Breyer P-Orridge: We Are OnePioneer Works at Red Hook Labs, through July 10

This is the first institutional exhibition of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s work since the artist dropped her body – as she would have it – on March 14, 2020, a few years after being diagnosed with leukemia in the last phase. It is also the first institutional exhibition to focus on what could be the masterpiece of the deceased artist, the Pandrogynous project. The project involves P-Orridge embarking with his romantic and artistic partner Jacqueline Mary Breyer, better known as Lady Jaye, on a series of cosmetic surgeries to look more and more alike, trying to knock on the door of the fusion into a singular being that defied categorization. .

The exhibition includes photographs documenting the couple’s physical transformations, images in which the appendages of their bodies merge into a singularity, as well as sculptures, drawings, videos and collages. The latter was at the heart of the Pandrogynous project. Inspired by the “cut-up” technique championed by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, friends and mentors of P-Orridge, collage has become an apt metaphor for how to live organically and holistically. Pandrogynous planned project.

Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the StandardLeslie-Lohman Art Museum, until August 14

The late Chilean-German transgender artist Lorenza Böttner (1959-94) had an accident at the age of eight which resulted in the amputation of both arms. She rejected prosthetics and left special education to enroll in art school, where she began working with her mouth and feet to create paintings and drawings that challenged people’s perceptions. disabled as disempowered and desexualized humans.

Böttner said she became an “exhibitionist” due to her disability and held hundreds of live shows in the United States and Europe in her lifetime; some of them are shown in videos overlaid with the artist’s wise words about radical self-acceptance. Beyond creating a space for artists with disabilities, Böttner’s trajectory illustrates the uplifting adage that art is an instrument of self-realization. “It’s not enough to think of an idea or just believe in an idea, you have to live it,” Böttner wrote in a statement about his artistic development. “The artist can achieve this action by creating.”

black atlanticBrooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn, until November 27

Located along the Brooklyn waterfront, this Public Art Fund exhibition, co-curated by artist Hugh Hayden, takes as its starting point the 1995 book of the same name which focused on hybrid identities and cultural practices created by transatlantic networks. Hayden and Leilah Babirye, Dozie Kanu, Tau Lewis and Kiyan Williams, created works responding to these diasporic experiences and to the site, in a port that was a hub for the transatlantic sugar, cotton and slave trade. Williams makes direct reference to this story in Empire Ruins, a clay statue designed to transform during the show. Its shape is based on a statue in Washington, DC that depicts the allegorical figure of Liberty, although it was created in part through slave labor. Williams’ reimagined take on the figure highlights the many shortcomings of this symbolism.

Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca JovenBrooklyn Museum, until September 18

Salvadoran-American artist Guadalupe Maravilla describes the sculptures in his Disease throwers as “healing instruments” inspired by sound therapy treatments which he claims helped recover from cancer. The shrine-like works are steeped in Mayan mythology; they are assembled with various organic and manufactured materials and have in their center a functional tone, forming an acoustic vessel whose vibrations would have curative qualities. The sculptures will be activated in a series of live sound baths and will be featured alongside new paintings by Maravilla and Mayan artifacts he has selected from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, such as ceramic figurines, shell trumpets of conch and other ritual objects. The title of the exhibit, which translates to “young white ash/earth,” refers to a 5th-century volcanic eruption in present-day El Salvador that displaced Mayan communities; it also symbolizes Maravilla’s own tumultuous migration to the United States as a child in the 1980s, and criticizes the continued movement of migrants across the United States.

Louise Bourgeois: PaintingsMetropolitan Museum of Art, until August 7

Although Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is best known as a sculptor, this exhibition curated by Clare Davies, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met, posits her early efforts in painting as crucial to understanding all that has monitoring. The exhibition focuses on his output between his arrival in New York in 1938 and his total rejection of painting in 1949, highlighting forms and themes – such as domestic spaces and hybrid female figures – that would take on new dimensions as his practice evolved.

The exhibition also demonstrates how deeply Bourgeois, before becoming a singular sculptor, was engaged in contemporary conversations about modernist painting, from the lingering influence of surrealism to nascent approaches to abstraction. “To this day, it is not widely known that Bourgeois was active as a painter in New York for ten years, a period when the city became a vital international hub amid critical debates around painting” , says Sheena Wagstaff, outgoing president of the Met of Modern. and contemporary art. “This exhibition reveals the fundamental DNA of the artist’s development of themes that would then bud into three dimensions and preoccupy her for the rest of her long career.”

Whitney Biennial 2022: …………….Whitney Museum of American Art, until September 5

More than any biennale in the new Whitney building (it’s the third), Quiet as it is kept fundamentally redid the interior architecture of the museum. The show’s co-curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, both of the Whitney, cited the collapsing sense of time and worsening political, health and humanitarian crises over the past three years. They started working on this biennial, which was originally supposed to open last year. , in the relatively quiet year of 2019 – as influences not only on their selection of 63 artists and collectives, but also on how their works are installed.

Most of the biennial takes place on the museum’s fifth and sixth floors, and the two couldn’t be more distinct. The lower level is a vast, bright room with no dividing walls, where luminous works by Alex Da Corte, Dyani White Hawk and others shine. The sixth floor, on the other hand, is almost entirely dark, consisting of a series of dimly lit and sometimes claustrophobic alcoves with black walls and carpeting, appropriate for hosting gloomy works by Coco Fusco and Rebecca Belmore. Generally speaking, this architectural dualism corresponds to the content of the work on each floor. The colourful, playful and meditative works are usually found on the fifth floor, while the sixth houses many of the darker and more captivating works in the exhibition.