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 Vick Quezada, Maize Crossing, 2017 CURRENT EXHIBITION
Curated by Sarah Fritchey Que desagradable! explores wrong-doingness as an impolite meeting point between the four artists in this exhibition. Taking direction from Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia (1944), the show asks the viewer to recognize everyday beauty as a lie. In the context of the horror of our socio-political moment, where the world is unraveling from its constitutional seems, the only beauty that we might catch is the admittance of that which is frighteningly not beautiful at all. The show derives its title from this idea, (Que desagradable! is Spanish for How unlovely!), but challenges even Adorno’s role in coining this phrase. The Spanish title refusing to quote Adorno in his original Italian, or English, the art world’s lingua franca. The works in the show spill into and out of the gallery space, questioning the colonizing structures that perpetuate the myth of Western dominance that extends to the art world's by way of its knowledge centers, economy and protected histories.
PAST EXHIBITIONS  Clement Valla, The Universal Texture, 2012 Nature Loves Courage
Curated by Bowie Zunino, Eve Biddle and Jeff Barnett-Winsby, Co-Directors of the Wassaic Project Nature Loves Courage brings together ten emerging New York City artists who step boldly into the outside. The work interprets nature through the lens of the City and deals with the untamed natural world, constructed landscapes, and human interventions. Taking psychedelics proselytizer Terence McKenna’s famous adage as its title, the exhibition features artists who investigate the processes through which nature is manipulated and mediated -- living in it, changing it, improving it, and fighting it. Through photography, sound, projection, painting, installations, and video, these ten artists highlight the ambiguity, and incredible beauty that arises when civilization imposes on nature -- and when nature pushes back.
 Installation view of "Make/Do" at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University in 2014 MAKE/DO: Contemporary Artists Perform Craft Lauren Rosati was selected to curate the first NYPOP travelling exhibition, which opened in January 2014 at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University. There is still space available in the travel schedule. Contact us to learn more about how to participate in our inaugural traveling exhibition.
Curated by Lauren Rosati Creation is performance.—Mikel Dufrenne 1 In 1953, Harold Rosenberg dubbed the work of Jackson Pollock “action painting,” underscoring the notion of the artwork as the result of a creative act. Since then, the concept of performativity has been critical to understanding the production of contemporary art as a process or event and the object of contemporary art as animated by and contingent on the “act” of its creation and reception. Distinct from performance art—which is predicated on the intervention of the artist's own body or the body of another performer—performative objects are static. Yet they reference both the active “manipulation of space” and “the [active] body,” which are “central to the visual impact of the work.”2 This performative turn in contemporary art refers not only to the artwork itself, however, but also to a peculiar kind of engagement between the artist and viewer; if the artist is an active agent in the construction of his or her work, then the viewer (whether a curator or spectator) is, in turn, an active participant in the construction of the work's meaning. MAKE/DO includes the work of five contemporary artists based in New York City who engage with the notion of performativity through the realm of craft. Whether creating mobile habitats constructed from discarded materials (Guzman), or paintings and totems crafted from layers of pigment, wood and paper (Lambert), the artists in this exhibition knit, assemble, scatter, paint, edit, transform and mold materials into objects that retain traces of their creation.3 This exhibition incorporates an expanded conception of craft outside traditional mediums to include painting, video, and performance. The works included in MAKE/DO are notable for their materials (shoddy and select) and quality of production (scrupulous and slapdash), which collapse the distinction between fine art and craft, and encourage us, as viewers, to participate in their re-production and reception, to their “making” and “doing.”
Curator: Eric Gleason This exhibition focuses on six New York City-based artists and one collaborative team in varying stages of their careers whose ideas dictate their media. Historically, painters painted, sculptors sculpted and photographers photographed, while constantly pushing the technical boundaries of their medium. While there were of course prodigious anomalies, especially during the Italian Renaissance, this notion of “painters” and “sculptors” has evolved surprisingly little in the past 700 years. However today, in the age of the Internet when images and information are rapidly and constantly distributed, digested and redistributed, contemporary artists are likely to see 10, 50 or 100 works for every one they see in person. The artificiality of this visual experience allows only the works subject matter to be understood, rather than its physical or technical elements. For this reason, there is a new generation artists who approach each work conceptually, and whose aspirations do not lie in advancing the medium in which they happen to be working during any given series. The title of this exhibition, I’m Over Here Now, is one of many iconic comedic phrases of Andrew Dice Clay, whose crass yet visionary brand of humor had a profound influence on his art form for two decades. The phrase was often employed by Dice Clay when abruptly changing subjects, which occurred with the same relative frequency as the artists in this exhibition change media. More over, to the traditional artistic guard who struggle laboriously to advance their medium of choice, this new generation of artists who claim no allegiance to a particular media represent an inane evolution of art making, just as Dice Clay’s comedy was constantly assailed for its crudeness.
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