenne, Visual Studies PhD. Candidate UC Irvine.  The publication for The Black Index can be purchased here.

Lead support for The Black Index is provided by The Ford Foundation with additional support by UCI Confronting Extremism Program, Getty Research Institute, Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Carol and Arthur Goldberg, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, Leubsdorf Fund at Hunter College, Joan Lazarus Fellowship program at Hunter College, Loren and Mike Gordon, Pamela and David Hornik, University of California Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding, University of California Humanities Research Institute, Applied Materials Foundation, Illuminations: The Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative, UCI Humanities Center, Department of African American Studies, Department of Art History, The Reparations Project, the Lehman Foundation, and the UC Irvine Black Alumni Chapter. The Black Index was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities., visit calhum.org, and was funded in part by Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Dennis Delgado was born in the South Bronx and received an MFA from the City College of New York (CUNY). His work examines the ideologies of colonialism and their historical presence in the current moment. Whether working with video games, drone images, or looking at historical sites (such as the Bronx Zoo), his practice reflects on the Eurocentric perspectives present in popular institutions and in American visual culture. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and at the Cooper Union. https://www.delgadostudio.net/

Alicia Henry received her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Yale University. She has garnered numerous awards and grants from various foundations including the Ford Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She has exhibited at the Cheekwood Museum and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Henry currently teaches at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, The Made in LA 2012 Biennial and The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times. She is also the recipient of several awards including: The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Student Fellowship, and The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award. https://www.kachstudio.com/

Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, MI and lives and works in New Haven, CT. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of numerous prizes and awards including the MacArthur Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Fund grant (2018), Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant (2016), and Creative Capital grant (2015). Kaphar’s work, Analogous Colors (2020), was featured on the cover of the June 15, 2020 issue of TIME. He gave a TED talk at the annual conference in Vancouver 2017, where he completed one of his whitewash paintings, Shifting the Gaze, onstage. Kaphar’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1 and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among others. His work is included in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AK; the 21C Museum Collection; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, FL, amongst others. https://kapharstudio.com/

Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his installations that incorporate masterful Conté crayon portraits of anonymous African Americans from between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. In 2007, Lovell was awarded with a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Works by Lovell are featured in major museum collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, DC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; The Yale University Art Gallery; The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Seattle Art Museum, WA, and many others. https://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/whitfield-lovell

Lava Thomas was born in Los Angeles, CA. She studied at UCLA’s School of Art Practice and received a BFA from California College of the Arts. Thomas is a recipient of the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award and a Lucas Artists Fellowship Award at Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2021). Thomas has participated in artist residencies at Facebook Los Angeles (2020), Headlands Center for the Arts (2018) and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. In 2015, she received the Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors. Thomas’s work is included in the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial exhibition, The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the International Print Center, New York, NY; the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the United States Consulate General in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; the M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA. Thomas's work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, SF Chronicle, The Guardian, KQED Arts, The Art Newspaper, and LA Weekly. http://www.lavathomas.com/

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Bridget R. Cooks is Associate Professor in UC Irvine’s Department of African American Studies and Department of Art History. Cooks' research focuses on African American art and culture, Black visual culture, museum criticism, film, feminist theory and post-colonial theory. She holds a Ph.D. from the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester and has received a number of awards, grants and fellowships for her work, including the prestigious James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History for her book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts: 2011) and the Henry Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Some of her other publications can be found in Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly. Her next book is titled, Norman Rockwell: The Civil Rights Paintings.

Cooks has also curated several exhibitions including The Art of Richard Mayhew at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2009-2010); Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California (2018) at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; and Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective (2019) at the California African American Museum (CAAM). Prior to her appointment at UCI, she taught in the Department of Art and Art History and the Program of Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University. She also served as museum educator for the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

ABOUT THE HUNTER COLLEGE ART GALLERIES

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter of a century ago. The galleries provide a space for critical engagement with art and pedagogy, bringing together historical scholarship, contemporary artistic practice, and experimental methodology. The galleries are committed to producing exhibitions, events, and scholarship in dialogue with the intellectual discourse generated by the faculty and students at Hunter and serve as an integral extension of the department’s academic programs.

ABOUT HUNTER COLLEGE

Hunter College, located in the heart of Manhattan, is the largest senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY). Founded in 1870, it is also one of the oldest public colleges in the country. More than 23,000 students currently attend Hunter, pursuing undergraduate and graduate classes in more than 170 areas of study. Hunter’s student body is as diverse as New York City itself. For 150 years, Hunter has provided educational opportunities for women and minorities, and today, students from every walk of life and every corner of the world attend Hunter. In addition to offering a multitude of academic programs in its prestigious School of the Arts and Sciences, Hunter offers a wide breadth of programs in its preeminent Schools of Education, Nursing, Social Work, Health Professions, and Urban Public Health.

