The Arts Center at Governors Island is Now Open!

The exhibitions at The Arts Center at Governors Island are free and open to all. 2023 exhibitions include:

'Where Time Runs Backwards' by Daniel Shieh with Chia-Lun Chang and Arleene Correa Valencia is a multimedia exhibition featuring five new site-specific works by Taiwanese-born artist Daniel Shieh. Shieh’s work will be paired with the poetry of Chia-Lun Chang—recipient of LMCC’s 2022 Sarah Verdone Writing Award—and textile works by Arleene Correa Valencia. All three artists draw upon conversations with their parents about aspirations for their children and what becoming American entails.

 'ANTI•VENOM' presented by Allies in Arts brings together seven multidisciplinary artists to ask: How do we affirm our humanity in the face of complex harm? In this luminous exhibition of videos, the artists face a troubled reality and transform it. With immersive works in one, two and three channels, the artists direct our gaze towards radiant visions of the future.

As bill-after-bill emerges to criminalize trans and queer bodies, Jacolby Satterwhite's opalescent communities vogue a narrative of interconnectedness, warning that we are in a malignant hell when we hurt each other. Conditions of harm are met with arresting beauty as cobalt and indigo spill out from the installation by Le'Andra LeSeur. Amelia Winger-Bearskin's layered videos, glitch rainbows and dissolve architectures with AI. Joaquin Trujillo reclaims the scapegoated old man in El Viejo. Adorned in red velvet, silver bells and a confetti of ribbons, Trujillo dances a path of return for dispossessed queers. In this year of the rabbit, Andrew Thomas Huang’s muse is a humble young restaurant worker. Through Thomas Huang’s lens, the banality of Matt’s life is beautifully disrupted when he is seduced by an alluring God from the Qing dynasty. In Corinne Spencer’s mesmerizing installation, Black feminine subjects care for one another across generations of life and death. In Sankofa, a Ghanaian principle that represents returning to the past in order to inform a better future, Anna Parisi places viewers in the politicized terrain of Black hair.

'there is nothing you can think that is not the moon' by Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky is a site-specific installation by the collaborative duo Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky that will transform during the exhibition. The black shed currently houses a collection of glowing replicas of antique and vintage objects, originally gathered for the artists’ ongoing public art project, which has previously been staged as a life-scale mock thrift store on the streets of Washington, Toronto, and Orebro (Sweden).  Each object is created in the form of a handmade lantern, assembled from photographs of objects collected and intensively documented by the artists. They are lit in changing patterns that organize the collection into categories such as type and city of origin.