RECENT EXHIBITIONS AT THE PRATT MANHATTAN GALLERY
Talking to Action: Art, Pedagogy, and Activisim in the Americas
Hablar y Actuar: Arte, Pedagogía y Activismo en las Amerícas
SEPTEMBER 27–DECEMBER 14, 2019
Talking to Action investigates contemporary, community-based social art practices in the United States and Latin America while attempting to build a direct dialogue with artists and researchers across the hemisphere to discuss shared concerns, issues and art practices. The artists in Talking to Action explore a range of trans-disciplinary practices, blurring the lines between object making, political and environmental activism, community organizing, and performance.
Mediated Meditations
JUNE 24–SEPTEMBER 7, 2019
Pratt Institute Fine Arts Alumni Exhibition
Curated by Niama Safia Sandy
Mediated Meditations is a multi-media group exhibition interested in creating a conduit for making sense of lived experiences which are often viewed through the prism of subcategories — the built environment, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and spirituality. These categories inform the selected artists’ sensibilities, and the way they each manipulate their materials to observe, question and quantify the many states of the human condition. Download the brochure.
All In
APRIL 30–MAY 21, 2019
Featuring work by second-year MFA Fine Arts candidates
Curated by LeRonn P. Brooks
All In is a group exhibition that explores the intersections between form and urgency. Each work stands as a metaphor for the evidence of the imagination’s questions about life, its ambiguities, secrets and truths. This is to say that there exists a community of inter-dependent and individual practices, here. Each work embodies its maker and is as unique, experimental and speculative, as the still-unfolding narrative(s) of each artist’s life and His/Her/Their implication(s) to the world(s) to which this exhibition is an invitation. It is an invitation (in)to the speculative interior(s) from which the imagination blooms as a matter of culture/counterculture, and the exploration of “personal knowing” and witnessing. Each work is a personified space of this witnessing and each space is a room for narration. All In is therefore evidence from the interior(s) and the communication of a deeply held bond between classmates, peers, friends and fellow journeyers. —LeRonn P. Brooks, Ph.D.
Design by Time
FEBRUARY 22–APRIL 13, 2019
Curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, c2-curatorsquared. Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents Design by Time, an exhibition with work from 22 international designers portraying time and its dynamic effects on fashion, furniture, textiles, vessels, and more. Representing an international field, the designers in the exhibition go beyond the conventional intention of design—to give functional objects a visually arresting reality. Their analytic, formal processes are partnered with natural phenomena, chemical, and physical forces, while time-based acts such as performance and drawing are magnified to serve as collaborators in the design.
With work by: Atelier Mark Sturkenboom; Auger-Loizeau; Maarten Baas; BeatWoven; Sebastian Brajkovic; Hussein Chalayan; Edhv, Architects of Identity; Patrick Frey; Front; Glithero; Marlène Huissoud; Humans since 1982; William Lamson; Mathieu Lehanneur; mischer’traxler studio; Jacob Olmedo; Diana Scherer; Sebastian Cox Workshop; Bartholomäus Traubeck; Nicole Wermers; Jólan van der Wiel; and Ryan Mario Yasin.
Design by Time will tour through March 2021 to the following venues: Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, OH; Gregg Museum of Art and Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; and the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, CA.
This exhibition and companion publication are supported in part by a grant from the Creative Industries Fund NL, and as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York
Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural
DECEMBER 7, 2018–FEBRUARY 7, 2019
This exhibition assembles over forty contemporary architects, artists, and landscape architects whose work challenges the division between the built and the natural environment. In the Anthropocene epoch, humans have been fundamentally displaced from a place of privilege, philosophically as well as experientially. Western civilization’s traditional distinctions between nature and culture have eroded. Ambiguous Territory asks, can art and design avail new ways to approach contemporary challenges regarding the environment? What new worlds, and what new concepts of nature and culture can art and design reveal that other modes of inquiry and knowledge cannot?