Please find the full press kit here. For further press inquiries please contact Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, at swat@hunter.cuny.edu .

Life as Activity: David Lamelas

Curated by Harper Montgomery, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art with Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, and Re’al Christian, Lazarus Graduate Curatorial Fellow, and with MA and MFA students enrolled in the curatorial practicum seminar: The Transgressive Itineraries of Conceptualism.

Hunter College Art Galleries
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street, New York, NY

November 3 – December 18, 2021
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11-5 pm

The Desert People (1974) and The Invention of Dr. Morel (2000) are screened as a double feature with approximately a 70 minute running time.

Screening Start Times:
11:30
12:45
2:15
3:45

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Life as Activity: David Lamelas, an exhibition marking the artist’s first solo show in New York in more than a decade. For over half a century, Lamelas (born 1946, Buenos Aires) has made work that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art by defying conventions of artistic media. Although he is globally recognized as a ground-breaking figure of conceptual art, his explorations with the spatial qualities of film and the signifiers of identity have not been adequately investigated. Life as Activity focuses on Lamelas’s experimentation with film and his examination of identity and narrative fiction in light of his ongoing insistence that his artistic practice has always, in one way or another, been grounded in his sense of himself as a sculptor.

The exhibition brings together sculpture, film, and photography made across many decades and locations to center this aspect of Lamelas’s artistic practice. These works include two key sculptural installations he made in Buenos Aires in 1966 and 1967, Situación de cuatro placas de aluminio (Four Changeable Plaques), a moveable configuration of aluminum sheets, and Límite de una proyección I (Limit of a Projection I), a spotlight in a dark room; a series of ten photographs shot in London that pose as film stills for a non-existent movie, The Violent Tapes of 1975; and two films, The Desert People, a pseudo-documentary about a road trip to a Native American reservation which was shot in Los Angeles in 1974 and The Invention of Dr. Morel, a film based on the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel (1940), which was filmed in Potsdam, Germany in 2000. Both films will be screened on an ongoing basis at set times, which will be available on the Leubsdorf Gallery website: leubsdorfgallery.org. Showcasing the ways in which Lamelas makes us aware of how the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by encounters with space and time, all of these works invite us to participate in scenarios in which container, contained, observer, and observed become blurred.

On occasion of the exhibition, a publication has been produced that includes texts on Lamelas by Professor Harper Montgomery and students in Hunter’s graduate programs in Art History and Studio Art. Essays focus on twelve works by Lamelas and include previously unpublished materials from the artist’s papers. Published in collaboration with Hirmer Verlag, the book is distributed by the University of Chicago Press and available for purchase here.

Both the book and the exhibition have been developed in close collaboration with David Lamelas, who worked with students via Zoom on both projects during the course of the pandemic, from spring of 2020 through the fall of 2021.

Life as Activity: David Lamelas results from an Artist Seminar Initiative grant awarded by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), which advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America. It was organized under the auspices of ISLAA’s Artist Seminar Initiative, an educational and curatorial program that fosters intimate exchanges between students and living Latin American and Latinx artists.

Additional support for Life as Activity: David Lamelas is made possible by Joan Lazarus, Gagosian Gallery and the James Howell Foundation in support of the Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies, and by the galleries’ sustaining supporters the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Carol and Arthur Goldberg, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and the Leubsdorf Fund.

