Events

There’s not many South Asians in the New York Art World, and frankly, I think I avoided getting to know the ones that were around me when I was younger because I was afraid that it would pigeon hole me. In a context where you can so easily be exoticized, it can be scary to become a curiosity for others. I know Baseera can relate to this. I don’t think she likes to be pigeon-holed, boxed in, or reduced in any way. She wants to steer her own ship, and she’s fought to do so.

She’s had an unorthodox career. First exhibiting at the legendary non profit exhibition space, Participant Inc, then beginning to show more widely, and eventually working with Simone Subal Gallery, she landed on the Television show The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, where she competed against seven other artists with a rotating cast of judges like Adam Pendleton and Sarah Thornton, for a cash price of $100,000, and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. She won.

I’ve never really gotten the chance to ask her about that experience, but I do know that Baseera took that opportunity and continued to build her visual legacy one exhibition, one body of work, one performance, one talk at a time. The profound intersection of identities she finds herself within offered her a way to unravel histories, visual forms, and power, while really just speaking to what it means to be alive in her body. Identity for her is meant to be ruptured, deconstructed, challenged, and sloughed off. She’s interested in using all the avenues at her disposal to develop complex visual systems that nod to craft, pop culture, karaoke, museological orthodoxy, minimalism, ritual, and more.

Join us on July 14th where we'll talk about what it means to misbehave with materials, what Islam gave them as a formal education before art school did, and what she hopes to leave behind.

There is a peculiar form of honesty in Lucas Blalock's photographs. Not the honesty of the document — not the camera as witness — but something stranger: the seams are visible, the Photoshop moves are clunky by design, the labor announces itself. And somehow, because of this, the images feel more present, not less. More tethered to the world we actually live in, where everything is being processed, manipulated, reconstructed — where the image is never innocent and knows it.

I've known Lucas for years and have always been struck by how his seriousness is inseparable from his humor. He photographs dollar-store objects and watermelons and bodily distortions with the same quality of attention. He takes Brecht and Melville and brings them to the 99-cent store. His current show at Winnie is an extension of his Bake Sale for a Colonoscopy — an itinerant fundraising project where he sells cookies and cakes — leaning into tools not adequate to the problems at hand, and asking what that tells us about the problems.

I find something deeply clarifying in that gesture. It doesn’t signal cynicism or throwing in the towel, but feels more akin to a clear-eyed absurdism - the kind that keeps working anyway.

I'd love to hear from Lucas about where that impulse comes from, how a photograph fails us productively, and what it means to remain earnest in a practice built on visible manipulation, especially now, when AI arrives promising to make all of that invisible again, to smooth the seams, to remove the hand, to reconstitute the fiction of the image.

And after the talk, we'll be celebrating the launch of Spent. Drinks, music, and footage of our upcoming episodes with Yaya Bey, Walter Price, and Whitney Mallett!

When the artist has as much respect for incident as they do intent, they are on their way to making great things. When they cultivate them both, they are on their way to transformation. I’ve seen Kamrooz Aram do just this; transforming over and over, always honing his voice and his ability, always methodically pushing what could happen with the simplest of materials— linen, oil, pigment, and pencil.

In his most recent exhibition at Alexander Gray, the paintings were a result of 6 years of work. It’s a rare exhibition of his where the works are hung without any exhibition design. Many artists treat exhibition design as a way to “house” their work, or to create an effect that is meant to establish dissonance. Aram’s designs are often intrinsic to understanding the work itself. Color, transparency, hum, demarcation; these are all words that can be used for both his paintings as well as the larger context he creates for them. The architecture is an extension of the painting, but neither is reducible to the other.

His installation in the 2026 Whitney Biennial is a testament to precisely this. Even the security barrier has been considered as part of the work, folded in form. It is also a subtle and restrained visual exegesis on the politics of display, and the ways in which Modernism and ornament are not antithetical, but visual forms whose roots have been covered through evidently prejudiced art histories. Criticality here is not dry or violent, it is braided with seduction. I take this as a particular generosity, considering how easy it could be for disgust and rage to overtake an artist in a time like this. Iran is at this very moment fighting for their survival from the place that Aram now calls home. The dissonant horror of that is impossible to avoid.

Aram has recently spoken about returning to the work of Joan Mitchell, and how, according to her, she had two identities: Big Joan and Little Joan. Big Joan was the public persona with bravado and edge. Little Joan was the painter Big Joan was sworn to protect. Perhaps Kamrooz will share what structures of protection he’s created in order to survive and thrive as an artist in this world.