John Ashbery: The Construction of Fiction
SEPTEMBER 21–NOVEMBER 14, 2018
The prolific collage work that John Ashbery produced over the last decade of his life is remarkable because it allows new insights into the creative process of one of America’s most reticent poets. But what many saw as a poet’s late foray into the visual arts was, in reality, a return to an early vocation that somehow morphed into complex hybrids. Composition, whether with images or words, was Ashbery’s métier and collage had been his technique of choice since the beginning of his career as a poet. The mixing of visual arts and literature was also a distinctive trait in the works of authors that have been of central interest to Ashbery, namely French writer Raymond Roussel, and American outsider artist Henry Darger. Ashbery, like Roussel and Darger, conveyed narrative through the juxtaposition of seemingly random imagery that left to the reader the task of filling the gaps and making connections. Presenting over one hundred and twenty collages and archival material, John Ashbery: The Construction of Fiction is the most comprehensive exhibition of Ashbery’s visual art to date. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog and public programs.
Art Food
JUNE 25–SEPTEMBER 8, 2018
This exhibition documents four editions of a design incubator (2013-2016) where students from the School of Form in Poznań, Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (Poland); Royal College of Arts, Central Saint Martins College (London); and Pratt Institute designed ceramic ware to showcase culinary art prepared by cutting-edge food stylists. The project was led by Marek Cecuła and held at the Ćmielów Design Studio in the Polish Porcelain Factories “Ćmielow” and “Chodzież,” Poland. Organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute / Culture.pl, Modus Design Marek Cecuła Studio, Polish Porcelain Factories “Ćmielów” and “Chodzież,” and Ćmielów Design Studio.
Albers, Lustig Cohen, Tissi, 1958-2018
MARCH 2–APRIL 28, 2018
Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents Albers, Lustig Cohen, Tissi, 1958-2018, an exhibition that explores sixty years of graphic design and art work by three influential women artist-designers: Anni Albers, Elaine Lustig Cohen, and Rosmarie Tissi. Connected by shared circumstances of identity, each is a 20th-century woman connected to a well-known male artist or designer and business partner, with mutual friends, patrons, places, and communities. Working through and inspired by constraints, all three demonstrated an affinity for geometric, hard-edged forms. They made work with a common ideal, exemplars of the Bauhaus ethos: unity in art and design. In the work is a vivacity that feels always new, timeless, and individual.
See Yourself E(x)ist
DECEMBER 8, 2017–FEBRUARY 17, 2018
Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents See Yourself E(x)ist, an exhibition that looks at the future of humans and nature—at our poetic and futile attempts at agency, and our absurd productive efforts to control. The exhibition presents incidences of human interaction—with animals, insects, leaves, trees, earth, and time—that yield extraordinary artifacts, engineered forms of hope, and objects of power. They’ve taken the form of robots, videos, paintings, sculptures, and interactive objects. The art acknowledges the elegance of futility, the strangeness of attempts at permanence, and the absurdity of technological advances.
From Digital and Back
JULY 10–SEPTEMBER 9, 2017
Each piece of work in this exhibition carries a distinct time stamp of today and incudes interactive installations and objects, digital images, video, animation, and digital mixed media. There is no language or aesthetic overlap. From emotionally charged machinima video, manipulated photographs of a near future, finding the soul in obsolete hardware, fantastical wearable devices, to handwritten poems, drawings, and a video chain of single moments, to visualizing emotions of finding one’s home and place in the world, the message always shapes the medium. This exhibition represents a small selection of the many Pratt Department of Digital Arts alumni who are featured in important publications, exhibiting in galleries and new media institutions, and working in major creative industries. Graduates emerge as critically informed and skilled creators actively shaping our digital future. Alumni continue to build on their education to respond to a diverse and networked culture, and to produce experiences that provide audiences agency to explore critical issues.
Download the brochure.
The Era of Good Feelings
MAY 1–23, 2017
Curated by the graduating seniors in the Photography Department at Pratt Institute, The Era of Good Feelings presents a vision of photography that is diverse in its approach to subject, style, and materials—reflecting the expanded field of photography today.
Nectar: War Upon the Bees
DECEMBER 9, 2016–FEBRUARY 11, 2017
Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents Nectar: War Upon the Bees, a visual essay centered on the way that disregard for bees and the “faster, bigger, cheaper” approach to modern food production is leading to severe consequences for human survival. Through various artistic mediums, the work of nine artists speaks to the way that bees are representative of today’s growing environmental threats and creates a rich compilation of imagery that evokes an important and socially engaged mission. Curated by Berta Sichel of Bureau Phi Art Projects.
