Although college is out, an exhibition at PPOW’s second-floor gallery house in Manhattan turns the highlight onto the arbiters of training — academics. Centered on the osmotic processes of data alternate, Airhead, on view by way of August 9, is made up of works by 16 artists who deploy various ways of their missions to succeed in others.
In an interview with Hyperallergic, gallery director Eden Deering defined that she and co-curator Timmy Simonds, additionally featured within the present, spent over a yr growing Airhead as an enlargement of artist and activist Shellyne Rodriguez’s 2023 solo exhibition with PPOW. Rodriguez’s views have been suppressed by faculties and universities a number of occasions all through her profession in academia; the pair noticed how she made use of the gallery as a distinct house for studying, together with community-based teach-ins, and sought to additional dialogue surrounding the artist as a instructor and discover different modes of studying inside and past the classroom on this exhibition.
In Airhead, Rodriguez exhibits 5 new linocut and chine collé works she crafted as a part of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop program at the Elizabeth Basis for the Arts. The prints depict patterned tile flooring on the lifeless ends of slender corridors, nodding to our collective dwelling areas by way of their collaging of components, comparable to chairs, balloons, flip-flops, and radiators, and to the precolonial pure world by way of motifs such because the “Three Sisters” agricultural crops (corn, beans, and squash).
Talking on how instructing is on the core of her being, Rodriguez emphasised that her work “doesn’t simply happen within the institutional classroom locked behind the tutoring paywall,” however as a substitute channels Guyanese political activist Walter Rodney’s idea of “grounding” — or turning any communal house right into a web site of studying and alternate.
“The prints I contributed to the present depict a standard house in New York Metropolis the place the potential for grounding is consistently tried and examined in order that we would create new collective our bodies that convey our experiences alongside to satisfy consciousness collectively,” she wrote to Hyperallergic.
“We convey the classroom outdoors, wherever the folks collect,” Rodriguez continued. “The constructing foyer, the coed encampment, the nook, and the quiet nooks we inhabit the place we get to be with ourselves.”
Airhead features a portion of Philadelphia-based Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio’s reForm (2014–17), a collaborative set up and world-building expertise crafted alongside 10 Philadelphia college students in response to the town’s closure of over 20 public colleges in 2013. The present additionally revisits Fluxus member Alison Knowles’s “99 Crimson North” (1970/2024), which invitations guests to take a Crimson Scrumptious apple in alternate for leaving one thing of theirs behind.
A big part of the exhibition is dedicated to late East Village storyteller Anton van Dalen‘s decades-long undertaking Avenue A Minimize-Out Theatre Props (1995–2015) — a maquette of his residence constructing accompanied by small, graphic sculptures of figures and components of the altering neighborhood over time.
Adam Putnam’s “Untitled (crimson hallway)” (2019) tasks the picture of an limitless, dingy hallway by way of mirrors and theater gels — “making one thing out of nothing,” because the artist places it within the exhibition’s accompanying booklet. Additionally using reflection, Gabo Camnitzer’s “The Swimsuit of Mirrors” (2019), stands out within the gallery house. Crafted as a pedagogical instrument to assist his college students perceive their sense of self, the environments they inhabit, and the way each ideas work together with and differ from one another, Camnitzer defined to Hyperallergic that the reflective wearable sculpture operates as each “an artwork object meant to be thought-about, and as a performative costume meant for use.”
His college students, Camnitzer instructed Hyperallergic, loved the novelty of carrying the swimsuit across the college; he noticed nuanced reactions, from performativity to quiet contemplation. College students “are most concerned with practices that may disrupt regular institutional working process, and draw issues in from past the standard curriculum,” he stated.
As such, the exhibition appears to posit that the present cultural and political second requires a rethinking of the classroom altogether, harkening again to Rodriguez’s post-academic praxis.
“If our work is of any worth, then it serves to dismantle the establishment itself,” she stated.