Can an image disclose a belief system? Can it quietly reveal the convictions of its time? Do images betray our conscious selves?

Artist and filmmaker Rachel Rose has spent the last decade asking these questions. Her work moves fluidly between the images of our present and the landscapes of the past, probing for the belief structures that underwrite them. She is drawn to the existential pressure point of a moment — the place where technology, history, faith, and mortality converge.

What do emerging technologies reveal about the shifting borders between life and death? How did pre–Industrial England foster a worldview where superstition, science, and burgeoning ideologies all bloomed together? These tensions animate Rose’s films and recent paintings. Her upcoming exhibition at Gladstone reaches even further back, into central Biblical symbols and allegories, creating space to think about displacement, mothers, and mothering.

Rose’s vision is both ambitious and exacting. Only a few years out of school, she exhibited her site-sensitive video installation, Everything and More, at the Whitney Museum of American Art— a meditation on ego dissolution that moves between outer space and a rave, collapsing the cosmic and the intimate. Liquids mixed and filmed up close become vast, disorienting worlds — so luminous they feel digitally rendered.

That same intensity extends across her sculpture, painting, and now her first feature film, The Last Day, starring Alicia Vikander and Wagner Moura.

Join us on March 10th for a conversation about what we project onto images, and what they disclose about the things we are still afraid to confront.

When you eat something really good—really good—something so good your whole body goes quiet, that food isn’t just feeding you. It’s hitting your spirit.

A loud silence, as Reginald Sylvester II might call it.

Over the last decade, Reggie’s work has moved fluidly between gestural abstraction, industrial design, minimal sculpture, and painting. What hasn’t changed is his commitment to holding space for belief—for the idea that an artwork can move past this world and open onto another.

In his current exhibition at the newly inaugurated Limbo Museum in Accra, Ghana, hollow steel tube sculptures act as gateways inside an unfinished concrete structure, embedded in a lush green landscape. Paintings are tucked throughout the space. EPDM rubber is stretched, rigorously washed with pigment, and cut in curves that reveal aluminum supports beneath—echoing the contours of the sculptures themselves. The whole exhibition feels like a visual prayer: provisional, searching, perpetually unfinished. It is beautiful.

What’s especially striking about Reggie is his clarity. He’s unabashed about his spiritual commitments and about the role art can play in sustaining faith, meaning, and resilience. That kind of openness feels rare. Many artists—myself included—often camouflage spiritual concerns with irony, deflection, or jokes. Reggie doesn’t. He’s direct, clear-sighted, and deeply grounded. You feel it when you’re around him.

Ben Bowling once described his father Frank Bowling’s paintings as a kind of soul food. For Reggie, this idea has become something closer to a principle: art as nourishment, art as sustenance.

Join us on Tuesday, February 17th for a conversation that doesn’t shy away from loud silences—or from speaking plainly about the spirit in art.

The story goes like this: when David Zwirner approached Ebony Haynes with the idea of joining the gallery, she didn’t just accept the offer—she rewrote the terms. If she were going to do it, it had to be a space she would run outright, with its own staff, its own tempo, its own intellectual weather. Not a subdivision, not a gesture, but a program with teeth and independence. That decision became 52 Walker.

What I love about that moment is its clarity. Ebony knew when to ask for more—not out of entitlement, but out of a precise understanding of what real curatorial work requires (as well as knowing her value). Autonomy isn’t a perk; it’s the condition that allows artists to think expansively without being folded into someone else’s narrative. She insisted on a structure that could hold that ambition, and then she built it.

Ebony’s practice has always been defined by this combination of rigor and refusal. She doesn’t simplify artists for institutional comfort, and she doesn’t dilute exhibitions for broader appeal. Instead, she constructs spaces where complexity is not a hurdle but the ground we walk on. Her exhibitions ask you to meet the work where it lives—not where the market or the moment might prefer it to be.

For a community like NewCrits—where so many of us are trying to imagine what thoughtful, ethically grounded art discourse can look like—Ebony offers something rare: a model of conviction that doesn’t calcify into dogma. She works from precision, not performance. She builds structures that redistribute attention instead of hoarding it. She reminds us that asking for more is often the most generous thing one can do—for artists, for audiences, for the ecosystem we’re trying to reshape.

Please join us on December 9th for our 25th NewCrits Talk with Ebony Haynes.

