Fotografiska New York re-opened its doors on August 28th, 2020, and is excited to finally present its new exhibitions, as we approach Fall. The doors will open on specific days and times, and with enhanced COVID-19 safety measures, which you can find at the end of this post.
Fotografiska New York will feature four distinct solo exhibitions by acclaimed photographers Julie Blackmon, Martin Schoeller, Cooper & Gorfer, Naima Green and a group show of emerging talent, co-curated with VICE Media Group. VICE and Julie Blackmon opened earlier this year, cut short due to the Pandemic.
On the 6th Floor, Mindfulness Fridays in 2021 ~ January 22nd, January 29th and February 5th at Noon.
6th Floor Installation: Aperture 2020 Summer Open: Information
Fotografiska New York is pleased to host the Aperture Summer Open: Information. The Summer Open is an annual open-submission exhibition organized by Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation, that connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person, and online. This show seeks to reveal and report on key themes and trends driving contemporary photography. This year, fourteen artists will present their work exploring the theme of Information.
The 2020 Aperture Summer Open is curated by Brendan Embser, Managing Editor of Aperture magazine, with Farah Al Qasimi, artist; Amanda Hajjar, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska; Kristen Lubben, Executive Director of the Magnum Foundation; and Paul Moakley, Editor-at Large for Special Projects at TIME.
Holiday Season Family Portrait Shoot with Photographer Terry Deroy Gruber
In a year marked by isolation and social distancing, celebrate the silver lining of family togetherness by gathering your herd at Fotografiska. Each shoot will include a guided tour of the museum followed by a private, one hour portrait session with up to six people by professional photographer Terry Deroy Gruber in the museum’s photo studio. After each session, participants will select one image to be enlarged to a gorgeous signed and dated 16X20 archival inkjet print and a digital link to all of the images captured.
Martin Schoeler, Death Row Exonerees on view from August 28, 2020 extended through March 28, 2021
Martin Schoeller’s Death Row Exonerees exhibition consists of ten moving, digital portraits of individuals who share their stories of how they were convicted and sentenced to death row for crimes they did not commit. Scholler collaborated with Witness To Innocence, a non-profit led by exonerated death row survivors who work to abolish the death penalty in the United States and seeks ways to support dealth row survivors and their loved ones as they confront the challenges of life after exoneration.
Julie Blackmon, Fever Dreams ~ On view through October 18, 2020
The playfully artful and chaotic nature present in the photographs of Julie Blackmon (American, b. 1966) illustrates the everyday people and places that have shaped the artist’s life. These are the familiar and ordinary scenes of Blackmon’s daily routine in her hometown of Springfield, Missouri, which she describes as “the generic American town” in the middle of the United States. Her scenes are often centered around children in backyards, garages and neighborhoods where the absence of adults alludes to a looming potential for danger. Her photographs, otherwise innocuous domestic tableaux, are woven with fantasy and subtle satire that reflect a delicate balance between the darkness and charm of contemporary American life in suburbia.
“I suppose I could make a work where the sun is shining, the mom is lying out in the grass, the kids are happy, and everything is perfect, but that wouldn’t interest me—and it wouldn’t be truthful. My aim is to create a more nuanced, subtly humorous and satirical portrait of the way we live today.” – Julie Blackmon
Fotografiska New York X VICE Media Group: New Visions ~ On view through October 18, 2020
Fotografiska New York and VICE Media Group have partnered to curate New Visions, anexhibition showcasing fourteen inspiring, emerging artists from around the world. Informed by personal experiences and underrepresented narratives, the work demonstrates what VICE and Fotografiska consider to be the vanguard of photography. Collectively, the exhibition affirms the discipline’s capacity to foster new understandings of identity, put forth nuanced critiques of the world around us, and find power in play and vulnerability.
Artists on view will be Cristina Bartley Dominguez, Eui-Jip Hwang, June Canedo, Laurence Philomene, Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Matthew Morrocco, Noma Osula, Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Silvia Grav, Stefanie Moshammer, Tamara Abdul Hadi, Texas Isaiah, Yao Yuan, and Zhongjia Sun.
Since its founding in 1994, VICE Media Group has been a vessel for visionary storytelling by featuring groundbreaking photographers who have challenged the status quo in both art and journalism. VICE celebrates these photographers each year by publishing a special VICE Magazine photo issue and correlating exhibition, launching the careers of many artists.
Cooper & Gorfer: Between These Folded Wall, Utopia ~ August 28, 2020 has been extended through March 28, 2021
In a series of richly-imagined portraits, the artistic duo Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer explore the idea of Utopia in the age of the new diaspora. Young women who have been forced to uproot their lives are photographed like goddesses inside lustrous and surrealist-inspired sets. These vivid portraits are a judicious and of-the-moment examination of our historical memory and possibility.
“We felt drawn to a new diaspora, the young generation of women whose lives had been influenced by forced migration and a need for a new place to live,” the duo said. “These are adolescents on the cusp of adulthood who have experienced what it means to uproot their reality and sense of self. Young women who grew up with different cultural understandings of the world. They are women in different stages of independence and gender equality and who, because of that, are less rigidly defined, less prone to accept a readymade understanding of the world.”
