No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor
Simply put, clothing is what we put on our bodies. We use it both to cover up and to reveal ourselves. It is also a tool we use to understand others. As an artistic medium, it embodies the tension between opposing forces—private experience and mass consumption, form and function, empowerment and vulnerability, personal expression and cultural expectation. Through bodiless artworks that reimagine and transform clothing, this exhibition at the Hudson River Museum offers a multitude of societal portraits and invites visitors to engage with the intimate narratives they evoke.
The artists in No Bodies use clothing to play with assumptions about materiality and cultural identity, and as a vehicle for social and political activism. In Shroud, a sea of suspended shirts, Rachel Breen asks us to stand in solidarity with garment workers. Inscribed on Patrick Carroll’s t-shirt, created in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are the ingredients of historical abortifacients. Rose Deler points up the cruelty of immigration policy with children’s garments fashioned from the Mylar rescue blankets given to migrants at the U.S. border. In Jesse Krimes’s quilt Skyline, an inmate’s memories of wellbeing are retained in spite of the oppression of the prison-industrial complex. The beads in Erica Lord’s loom-woven burden strap replicate the pixel-like format of DNA analysis of diseases affecting Indigenous communities. And Karen Shaw transforms a sports jersey into a hoop shirt—a winking reference to a hoop skirt—that subverts gender norms and blends masculine and feminine elements.
No Bodies reveals how clothing can convey deeply personal stories while critiquing broader systems of production and regulation. Disrupting familiar clothing conventions, the artists illustrate how personal expression can reshape cultural and social norms. Their works unravel our presumptions about clothing, the stories it can carry, and the psychological weight it can bear. No Bodies asks us to reconsider clothing as not merely attire, or fashion, but a dynamic expression of both personal and collective identities.
2. Fantastical Streets: The Theatrical Posters of Boris Bućan
On view at Poster House the works in this display represent a snapshot within Bućan’s expansive career, focusing on the monumental works he created for his first season with the Croatian National Theatre in Split, who hired him between 1982 and 1986. While he had previously produced a few large-format posters for other organizations or events, these images made up of six separate sheets of paper became his best-known designs, transforming exterior walls into urban canvases for his artistic explorations.
Each image references numerous moments in art history and yet remains extremely modern, so much so that many of the posters from the first and second seasons of his tenure at the theater were given their own exhibition the following year. In 1984, the posters were seen as so particularly Yugoslavian that they were chosen to represent the country at the 41st Venice Biennale, revealing his work to a global audience and solidifying him as one of the most exciting and innovative poster designers in the world.
Jasmine Gregory approaches painting as a spatial practice, maneuvering tightly rendered canvases into sprawling sculptural tableaux. Her works appropriate advertisements for wealth management firms and luxury watch companies, with their glossy photographic surfaces rendered by hand in oil. The advertisements’ coy use of second-person address (“You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation”) become satirical provocations to consider questions of patrimony and preservation. Commingling paintings with wine bottles, vitrines, plastic bags, tinsel, and studio refuse—to name a few materials in her repertoire—she weaves scenarios whose ambiguous drama reflects the difficulty of digesting, and producing within, hyper-saturated cultural landscapes.
On view at MoMA PS1, this is Gregory’s first institutional exhibition in the US, features a focused selection of new works including a large-scale, site-specific installation. Extending her interest in the material histories of image-making and display, the exhibition considers transparency, fragmentation, and dissolution in relation to both artistic production and racial capitalism.
3. Who Wants to Die for Glamour
4. Keith Haring: Black, White, and Red All Over
NEW
Taking its name from the well-known newspaper riddle, Keith Haring: Black, White, and Red All Over gathers works from 1985 to 1989 and makes reference to the artist’s unflinching artistic engagement with the pressing socio-political concerns of the time. On view at Pace Prints the imagery in dialogue with the artist’s activism appears throughout the exhibition, addressing themes central to his work during this period.
Many of the artist’s most recognizable motifs are present: elastic dancing figures, the radiant baby, barking dogs, among other essential symbols and characters from his extraordinary visual vocabulary. These prints exemplify his signature graphic style in a palate of black, white, and red, showcasing Haring’s print oeuvre at its most direct and compelling, pulsing with energy and life.
Known for his affinity towards reproducible mediums, Haring’s work is represented in a breadth of printmaking techniques, including lithography, aquatint, woodcut, and silkscreen. Rare large-scale prints like Retrospect (1989) and Untitled (1986) harness Haring’s narrative power in engrossing black and white compositions, imbuing the many fantastical figures with an approachable comic book sensibility that is undercut by their radically subversive subject matter.
LAST CHANCE
5. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Closes January 19th
A defining Black woman artist of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) has not received the mainstream art-world attention afforded many of her peers. The Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, closes this gap with this exhibition of over 200 works that gives this revolutionary artist and radical activist her due.
A deft sculptor and printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Catlett was uniquely committed to both her creative process and political convictions. Growing up during the Great Depression, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. imperialism firsthand, all while pursuing an artistic education grounded in the tenets of modernism. Catlett would protest injustices for nearly a century, via both soaring artworks and on-the-ground activism.
Born in Washington, DC, Catlett settled permanently in Mexico in 1946 and for the rest of her life she worked to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women.