David Lamelas first studied art at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina and began to exhibit his work in the lively gallery scene there in 1963. Making sculptural installations that explored minimal forms, the materials of industry and mass media, and pop, Lamelas was at the center of the experimental avant-gardism encouraged by the critic and curator Jorge Romero Brest at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella during much of the 1960s. After winning the prize for sculpture at the 1967 São Paulo Biennial, Lamelas traveled to Europe to represent Argentina in the 1968 Venice Biennial. Having won a scholarship from the British government to study art in London, Lamelas moved to London the same year, where he attended Saint Martin’s School of Art. In 1969 and 1970, Lamelas was invited to participate in groundbreaking exhibitions of conceptual art organized by Anny De Decker for Prospect and by Michel Claura and Seth Siegelaub in Paris. In 1969, Lamelas began to use film to explore relationships of time and space and themes of narrative and character development. A trip in 1974 to Los Angeles inspired Lamelas to investigate glamour, dramatic narrative, television, and to make works that highlighted the proximity of reality and fiction. In 1976, Lamelas moved to Los Angeles and during the mid- and late-1970s his work took the form of video and television projects investigating how stereotype and myth fashion reality in the United States. Collaborations with Hildegarde Duane during this period produced interrogations of gender and racial and ethnic stereotypes and videos that brought to light the entertainment quality of the news. Film and digital video have continued to be a focus of Lamelas’s work, along with his consistent engagement with sculptural projects. In 1997, after Lamelas and other progenitors of conceptualism appeared in the exhibition 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, he was the subject of the retrospective, David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time at the Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art). In 2006, David Lamelas, Extranjero, Foreigner, Étranger, Ausländer took place at the Museo Tamayo and Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires); and in 2017 and 2018, respectively, he was the subject of one-person shows at Malba and the University Art Museum, California State University (supported by the Getty Foundation), and at the Broad Museum of Michigan State University in 2018. He continues to make work that questions boundaries and disrupts art historians’ attempts to map conventional categories onto his unclassifiable and provocative practice.

BFA Thesis Show: Extra Virgin

December 11, 2019 – January 12, 2020
Opening reception: December 11, 4–8pm

Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 E. 68th Street
NY NY 10065

Isaac Dunne
Susan Flores
Sarah McKendry
Peter Kihoon Park
Sze Wing Shum

The Hunter College BFA Program and the Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present the Fall 2019 BFA Thesis Exhibition, Extra Virgin at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, December 11, 2019 through January 12, 2020. The exhibition will feature works by Isaac Dunne, Susan Flores, Sarah McKendry, Kihoon Peter Park and Sze Wing Shum. The gallery is free and open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 1–6pm.

Chris Domenick: STAGE
In conjunction with the project Archipelago, 2019
October 10–December 8, 2019
Opening Reception: October 10, 7–9pm

Hunter College Art Galleries
Leubsdorf Gallery Atrium - West Lobby
132 E. 68th Street, New York, NY

Archipelago is a project by artist Chris Domenick composed of five kitchen islands occupying various sites around New York City. Throughout the fall of 2019, each island will have its own event—some islands will inhabit their spaces for a day, some for a month, some for longer. For seven weeks STAGE will live in the Atrium of the Leubsdorf Gallery in the West Lobby of Hunter College, a space activated by public events like voting, blood drives, and gallery openings. STAGE is presented concurrently with the exhibition Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects, on view at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery October 10–December 1, 2019. The exhibition brings together a selection of large ink-on-paper drawings that illustrate a fantasy architectural complex.

Domenick’s approach to making work and his choice of materials have consistently been inspired by American suburban landscapes, interior and surface architecture, and historical sites across the country—both abandoned and active. The islands: DOCK, STAGE, STATUE, STORAGE, and FOUNTAIN evoke the open concept floor plan of domestic architecture—an aspirational class trope. Additionally, the works’ titles and locations highlight the metonymic properties of each piece. STAGE produces a social space, latent with the performativity of its inhabitants. Built with a contractor's touch, it is faux-finished like a theater prop, its top prepared with a fresh coat of black paint for opening night. To accompany STAGE, a “User's Guide” written by Daniel Marcus offers guidelines on “how to behave” in the performative kitchen inspired by Julia Child’s media personality. 

Chris Domenick (b. 1982, Philadelphia) received an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York and has participated in residencies at The Shandaken Project, New York; The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program New York; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME;  and Recess Activities, New York; among others.  Recent projects include Plumbat Motel, Brooklyn, NY; The Porch The Openat 14a, Hamburg, DE; Your Shell Is In the Unending, (in collaboration with Em Rooney) at The Beeler Gallery, Columbus, OH; Particulate Paper Records of Timein Cabinet Magazine;  and 5 O D A Y Sat MASSMoCA, North Adams, MA.  He has been included in exhibitions at Canada Gallery, New York; The Queens Museum, Queens, NY;  Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles; The Vanity East, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York;  Essex Flowers, New York; Situations, New York; Regina Rex, New York; and Room East, New York; among others.  Domenick currently co-curates the project space GERTRUDE in Stockbridge, MA with Em Rooney.

Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects
Curated by Sarah Watson
October 11–December 1, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 10, 7–9 pm

Hunter College Art Galleries
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street, New York, NY
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6 pm

Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects at Hunter’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery. Robert Morris, who died in November 2018, was an alumnus of Hunter College and a member of the faculty for over 40 years. Hunter’s exhibition focuses on a series of large-scale drawings made by the artist in 1971, many of which were first shown in Morris’s infamous Tate Gallery exhibition of the same year. The Tate’s catalogue describes that exhibition as “a sequence of structures which, although they resemble in their uncompromised simplicity Morris’ earlier sculptures, invite physical participation of the public.” The interaction that Morris encouraged, however, ultimately resulted in visitor injuries as well as damage to the structures, leading to the closure of the exhibition only four days after it opened. In 2009, in collaboration with the artist, the Tate Modern reconceived the 1971 exhibition: this reinstallation, Bodyspacemotionthings, included newly designed versions of the participatory structures, but none of the drawings.

The Para-architectural projects —observations, exercise courts, aqueducts, courts, concourse, etc., as the drawings are titled in the 1971 Tate Gallery catalogue, comprise some twenty very large, ink-on-paper drawings that illustrate a fantasy architectural complex. The exhibition at Hunter brings together a selection of these drawings, including a work from Hunter College’s own collection, Section of a Walled Courtyard¾on view for the very first time. While Hunter’s drawing has not been exhibited previously, several of the other works in this series were included in exhibitions during the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s in Europe and the United States. Among these exhibitions is The Drawings of Robert Morris, curated by Thomas Krens at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1982. The publication for this exhibition has proven invaluable in identifying a number of these drawings as well as in gaining insight into Morris’s thinking about these works:

I have a persistent and recurring fantasy of a complex of spaces, forms, and functions. The temple-tomb complex of Djoser, the Great Stupa at Sanchi with its changing levels and promenades, the ramps of Hatshepsut, the enclosures, pools, arcades of Gopura or Angkor Wat, the great court at Ibn Tulun, Stonehenge and the observatory at Jaipur, the vast but human scale of unfolding spaces, gates, and enclosures of the Imperial City in Peking, the Sung bridge and pond of the Shen Mu Tien, the amphitheaters of Muyu-uray, the grim Mayan Ball Courts at Copán, the siting and forms of the American Indian works in Ohio, the troglodytic complexes at Luoyang or the kivas of Mesa Verde, the pavilions and levels and climatic considerations of Fatehpur Sikri, the militaristic revetment, escarpment, glacis, the zig-zag rampart of the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above Cusco, even the parade grounds of Nuremberg. . . . Neither religious nor militaristic the fantasy complex circles around a secular re-entry to time, place and function. In the Bath House Observatory one could soak and know precisely the location of that ultimate source of energy that has heated the water. One could work out at dawn in the Morning Exercise Court (the T’ia Chi used to be practiced at dawn outside the Altar of Heaven in Peking), one could walk for miles along the top of the meandering Aqueduct or wade barefoot in one of the shallow raceways on a summer day, take a snooze under the overhang of an Enclosed Courtyard, meet friends on a grand Concourse, that was not in the Bronx, check out the Solar Furnace Observatory on a bright, cold day, run up and down the ramps that connect the endless, interlocking Courtyards. I’m waiting for an enlightened W.P.A. to build this complex.

These drawings also connect to Morris’s Observatory, a large earthwork completed in Arnhem, the Netherlands, as part of the exhibition Sonsbeek 71 in 1971. In the show’s brochure, Morris posits in a short text titled “Observations on the Observatory,” that the “Observatory is different from any art being made today. It has a different social intention and esthetic structure from other art being made at present. I have no term for the work. A kind of ‘para-architectural complex’ would be close but awkward.” He continues that this concept “derives more from Neolithic and Oriental architectural complexes. Enclosures, courts, ways, sightlines, varying grades, etc., assert that the work provides a physical experience for the mobile human body.”

The drawings presented in Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects connect to Morris’s sustained interest in ancient and primarily Non-Western architectural forms, and to his concerns with presentness as an intimate experience in which physical space and “an ongoing immediate present” are bound. In turn, the exhibition at Hunter offers an entry point to consider what Morris might have meant by the “fantasy complex circles around a secular re-entry to time, place and function.”

Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects is made possible by the generous support of Carol and Arthur Goldberg, The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, the Joan Lazarus Curatorial Fellowship Program, the Leubsdorf Fund, and Castelli Gallery. We also extend a very special thanks to Barbara Castelli for her invaluable assistance with this exhibition.

ABOUT ROBERT MORRIS

Robert Morris was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1931. In 1959, Morris moved to New York City, where he met John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and La Monte Young. At that time, Morris created his first large-scale sculptures, and played a central role in the development of the Minimalist Art Movement, emerging in the early ’60s principally from the stable of artists of the Green Gallery on 57th Street. In 1967, Morris created his first “Felt” pieces, which were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1968. This same year, in his seminal essay “Anti-Form” that appeared in Artforum, Morris articulated his growing interest in the concept of “indeterminacy” which argued for an art that is based in process and that advocated chance and other organic processes in the creation of minimal sculpture.

