In its fall 2017 season, the New Museum marks its 40th anniversary with several special exhibitions and the inauguration of new gallery spaces and a storefront window display in the adjacent building. The Museum-wide survey Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon leads the season, with solo exhibitions by Kahlil Joseph, Petrit Halilaj, and Helen Johnson, an intervention by Alex Da Corte, and Pursuing the Unpredictable, an archival exhibition on the Museum’s history. The exhibitions by Joseph and Halilaj will be site-specific projects filling new temporary galleries that connect the Ground Floor of the Museum with its adjacent building to the south, at 231 Bowery.
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon
September 27, 2017–January 21, 2018
Second, Third, and Fourth Floors
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon is a major exhibition investigating gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars, featuring an intergenerational group of artists who explore gender beyond the binary to usher in more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity. Since its inception, the New Museum has been committed to urgent ideas, devoting many exhibitions and programs to issues of representation with regard to gender and sexuality. Trigger extends that conversation, considering how even a fluid conception of gender is marked by ongoing negotiations of power and cannot be understood outside its complex intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability. The exhibition will feature over forty artists working across a variety of mediums and genres, including film, video, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and craft. Many embrace explicit pleasure and visual lushness as political strategies, and some deliberately reject or complicate overt representation, turning to poetic language, docufiction, and abstraction to affirm ambiguities and reflect shifting physical embodiment. The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, with Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator, and Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum.
Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play
September 27, 2017–January 7, 2018
South Galleries, Ground Floor
For Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play, his first solo presentation in New York, Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981, Seattle, WA) will debut Fly Paper (2017), a new film installation that departs from his admiration of the work of photographer and artist Roy DeCarava (1919–2009). With Fly Paper, Joseph extends DeCarava’s virtuosity with chiaroscuro effects to the moving image and brings together a range of film and digital footage to contemplate the dimensions of past, present, and future in Harlem and New York City. The film also touches on themes of filiation, influence, and legacy, marking a personal reckoning that intuitively calls upon his connections to the city through his own family. The exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director.
Petrit Halilaj: RU
September 27, 2017–January 7, 2018
South Galleries, Ground Floor
Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kostërrc, Skenderaj-Kosovo) will present a major new project that begins in Runik, the city in which he was born and the site of one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region. An archaeological dig there uncovered 505 objects that comprise part of the country’s most significant material history from the period. Now spread across several countries as the result of the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the most valuable of these objects currently reside in storage at the Natural History Museum in Belgrade. In Petrit Halilaj: RU, Halilaj presents a number of new video works, several large fabric sculptures, and an extensive environment, with the artist’s real and imagined narratives beginning from recollections by Runik’s own inhabitants of discoveries from this site. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.
Helen Johnson: Ends
September 13, 2017–January 14, 2018
Lobby Gallery, Ground Floor
For over a decade, Helen Johnson (b. 1979, Melbourne, Australia) has used painting as a tool to investigate issues around the legacy of colonialism, the construction of national identity, personal history, and contemporary politics in her native Australia. For her first exhibition in an American institution, Johnson has produced a new series of paintings that outline the contours of relationships between individuals, families, social bodies, and institutions. The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.
Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon
September 27, 2017–January 7, 2018
Storefront Window, Ground Floor
Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ) has created a new work for the inaugural installation in the storefront window of the New Museum’s 231 Bowery building, which relaunches the series of window installations that the Museum mounted in the 1980s. Through subtle manipulation, repurposing, and juxtaposition of objects and icons, Da Corte unearths the eerie and absurd qualities that underlie the seemingly familiar. The project is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.
Pursuing the Unpredictable: The New Museum 1977–2017
September 27, 2017–January 7, 2018
Fifth Floor Gallery and Resource Center
Pursuing the Unpredictable reflects on the New Museum’s history as an alternative museum committed to art, ideas, and institutional practices at the forefront of culture and discourse. The exhibition will present a select chronology, designed by Project Projects, featuring highlights from the Museum’s early years through the present, alongside key archival documents, publications, and artworks that reflect the Museum’s consistent themes. These materials bear testament to the institution’s ongoing inquiries into the role of art museums. The exhibition is curated by Alicia Ritson, Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow.
About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
