We Tried to Warn You! Environmental Crisis Posters, 1970–2020
Every poster in this exhibition is a failure, not in the sense that they failed in their graphic intent, but rather that they failed to successfully modify behavior. Almost all of the environmental issues showcased in these posters remain or have become catastrophically worse.
Nevertheless, these impactful images have shaped the bounds of public debate on environmental issues, drawing attention to distinct and particular concerns. On view at Poster House, these highlighted narratives have increased the visibility of environmental crises, they have historically masked systemic causes of these problems and ignored structural inequalities.
2. Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies
This is the first major solo museum presentation of fourth-generation Navajo weaver, Melissa Cody (b. 1983, No Water Mesa, Arizona). The works on view at MoMA PS1, span the last decade of Cody’s practice, showcasing over 30 weavings and a major new work. Using long-established weaving techniques and incorporating new digital technologies, Cody assembles and reimagines popular patterns into sophisticated geometric overlays.s. Her tapestries carry forward the methods of Navajo Germantown weaving, which developed out of the wool and blankets that were made in Germantown, Pennsylvania and supplied by the US government to the Navajo people during the forced expulsion from their territories in the mid-1800s. During this period, the rationed blankets were taken apart and the yarn was used to make new textiles, a practice of reclamation which became the source of the movement. While acknowledging this history and working on a traditional Navajo loom, Cody’s works exercise experimental palettes and patterns that animate through reinvention, reframing traditions as cycles of evolution.
3. Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols
on view at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, this exhibition examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower, and connect us. As important communication tools in our daily lives, symbols are constantly evolving based on new needs and users. They formed some of the first written human expressions and today animate our digital conversations.
This exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of Henry Dreyfuss’s “Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols” (1972), a manual that compiled and categorized thousands of symbols across the globe. The origin story of the Symbol Sourcebook—told in the exhibition for the first time through primary materials from Cooper Hewitt’s Henry Dreyfuss Archive—has inspired us to look at symbols now and explore their evolution and future.
NEW
4. Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here
Hitting it’s twelfth exhibition, 52 Walker presents Orgasms Happened Here, which features new work by Diamond Stingily (b. 1990). Stingily’s multidisciplinary practice traverses fictive, biographical, and autobiographical narratives to reexamine the symbolic order that governs everyday objects. Throughout the exhibition, she has installed a series of site-specific architectural interventions that evoke the colors, scale, and ambience of suburban American households and places of worship. These interstitial spaces, as well as the gallery itself, serve as portals into the whimsical and dark memories that are often suppressed in the name of adult decorum, revealing glimpses of the secret longing stored in the artist’s and our own collective imagination.
LAST CHANCE
5. Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls
On view until July 28
This installation of works by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith—four artists with strong connections to Brooklyn—creates a dynamic environment through four visually immersive experiences. Animating the monumental architecture of the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, each artist transforms the iconic space with brilliant and subtle colors, intriguing surfaces, and wide-ranging materials.
The Brooklyn Museum’s considerable collection of hard-edge paintings by Smith, which sharply delineate the shaped canvases, serves as the impetus for the installation. The newly created works by the three living artists, all of whom work in Brooklyn today, similarly engage with space in innovative ways: Hayuk with her tactile, abstract modular pieces; Parlá with his large environmental paintings; and Yanko with her metal and paint sculptures.