Robert Morris has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives at institutions including the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC (1969; traveled to the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); the Tate, London (1971); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994; traveled to Centre Pompidou, Paris). The artist’s work is included in major public collections worldwide, chief among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute, Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate Modern, London.

Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947–Present

Curated by Prof. Maria Antonella Pelizzari with graduate students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate

September 29–November 26, 2017
Opening Reception: September 28, 2017, 7­–9pm

Leubsdorf Gallery
Hunter West Building
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065

Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm

On the occasion of Magnum Photos’ 70th Anniversary, the Hunter College Art Galleries presents Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947–Present, an exhibition that revisits the history of the cooperative photo agency, focusing on the idea of “Community”—a subject that has been central to the practice of photographers and continues to be crucial in our time. 

Framing Community features a selection of seventeen visions and narratives representing communities in a conflicted, dispersed, and racially fractured state. The subjects of this photo exhibition are searching to belong, while living in exile and navigating shifting politics and identities. Organized into four thematic sections: Longing for Community, Shifting Community, Contested Territories, and Displaced Community, the exhibition includes works by photographers Bruno Barbey, René Burri, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Bieke Depoorter, Carl de Keyzer, Paul Fusco, Jim Goldberg, Thomas Hoepker, Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas, Alessandra Sanguinetti, David Seymour, Alec Soth, Larry Towell, Peter van Agtmael and Alex Webb. 

Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 on the shared belief in humanist values, has seen a world in increasing disarray at the brink of social change, alienated by divisive politics and migrations.  Photographers, witnesses of these fluctuating conditions, have demonstrated a creative sensibility and individual engagement, generating images that have marked history. These photographers’ wide range of approaches to social documentary is relevant in regard to an idea of community that has radically changed in the seven decades of the history of Magnum. If the first years were marked by a universalist utopia that celebrated human sameness, across these decades, photographers have increasingly questioned their position as outsiders looking in, negotiating religious and political diversity while seeking trust from within these various communities. 

Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947–Present was developed over a two-semester curatorial seminar, led by Art History Professor Maria Antonella Pelizzari, and is the result of an exceptional team effort by the graduate students involved in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate at Hunter College. In addition to the exhibition, the class produced a comprehensive catalogue, published by Hirmer Verlag and available through University of Chicago Press and Thames and Hudson. 

Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947–Present is made possible by the generous support of the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., The Crossways Foundation, Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg, the Leubsdorf Fund, Linda Macklowe, and Agnes Gund in support of the Curatorial Certificate Program.

ABOUT THE ADVANCED CURATORIAL CERTIFICATE
Hunter’s Department of Art & Art History has long provided its graduate students the opportunity to work with faculty and our galleries’ professional staff on exhibitions of exceptional quality.  The new Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies builds on that tradition and the curatorial interests and ambitions of Hunter faculty and students—and our commitment to exhibitions whose themes, theses, and checklists have been developed and honed by our students. The program is designed to offer both a theoretical and historical grounding in curatorial practices and practical experience in exhibition organization and display and object research and preservation. Every student enrolled in the certificate program has the opportunity to work on an exhibition from inception to fruition, whether in the annual Curatorial Seminar or in faculty-supervised guided internships in the Hunter College Art Galleries or in museums and galleries beyond the College.

Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno

June 21–August 20, 2017
Opening reception: Wednesday, June 21, 5–8pm

Leubsdorf Gallery
Hunter West Building
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065

Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm

On the evening of the June 21st summer solstice, Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno—the first major U.S. exhibition about the American poet, artist, activist and muse John Giorno—will open simultaneously across 13 locations in New York City. I ♥ John Giorno is a work of art by Giorno’s husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The exhibition is a celebration of the life and work of John Giorno—an artist whose work has influenced generations. Taking place in his chosen hometown, the exhibition affords a unique opportunity for Giorno’s contributions to be recognized within the canons of American poetry and art history, and celebrates the artist’s 80th birthday. 

I ♥ John Giorno is an unprecedented collaboration between leading non-profit and alternative spaces across New York, which are joining forces for the first time to mount a multilayered exhibition on a single subject. Partner venues include: Artists Space, High Line Art, Howl! Happening, Hunter College Art Galleries, The Kitchen, New Museum, Red Bull Arts New York, Rubin Museum of Art, Sky Art, Swiss Institute, White Columns, and 80WSE Gallery. Reconfigured as a festival, including installations in galleries and public spaces, as well as a full roster of public programs and events, I ♥ John Giorno is free and open to the public. 