Download the catalog.
Feminism Is Politics!
SEPTEMBER 28, 2016–NOVEMBER 23, 2016
Feminism Is Politics! is an inquiry into what is conceptualized by feminists and queer/lesbians in the 21st century as New Feminism. The exhibition features video, performance works and art activism that address the feminist position in action and redefine the notion of “political” within the new millennium’s paradigm of uncertainty and precarity.
Download the catalog.
The Picture Book Re-Imagined: The Children’s Book Legacy of Pratt Institute and Bank Street College of Education
JULY 12, 2016–SEPTEMBER 15, 2016
Curated by Leonard Marcus, this exhibition represents a significant collaboration between Pratt Institute and Bank Street College. Both institutions have played a seminal role in furthering the illustrated children’s book as an art form. This exhibition features original children’s book artwork, manuscripts, and archival materials highlighting the ongoing legacy of Bank Street and Pratt Institute in shaping children’s literature as an art form.
Little Sister (is watching you, too)
DECEMBER 11, 2015–JANUARY 30, 2016
This exhibition features artworks and activist projects that look back at the apparatus of government agencies and systems of control, addressing ethics, accountability, the limits of transparency and visualization, and the ways in which data analysis is shaping political decisions and civic rights.
After Wearing: A History of Gestures, Actions, and Jewelry
SEPTEMBER 25–NOVEMBER 14, 2015
This exhibition demonstrates the relational and participatory potential of jewelry, investigating its presence in the social world through artworks, jewelry objects, and commissioned projects.
The Water Knows All My Secrets
JULY 10–SEPTEMBER 12, 2015
This exhibition takes a critical look at our engagement with water, whether as a barrier, a threatening force of nature, or a resource at risk.
Performing Franklin Furnace
FEBRUARY 20–APRIL 30, 2015
In 1976, performance artist Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace, an organization whose mission would be “to make the world safe for avant-garde art.” This exhibition celebrates that mission with a presentation of thirty projects selected from Franklin Furnace’s archives.
Performing Franklin Furnace Brochure
Dust, Dialogue and Uncertainty: Slow knowledge in design thinking and practice
DECEMBER 5, 2014–FEBRUARY 7, 2015
Dust, Dialogue and Uncertainty gives form to a decade of inquiry by the Netherlands-based research platform slowLab, combining diverse facets of its ongoing investigations into the potentials of Slow knowledge in design thinking and practice.
Sleuthing the Mind
SEPTEMBER 17–NOVEMBER 5, 2014
Through video, performance, human-computer interface, virtual reality, and traditional artistic approaches, this exhibition explores the mind’s many facets, presenting an expanded field of artistic practice informed by neuroscience.
Black Dress
FEBRUARY 7–APRIL 26, 2014
Coinciding with both Fashion Week and Black History Month, “Black Dress” celebrates the contributions of ten New York City-based Black fashion designers working today, raising awareness of their achievements within the fashion industry.
0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art
NOVEMBER 22, 2013–JANUARY 25, 2014
Co-organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art and Penland School of Crafts, 0 to 60 highlights contemporary work that engages with themes such as real time, virtual time, historical time, recorded time, manipulated time, and the passage of time.
Splice: At the Intersection of Art and Medicine
SEPTEMBER 20–NOVEMBER 9, 2013
Showcasing 20th-century anatomical drawings complimented by contemporary works of art, SPLICE brings together both scientific and artistic means of representing the human body.
Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age, 2001-2012
JULY 8–AUGUST 28, 2013
An international selection of recent posters addressing and advocating for social change. Organized by Elizabeth Resnick and MassArt; exhibition website at http://graphicadvocacyposters.org/.
Kinesthetics: Art Imitating Life
FEB 8–APRIL 27, 2013
An exhibition exploring the aesthetics of movement through kinetic sculptures echoing the movement of natural forms and recreating human experiences.
