Lubaina Himid, Mika Rottenberg and Diedrick Brackens at New Museum, Summer 2019

Photographs by Corrado Serra.

“Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath”, June 26 to October 6, 2019

The New Museum debuts an entirely new body of work by Turner Prize–winning British artist Lubaina Himid (b. 1954, Zanzibar), marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. A pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and ’90s, Himid has long championed marginalized histories. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and textile works critique the consequences of colonialism and question the invisibility of people of color in art and the media. While larger historical narratives are often the driving force behind her images and installations, Himid’s works beckon viewers by attending to the unmonumental details of daily life.

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Old Boat / New Money, 2019.

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Left: Old Boat / New Money, 2019. Right: Metal Handkerchief series, 2019

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Series Metal Handkerchief, 2019

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Left: Close Up – Materials for Change, 2019. Right: Six Tailors, 2019.

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Left: Three Architects, 2019. Right: Close Up – Ideas for Development, 2019

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Left: Close Up – Ideas for Development, 2019. Right: Shopping for a Loaf Tin, 2019

Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.

“Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces”, June 26 to September 15, 2019

This exhibition marks the first New York solo museum presentation of work by New York–based artist Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina). “Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces” takes its title from the book Six Easy Pieces (1994), in which theoretical physicist Richard Feynman introduces the fundamentals of physics to general audiences. Rottenberg’s exhibition likewise considers our relationship to the material world, while questioning human attempts to control or explain the inexplicable. Her investigations reveal the unseen connections between the basic or “easy” items that we manipulate and consume almost without thinking—from luxury goods and plastic objects to emails, Bitcoin, and particle beams—and matters of the universe beyond our control.

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Ponytail (Orange), 2016. Hair and mechanical system

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Lips (Study #3), 2016/2019. Single-channel video installation, sound, color; 1:28 min

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Frying Pans (duo), 2019

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Installation view

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Front: Ceiling Fan Composition, 2016. Back: Video

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Installation view

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Installation view

Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.

“Diedrick Brackens: darling divined”, June 4 to September 19, 2019

For the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York, Brackens presents a new installation of weavings in the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX) constructs intricately woven textiles that speak to the complexities of black and queer identity in the United States. Interlacing diverse traditions, including West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American south, Brackens creates cosmographic abstractions and figurative narratives that lyrically merge lived experience, commemoration, and allegory.

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Far left: the flame goes, 2017. Left: in the valley, 2017. Right: the cup is a cloud, 2018

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Left: in the decadence of silence, 2018. Right: bitter attendance, drown jubilee, 2018

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Center: break and tremble, 2019 

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Left: demigod, 2019. Right: opening tombs beneath the heart, 2018

Diedrick Brackens: darling divined is curated by Margot Norton, Curator, and Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant.

Text courtesy new Museum.