Expanding upon the exhibition that took place at Palais de Tokyo in Paris from October 2015 to January 2016, I ♥ John Giorno has been re-conceptualized specifically for New York, highlighting Giorno’s significant relationship with the city, and his singular role in creating and fostering community here. The 18-part exhibition has been divided by Rondinone into chapters reflecting the layers of Giorno’s life and work, his longstanding influence on and dedication to his chosen hometown of New York City, and his relationships with artist friends, lovers and collaborators including: Richard Bosman, Phong Bui, Angela Bulloch, Anne Collier, Verne Dawson, Judith Eisler, John Giorno, Mark Handforth, Matthew Higgs, Pierre Huyghe, Françoise Janicot, Scott King, Elizabeth Peyton, Ugo Rondinone, Erik Satie, Kendall Shaw, Michael Stipe, Billy Sullivan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Peter Ungerleider,  Joan Wallace, and Andy Warhol, whose work will be presented as part of the festival.

The exhibition format echoes the symbiotic relationship between Ugo Rondinone and John Giorno, who have been both partners and collaborators for the past two decades. Rondinone describes the show saying: “I ♥ John Giorno is a kaleidoscopic exhibition about the life and work of American poet and Tibetan Buddhist John Giorno, whose rich and stimulating life has woven many threads of American culture and spirituality. Within the dreamscape of the exhibition, one is invited to wander through the juxtaposed realm of art and poetry where image and language build upon themselves in a layered stream of consciousness driven by the biographical, the conceptual, and the emotional.”    

I ♥ John Giorno is made possible in part by public funds from Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council. The I ♥ John Giorno organizing committee gratefully acknowledges generous support from Van Cleef & Arpels and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thanks to Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, London, New York and Paris; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York and Zürich; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels and New York; Galerie Kamel Mennour, London and Paris; Kukje Gallery, Seoul; and Sadie Coles, London for production support. Additional thanks to Ophelia and Bill Rudin as well as the General Consulate of Switzerland in New York for their gracious contribution, and to agnès b. for in kind support.

ABOUT JOHN GIORNO
John Giorno (b. 1936, New York City, USA) is an artistic innovator who has been defying conventional definitions of poet, performer, political activist, Tibetan Buddhist, and visual artist since he emerged upon the New York art scene during the late 1950s. In the 1960s, he began producing multi-media, multi-sensory events concurrent with Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He worked with Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) in 1966, and with Bob Moog in 1967-68. His breakthroughs in this area include Dial-A-Poem, which was first presented in 1968 at the Architectural Society of New York, and was later included in the MoMA’s Information exhibition in 1970. His contributions are significant to many culturally defining moments: the Beat generation, Pop Art, Punk, the Pictures Generation, and the hip-hop era. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris; and Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; among others.

ABOUT UGO RONDINONE
go Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) is a renowned mixed-media artist who lives and works in New York. Recent solo shows include: your age my age and the age of the rainbow, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; let’s start this day again, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; every time the sun comes up, Place Vendome, Paris; girono d’oro + notti d’argento, Mercati die Traiano, Rome; becoming soil, Carre d’Art, Nîmes; seven magic mountains, Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art/Desert of Nevada; vocabulary of solitude, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Ugo Rondinone: I ♡ John Giorno, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; golden days and silver nights, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and artists and poets, Secession, Vienna. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others. Upcoming shows include the world just makes me laugh at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; and good evening beautiful blue at Bass Museum of Art, Miami.

Ugo Rondinone: I ♡ John Giorno is made possible in part by public funds from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. The I ♡ John Giorno organizing committee gratefully acknowledges generous support from Van Cleef & Arpels, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and LUMA Foundation. Thanks to Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, London, New York and Paris; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York and Zürich; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels and New York; Galerie Kamel Mennour, London and Paris; Kukje Gallery, Seoul; and Sadie Coles, London for production support. Additional thanks to Ophelia and Bill Rudin as well as the General Consulate of Switzerland in New York for their gracious contribution, and to agnès b. for in kind support.

JOHN GIORNO DANCING
Kendall Shaw
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery displays works by Kendall Shaw depicting his close friend John Giorno. In 1963, Shaw took photos of Giorno dancing that later inspired his spare paintings whose black outlines and colorful silhouettes depict Giorno’s body in motion. The works were first exhibited at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in September 1964. For the first time, a number of Shaw’s original photographs will also be exhibited alongside the paintings.  

