Joanna Seifter
Joanna Seifter is a writer, artist, and museum professional living and working in New York City. She is a recent graduate of NYU’s Museum Studies MA program.
Neon glows from the wood-trim parlor of the Newport Art Museum, shining from a large pitch tent studded with antennae and LED strips, distorted and enlarged by the narrow walls that surround it.
Playwright Walter Corwin is certainly no stranger to Theater for the New City, a pioneering off-off Broadway mainstay of the Lower East Side dedicated to showcasing both emerging talent and veterans of the New York City stage.
Curator Lauren Cornell deftly and thoughtfully intersperses Douglas’s photography with his short films, alternating the Hessel’s sundrenched galleries with sequestered screening rooms, appropriately balancing communal halls with more intimate spaces for reflection.
Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse does not introduce Ikeda’s audience to his abrasively immersive work gently, instead flinging them into a turbulent orgy of sight and sound without a second to spare. The first gallery’s coffered ceilings emit enough light for the viewer to see the floor and thus cling to a shred of spatial stability.
Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always is the swan song of late contemporary artist-curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, herself of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nations. Most recently, Smith was the subject of a roughly fifty-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and helmed the National Gallery’s first ever artist-curated exhibition.
In contemporary mixed-media artist Jesse Krimes’s current solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corrections, Purgatory (2009) serves as a fitting introduction to Krimes’s oeuvre, much of which was either made during or was inspired by his six-year incarceration for nonviolent drug charges.
Of 2024’s proliferation of body horror films, Guadagnino’s use of this imagery in Queer is the most direct timeline of the art form: it is an early-period work of body horror, true sensory derangement, through a twenty-first-century auteur’s lens.
Contemporary artist Jenna Bliss’s short film Spectacle (2021), now on view as part of her solo exhibition Basic Cable at Amant. Bliss’s film features shots of a commercial airliner superimposed over stylized renditions of both pre-and-post 9/11 landscapes, like a sunset-dappled skyline absent the glass high-rise buildings popularized in the 2010s and the narrowed, angular spokes of the Bloomberg-era Oculus.