In 2005, Banks Violette filled the Whitney’s Breuer building with a ghost — Untitled (Church), a scorched reconstruction of a burned church rendered in white polyurethane and salt, pulsing with the sound of Norwegian black metal. The work blurred fiction and reality, exposing how art’s power can be both beautiful and dangerous, capable of touching nerves so deep they spill into the real.

I was 21 when I first saw it, and it floored me — the sound, the scale, the sheer presence. A few years later, I found myself in his studio, then working for him, and now, 20 years on from that first encounter, in conversation with him again.

Violette’s work has transformed over time, but his preoccupations remain: the exhaustion of images, the horror of devotion, the entropy of minimalism, and the rot at the heart of America(n whiteness). In recent years, his ongoing exchange with Hedi Slimane — two artists bound by their shared precision, nihilism, and romance with youth culture — has opened new ground between art and fashion. Both see the stage as an altar: one in fabric and light, the other in ruin and salt.

As the world edges toward its own fever pitch — with a collapsing state and a resurgent theocratic right — Violette’s return feels not just timely, but prophetic.

Join us for a conversation with Banks Violette, an artist who saw it coming.

Our next NewCrits talk is with Eric N. Mack, an artist whose work keeps stretching what painting can be, and where it can go. Eric’s practice has long moved between the disciplines of fashion, abstraction, and installation—where fabric becomes both color and history, and the gestures of draping, tying, or folding are as conceptual as they are tactile.

As Eric puts it, “the art object, at its most sacred, should reflect altered systems of value, especially in observation of the world’s brutalities.” He uses the image of a seat cushion turned into a flotation device—an object repurposed by crisis—to describe how painting might need to abandon its wall, even its autonomy, to meet the world as it is. It’s a vision of art that’s responsive, contingent, and alive.

We’ll be talking about that urgency—about what happens when value systems shift faster than institutions can hold them, and how artists find new forms when the old ones no longer suffice.

This will be a conversation about painting, yes—but also about adaptation, care, and what it means to make art in a world that keeps changing its terms.

Eric has a show up at Arts and Letters uptown in New York. I'm quoting their press release here so you can appreciate the many points of contact in Eric's work:

"The titles of Mack’s exhibitions, like the fabric remnants he uses, are selected from what he finds in the world around him. This one, Fishers of Men, is taken from a now-shuttered seafood restaurant in Harlem, though it may bring other associations to mind. Central to Mack’s work is nuance, and in this exhibition, Arts and Letters aims to be a holding place for that nuance."

I’ve known Raúl for some time now, but we really got to know each other better during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which we were both in. Not only that, we were two of the five artists asked to do a collaboration with Tiffany and Co, so we were spending quite a lot of time together.

Raúl is one of those artists where you can’t tell if the art is an extension of him, or he’s an extension of the art. There’s a purity and transparency to who he is as a person and an artist that feels free of shame and free of hiding. You will see the dark and the light. He’s joy and sparkle at times, but he can access a banshee scream and speak from unknown depths, as he does in his band, Hairbone, too. Dark and light, life and death, are not seen as mere opposites in his work - they are a fated coupling. Archetypes and phantasmic characters emerge throughout his sculptures, as if enacting scenes from forgotten religious books. Ritual and rite beat through much of the work in ways that give them new life. There is plenty of art that looks to religions for a kind of age old might, but few works of art inject a new spirit into that old fist to open it up. Raúl has a new exhibition at Pioneer Works that just recently opened.

The space is wide and gleaming with colors pouring through the windows. He has created new “stained-glass” works for the windows of the entire building. They are modestly made with tape and colored plastic, but the effect is regal. The colors almost tune a frequency that makes you smile, so when you see text that might be darker, more bodily, even gross - you accept this as part of the light too. Nothing is left out, everything feels redeemed.

After spending so much time seeing how Raúl creates, thinks, and cares, I was and am convinced that this person is a star. Not a star in the sense of celebrity, although there is that, but in the way that he radiates with an unflinching and holistic energy, as if he simply is star. I wonder if he always felt that, or whether he incubated the feeling until it was ready. On Tuesday, September 23rd, when we have our first NewCrits talk of the season, I’ll ask.

Join NewCrits for our final live info session covering all three Fall 2025 courses:

New Identities for Dangerous Times (Ajay Kurian)
What of My Mirror (Shala Miller)
The Way of Removal (Steve Shaheen)

Hosted by Ajay Kurian, this session offers an overview of each course’s themes, structure, and expectations. Come with questions and get help choosing the course that fits your practice.

Free and open to all. Registration required.