GRASPING AT EMPTINESS
Richard Bosman and John Giorno
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery

Also on view at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery is Grasping at Emptiness, a collaboration featuring Giorno’s 1978 eponymous poem and 20 drawings by Richard Bosman. Bosman’s dynamic depictions of frustration evoke Giorno’s poem about a fraught end to a relationship. This book was published in 1985 by the Kulchur Foundation, an independent press and granting organization that supported poets and critics now primarily known as part of the New York School. 

JOHN GIORNO AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM
With works by John Giorno and Ugo Rondinone
205 Hudson Gallery

“When you’re a Buddhist, you work with your mind in meditation, and with various practices you train the mind to realize its empty nature. Strangely, that’s the way I make poems! Maybe it’s developing the ability to see what arises in one’s mind, how it arises and its nature, that makes Buddhism very sympathetic to poets.” — John Giorno

John Giorno was first introduced to Buddhism during his undergraduate studies at Columbia University in 1956 as part of its Core Curriculum.  After several trips to India during the 1970s, he discovered Tibetan Buddhism and became a disciple of Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–1987), master of the Nyingmapa lineage, which Giorno actively helped to promulgate in the United States. 

Every New Year since 1986, Giorno has welcomed Buddhist masters and students to his home for the traditional fire ceremony, during which the obstacles of the previous year are released to usher in the new one. For this exhibition, Giorno’s personal shrine from his home, which is decorated with intricate brocade from the sacred pilgrimage site of Benaras in India, has been relocated to the gallery space.  Additionally, selected from the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art, a group of eighteen thangkas—Tibetan paintings—are also on display along with two from Giorno’s personal collection. 

Padmasambhava, the founding figure of the Nyingmapa order, is depicted in a number of the works. Considered to be a “Second Buddha” in Tibet, Padmasambhava played a predominant role in the advancement of Buddhism across Tibet in the 8th century. Padmasambhava is endowed with superhuman qualities and shown through Tibetan iconography in a variety of forms.

Guru Pema Drakpo is one of the most wrathful depictions of Padmasambhava, an illustration of the powerful energy required to neutralize and transmute the obstacles that inevitably arise on the path to Enlightenment and spiritual accomplishment.  He holds in his hand a vajra or “Diamond Thunderbolt,” a symbol of Enlightenment and a ritual object.  Padmasambhava is believed to have been essential to the dissemination of the teachings of the Vajrakila, also known as the “Diamond Dagger,” throughout Tibet.

Conversely, Guru Pema Jungne is a more peaceful depiction of Padmasambhava. Known as the “Lotus-Born,” he is often shown sitting on a flower and dressed in the robes of a monk, teaching Dharma to the people.  In his right hand he holds a diamond scepter, while in his left he holds a skullcap of clear nectar.

AIDS TREATMENT PROJECT
With works by John Giorno, Ugo Rondinone and Peter Ungerleider
205 Hudson Gallery

205 Hudson Gallery presents material from Giorno’s AIDS Treatment Project begun in 1984. Conceived as a direct-action program, Giorno described it as “my personal effort to combat with all-pervasive compassion, the catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic. Cash grants for emergency situations: back rent, telephone and utilities, food, nursing, alternative medicine not covered by Medicaid, taxis, whatever is needed. Money given with love and affection.”

Facilitated through his non-profit foundation, Giorno Poetry Systems, many artists in his LP series, such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Patti Smith, among many others, donated their royalties to the AIDS Treatment Project. Giorno also organized benefit performances at the Beacon Theater with artists including Debbie Harry, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Sonic Youth; posters from these concerts are included here. The AIDS Treatment Project concluded in 2004, though Giorno has continued to help poets and artists since with medical problems.

Peter Ungerleider’s film Loving Kindness, presented with the AIDS Treatment Project documentation, is a portrait of Giorno that focuses on his work with the AIDS Treatment Project interspersed with his musings on death within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

—

Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno is made possible by the generous support of the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg, the Leubsdorf Fund, and Agnes Gund in support of the Curatorial Certificate Program.