Kinesthetics: Art Imitating Life Catalogue
125 Icons: A Celebration of Works by Pratt Alumni and Faculty, 1887-2012
NOV 30, 2012–JAN 19, 2013
Part of Pratt’s 125th anniversary celebrations, this exhibition features 125 “iconic” art and design objects created by Pratt alumni and faculty.
Party Headquarters: Art in the Age of Political Absurdity
SEPT 28–NOV 10, 2012
Just in time for election season, Party Headquarters: Art in the Age of Political Absurdity updates the grand tradition of political satire to shine a light on the American psyche in an era political polarization.
Pratt Alumni Painters
JUNE 8–SEPT 8, 2012
An exhibition of work by fourteen emerging and established painters who graduated from Pratt within the last three decades.
Pratt Alumni Painters Brochure
Bright Future: New Designs in Glass
FEBRUARY 10–MAY 5, 2012
Furniture, tableware, architectural elements, and lighting designs by American and international artists exploring issues of sustainability, the manipulation of light, and the contrast of ancient and modern influences in contemporary glass.
Resonance: Looking for Mr. McLuhan
OCTOBER 21–DECEMBER 21, 2011
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of pioneering media critic Marshall McLuhan, this exhibition demonstrated the wealth of ways in which McLuhan’s thinking still resonates with contemporary artists.
Principals of Design: Pratt Fashion Alumni
SEPTEMBER 9–OCTOBER 8, 2011
From haute couture to the finish line, “Principals of Design: Pratt Fashion Alumni” highlights the diversity, influence, and talent of professional designers who began their careers at Pratt Institute.
Project 35
JUNE 17–JULY 30, 2011
A program of single-channel videos selected by 35 international curators (produced and organized by Independent Curators International).
We Are Grammar
FEBRUARY 25–MAY 7, 2011
Explored the diverse and evolving ways in which a third generation of artists has employed text in art over the past 10 years.
Blind Dates
NOVEMBER 19, 2010–FEBRUARY 12, 2011
This exhibition matched artist/architect couples whose ethnic backgrounds represent the Anatolia region to mediate through projects that contend with what remains of the people, places, and cultures that once constituted the Ottoman Empire.
You Are Here → Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City
SEPTEMBER 24–NOVEMBER 6, 2010
A selection of contemporary artists maps the emotional terrain of New York City through artworks and conceptual projects that investigate our frenzied cityscape.
Envelopes
MARCH 5–MAY 1, 2010
Featured designs exploring new potentials of the architectural surface as the “skin” of a building and also as a skin that envelopes the body.
Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion
NOVEMBER 20, 2009–FEBRUARY 20, 2010
Surveyed the work of artists and designers exploring practical and symbolic solutions to the problem of integrating sustainable practices into the fashion system.
Design Jazz: Improvisations on the Urban Street
SEPTEMBER 25–NOVEMBER 7, 2009
Inspired by the newly created department of Academic Sustainability at Pratt Institute, this exhibition in two parts documented both theoretical and creative approaches to the design of urban streets.
Design S: Swedish Design Award
JUNE 18–AUGUST 5, 2009
Showcasing recipients of Sweden’s biggest design award, this exhibition highlighted products that drive development, make everyday life easier and more pleasant, simplify work life, or point the way to a sustainable society. Made possible by Saab Automobile, Albihns and the Consulate General of Sweden.
Broadcast
FEBRUARY 20–MAY 2, 2009
Explored the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged with, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. Co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore and Independent Curators International.
Zones of Conflict
NOVEMBER 19, 2008–FEBRUARY 7, 2009
Photographic and video-based artworks that focus on contemporary war—particularly in the Middle East—and that deploy a multiplicity of artistic approaches.
Downloads
- After Wearing Brochure
- Performing Franklin Furnace Brochure
- Bright Future Brochure
- Resonance Brochure
- Pratt Alumni Painters Brochure
- Ethics+Aesthetics Catalogue
- Party Headquarters Brochure
- Kinesthetics: Art Imitating Life Catalogue
- 0 to 60 Brochure
- Splice Brochure
- Black Dress Brochure
- Sleuthing the Mind Brochure
- SlowLab Brochure