The subjects’ state of limbo is echoed in the custom-built sets, inspired by the surrealist literature of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Working with a conceptual architecture team in Vienna, Cooper & Gorfer designed sets whose space and perspective rewrite history into something layered and unexpected. Echoes of Rome’s fascist Palazzo Della Civilta Italiana or dioramas from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh are woven into the fantastical set. Cooper & Gorfer are also inspired by eastern philosophy. The work invites viewers to search for their own ideas of Utopia by entering a transcendental state of consciousness. In Sanskrit teachings, this state may be known as a “No Place” or “the Void of Conceptions.”
The Cooper & Gorfer artistic universe challenges our preconceptions to imagine a world where humans live in harmony with themselves, each other and the planet. Sarah Cooper (b.1974, US) and Nina Gorfer (b.1979, Austria) have been collaborating since 2006 and work in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their work has been shown at the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art, Nuuk Art Museum in Greeland, and Fotografiska Stockholm among others. In 2018, Cooper & Gorfer won the prestigious German Photo Book award for their monograph “I Know Not These My Hands.”
Naima Green: Brief and Drenching ~ August 28, 2020 through February 7, 2021
Naima Green’s photography conducts experiments in being. Her portrait-making begins in the form of an invitation to her sitter, to co-create a context and allow themselves to evolve within it.
Her most recent experiment pictures the transient self at play. Through Pur·suit, a deck of 54 playing cards featuring photographs of queer womxn, trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people, Green photographed over 100 sitters in 9 days to create an object through which both play and contemporary documentation cohere. In this co-collaboration with Toby Kaufmann, Green inverts hierarchies of power that often exclude stories and contributions by Black people and people of color. Green honors her community, which deserves to be seen and remembered.
In Brief and Drenching, Green moves from a traditional photography studio into the stage of her apartment. Within this space, the artists’ short film, Between Pearls and Teeth, upsets the comfortable domestic setting with a sequence of unnerving intimate confrontations. Further into the gallery, a birthing stool made by the artist in collaboration with Ivan Ontiveros is presented as an object of support to brace oneself against this scene of imbalance.
The theme of brevity is multifold, referencing the instantaneous nature of the making of an image or a quick interaction between a group of people, and though however brief, these actions can create infinite and rippling effects, memories, and a long-lasting sense of community for her sitters.
Tuesday, January 21, 2021 at 7:00pm, Images of Racism in Consumer Culture ~ a discussion with Professor Michael Ray Charles in Conversation with Dr. Cherise Smith.
Friday, January 22, 2021 from Noon to 1:00pm, Murals of New York City ~ A discussion with Book Creators Graydonn Carter, Edward Sorel, Glenn Palmer-Smith and Joshua McHugh.
Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 7:00pm, Medicine and The Natural World ~ Workshops with Herbalist Suhaly Bautista-Carolina in celebration of Naima Green’s exhibition, Brief and Drenching.
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We offer congratulations to Fotografiska New York for being one of several landmarked projects honored by The Lucy G. Moses Preservation Awards for 2020, to be held on September 23, 2020 at 6:00 pm (A virtual celebration).
Admission to the museum will be on a timed entry basis and an overall capacity of 25% will be enforced. Special reduced pricing will be in effect through 2020: $24 general admission and $14 for seniors, students and military personnel. The museum will also offer free admission to First Responders and Frontline Healthcare providers through 2020.
Fotografiska New York had opened in December 2019 but closed its doors in mid-March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum will be open Wednesday through Sunday, 11am to 9pm and closed Monday and Tuesday for cleaning, private tours, and personal shopping. Admission to the museum will be on a timed entry basis and an overall capacity of 25% will be enforced. Special reduced pricing will be in effect through 2020: $24 general admission and $14 for seniors, students and military personnel. The museum will also offer free admission to First Responders and Frontline Healthcare providers through 2020.
Enhanced health and safety measures will be implemented to help keep guests and staff safe. All visitors and staff must wear a face mask while inside the museum, temperature checks will be administered prior to entering the building, and a safe social distance of 6 feet between parties must be maintained. Hand sanitizer will be available throughout the building, common surfaces will be cleaned and sanitized throughout the day in addition to deep cleaning after museum hours, and plexiglass shields have been installed at the Front Desk for the safety of staff and visitors. All purchases made at the museum will be cashless/contactless through credit or debit card only. Visitors who have been in close contact with anyone who has, or had, cold or flu-like symptoms are asked to reschedule their trip to the museum until after completing a medically-recommended quarantine period.
The Shop, Fotografiska’s retail space, is currently open and has been re-merchandised for safe and inspired shopping. Retail items at The Shop are on display for visitors to browse, clean and untouched items are available in the stockroom. Private personal shopping appointments are available on Tuesdays when the museum is closed to the public. Personal shopping appointments and curbside pickup options can be made by emailing shop.ny@fotografiska.com.
The Shop has also joined the 15% Pledge—working to commit upwards of 15% of retail space to Black-owned business. In addition, at least 25% of future in-store events will be dedicated to featuring POC-owned brands and products.
Fotografiska New York is located in the Flatiron District in a six-floor, 45,000 square foot building. The new, multi-concept venue will feature three floors of galleries, an esteemed hospitality partner, STARR Restaurants, a highly curated retail offering, and a versatile event space. The building, located at 281 Park Avenue South was constructed in the 1890s, and is also know as the Church Missions House, a historic building and registered landmark in an area once known as Charity Row.