Homecoming: Katherine Behar, Oliver Herring, Julia Jacquette, Yashua Klos

Organized by Sarah Watson with Jenn Bratovich

April 8–May 7, 2017

Leubsdorf Gallery
Hunter West Building
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065

Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce Homecoming, an exhibition of four Hunter Studio Art MFA alumni: Katherine Behar (MFA 2009), Oliver Herring (MFA 1991), Julia Jacquette (MFA 1992) and Yashua Klos (MFA 2009).  The exhibition, scheduled to open in conjunction with Hunter college-wide Alumni Reunion on Saturday, April 8, 2017, will be on view through Sunday, May 7, 2017.  The exhibition marks the inauguration of a new initiative, also entitled “Homecoming,” developed in collaboration with the MFA Student Organization, and designed to foster connections between current Hunter MFA students and Hunter MFA alumni in a variety of ways, including an annual exhibition in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery.  This year’s inaugural Homecoming exhibition offers the opportunity to highlight the work of just some of Hunter’s internationally recognized alumni artists, allowing our current students to gain a greater understanding of their practice in advance of the visits, interviews, lectures, and tours that are part of the broader initiative. During this exhibition, the gallery will also collaborate with the alumni artists to organize undergraduate-specific programming.

Homecoming artists: the inaugural year includes the artists Katherine Behar (MFA 2009), Oliver Herring (MFA 1991), Julia Jacquette (MFA 1992) and Yashua Klos (MFA 2009).

Exhibitions in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery are made possible by the generous support of the Leubsdorf Fund, the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg, and Joan and Charles Lazarus.

Katherine Behar (Hunter MFA 2009) explores issues of gender and labor in contemporary digital culture. Her work has been presented at festivals, galleries, and performance spaces throughout North America and Europe. Her survey exhibition and catalog Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi was presented at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2016. A previous solo exhibition and catalog, Katherine Behar: E-Waste, premiered at the University of Kentucky in 2014 and traveled to Boston Cyberarts Gallery, MA. Since 2005 she has collaborated with Marianne M. Kim in the performance art duo Disorientalism. Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2016. Her publications And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, coedited with Emmy Mikelson, and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity were published by punctum books the same year.

She has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and others. Behar holds an MFA in combined media from Hunter College, an MA in media ecology from New York University, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is based in New York and is Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College, CUNY.

Oliver Herring (Hunter MFA 1991) received a BFA from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, UK and an MFA from Hunter College. Throughout the 1990s, Herring became known for hand-knit Mylar and tape sculptures. Inspired by the death of playwright and drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, the project lasted ten years, and revolved around marking time through the accumulation of incremental stitched units. In the late 1990s his practice expanded to include improvised stop-motion videos and performances that at first involved friends and eventually strangers on the street. These interactive works were counterpoints to the more stationary and solitary work practice of knitting. A few years later Herring began using volunteers and photography to create elaborately constructed fragmented three-dimensional photo sculptures. Much of his recent work involves human interaction, progressing towards unexpected and/or unpredictable finales.

In 2002, Herring created the improvisatory art event TASK, an ongoing series of events, workshops and parties in which participants of all ages and demographics collectively dream up instructions and carry them out with the materials provided. Increasingly, TASK has become a tool in classrooms and communities to access contemporary art in ways that are experimental, open-ended, and accessible to anyone.

Herring’s work has been exhibited widely. In the United States, his work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Performa 09, New York; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Blanton Art Museum, Austin, TX; and the Denver Art Museum, CO. Elsewhere, he has exhibited at the Camden Art Center, London, UK; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; The Kyoto Art Center, Japan; the 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Configura II, Erfurt, Germany; and the 2010 Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan. Me Us Them, a fifteen-year survey of Herring's work, was organized in 2009 at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY.

Julia Jacquette (Hunter MFA 1992) is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, among other institutions. Jacquette’s work was included in the first installment of MoMA PS1's Greater New York exhibition, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Princeton University, and is currently on the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Jacquette’s work is currently the subject of a major museum retrospective at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY. Unrequited and Acts of Play comprises paintings, site-specific murals, and a series of gouache drawings.

Yashua Klos (Hunter MFA 2009) was born in 1977 in Chicago, IL. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Klos obtained an MFA at Hunter College, and a BFA at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL. He was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 2015 and the Joan Mitchell Award in 2014.

Klos’s solo shows include Blank Black, Galerie Anne De Villepoix Paris, FR, 2016; How To Hide in the Wind, Papillion Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); As Below, So Above, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (2015); and We Come Undone, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (2013). Other recent group shows include: Imagine, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2016); Broken English, Tyburn Gallery, London, UK (2015); To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, curated by Hank Willis Thomas, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015); In Plain Sight, Opa Locka ARC, Florida (2014); Draw 2014 Symposium, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2014); and Fore, Studio Museum Harlem in Harlem, New York (2012). Klos has participated in the residency programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, TV; and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.