We’re thrilled to announce our 2023 Exhibitions!
The Arts Center at Governors Island opens on Saturday May 6, 2023!
Exhibitions at The Arts Center explore a range of ideas and media with an emphasis on site-specific projects that take the Art Center’s unique location into consideration. Special events take place throughout the Summer in conjunction with each of three annual exhibitions, including artist talks, workshops, and The Take Care Series.
The 2023 exhibition season takes inspiration from LMCC’s long history as a supporter of the arts through the theme of the passage of time. Each exhibition offers different perspectives on the ways in which artists respond to ideas about time such as personal history, the legacies of activism, objects we collect, intergenerational relationships, and more.
2023 Exhibition Season on view from May 6-October 1, 2023
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By Daniel Shieh with Chia-Lun Chang and Arleene Correa Valencia Where Time Runs Backwards is an exhibition by Daniel Shieh featuring five new site-specific works created for LMCC’s Arts Center on Governors Island. Weaving personal history and cultural icons into sculptures that sing, rotate, hover, and shift, each work reflects the artist’s understanding of the United States and his place within American culture. Daniel’s work is exhibited alongside poetry by Chia-Lun Chang 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. The title “Where Time Runs Backwards” refers to the artists' means of self-determination—endlessly retracing the past decisions of their families in order to make sense of their future. |
Presented by Allies in Arts
Featuring work by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Andrew Thomas Huang, Anna Parisi, Corrine Spencer, Jacolby Satterwhite, Joaquin Trujillo, and Le’Andra LeSuer
ANTI•VENOM 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.
The magical quality of the pieces in this show draws from the specific communities the artists are rooted in. And yet, the hermetic power of these artworks extends far beyond the specific. We hope that many needed antidotes might be found in this exhibition experience.
ANTI•VENOM is curated by Sophia Wallace and Drew Denny of Allies in Arts. Learn more about Allies in Arts here→
there is nothing you can think that is not the moon
By Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky
This site-specific installation by collaborative duo Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky 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.
In August, these lanterns will be given away to visitors, an offering for the objects to enter into a new phase and history. The shed will then house a new collection of lanterns which will be made by the public over the course of the exhibition. The artists invite you to recreate an object that you have lost or given away, and that you desire to be connected with again.
The title of the work is taken from the words of Japanese Haiku poet Matsuo Basho. “There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.”
All exhibitions and events at The Arts Center are free and open to the public, and all are welcome.