MoMA PS1
Yto Barrada on Le Grand Soir
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Directed by Nora Rodriguez; Filmed by Elle Rinaldi; Video Editing by Elle Rinaldi; Audio by Nora Rodriguez; Graphic Design by Julia Schäfer; Music: Tendril by Dan Langa, Floretin by Blue Dot Sessions, Bivly by Blue Dot Sessions
The tower. The flower. The door. These are the names of the acrobatic formations to which Yto Barrada’s colorful sculptures pay tribute, acknowledging Morocco’s rich history of human pyramids.
Used during battle to see over walls and enemy lines, human pyramids transformed acrobatic movements into warrior traditions. Barrada’s sculptures play off architecture—both human and concrete. Discover them for yourself when you visit MoMA PS1, and watch the installation come to life in this video.
MoMA PS1
Through the Open Window
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The choreographer, writer, and visual artist Ralph Lemon has likened the presentation of dance within a contemporary art museum to the event of a bird flying unexpectedly into a house through an open window. There is a disorienting change in air pressure and temperature from the perspective of the bird, and a dizzying disruption of atmosphere for those already in the room. A potentially productive meeting arises from two very different positions.
On the occasion of Lemon’s major solo show at MoMA PS1, Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon, exhibition curators Connie Butler, T. Lax, and Kari Rittenbach placed equal emphasis on the drawings, films, sculptural objects, and remnants made by Lemon and his collaborators, and the ambitious program of performances rehearsed on site and staged monthly for museum audiences. The ebb and flow of Lemon’s ceremonies engage with the material traces occupying the very same building. In some cases, art objects and sonic elements even travel between the porous realm of live performance and the secure climate-controlled room—virtuosically upending the values conventionally held in either setting.
MoMA PS1
On Bungkalan and Butterflies
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For over a decade, artists Enzo Camacho (Filipino, b. 1985) and Ami Lien (American, b. 1987) have amplified local forms of survival and resistance, with particular attention to the Philippines. On the occasion of their first major US museum exhibition Offerings for Escalante, on view at MoMA PS1 through February 17, the duo discuss their historical and material research on the island of Negros, with both documentary and indexical approaches to embodying the land. Camacho and Lien’s interests materialize in two of their recent works on view in the exhibition, Langit Lupa (2023) and Decomposition Animation (2023), which recently entered the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The conversation with Chief Curator Ruba Katrib triangulates the social and environmental concerns of artists and activists across The Philippines, its diaspora, and New York.
MoMA PS1
Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon
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Accompanying the first US museum exhibition dedicated to artist, dancer, and choreographer Ralph Lemon, this catalogue features works across diverse media, including sculpture, film, drawing, and major ensemble performances that emerge in the afterlife of postmodern dance. As a “devotional” handbook for the PS1 show, Ceremonies Out of the Air traces the arc of Lemon’s ongoing collaborations, which extend far beyond the paradigm of dance. It includes essays by exhibition curators Connie Butler and Thomas Lax, as well as newly commissioned essays, texts and contributions by Kevin Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pope.L, Kevin Quashie, and Kari Rittenbach. Featuring a dust jacket that unfolds into a poster, the book includes more than 100 full-color illustrations of Lemon’s artworks, performance documentation, and sketches.
Edited by Connie Butler, Thomas Lax, Kari Rittenbach, Jody Graf. Text by Butler, Lax, Adrienne Edwards, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pope.L, Kevin Quashie, and Rittenbach. Contribution by Kevin Beasley. Designed by Julia Schäfer and Asel Tambay.
MoMA PS1
Jerry the Marble Faun
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Filmed by Elle Rinaldi ; Video Editing by Elle Rinaldi; Audio Recording by Nora Rodriguez; Graphic Design by Julia Schäfer; Music: Etude 13 LaSalle by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue); Original score by Dan Langa
Jerry Torre has lived in Sunnyside, Queens for 25 years. When he moved in, this garden was weeds and concrete. He slowly transformed it into a verdant respite—and it wasn’t his first time! You may know Jerry as the gardener of Grey Gardens, where he earned his nickname: Jerry the Marble Faun. In addition to his excellence as a gardener, Jerry carves sculptures from stone sourced from demolition sites around New York. His intricately carved limestone works are now on view in Hard Ground through October 14, 2024.
MoMA PS1
Melissa Cody on Weaving and Video Games
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Filmed by Elle Rinaldi; Additional footage courtesy of the Hammer Museum; Video Editing by Elle Rinaldi; Audio Recording by Nora Rodriguez; Graphic Design by Julia Schäfer
Navajo weaving has always reflected the culture and politics in which it was created. And when you grow up in the 1980s, that culture includes Mario Kart, Pac-Man, and Contra. See how Melissa Cody’s vibrant weavings draw from her childhood mastery of video games, and how the artist joins a long lineage of innovation and evolution in weaving tradition.
MoMA PS1
Warm Up Cassette Tape Archive
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“When I first started at PS1, this was one of the first things you showed me,” remarks Nick Scavo, MoMA PS1 Senior Project Manager, Music, Performance and Events. “This mysterious box with tapes, floppy disks, flyers. There’s a beer koozie in there as well.”
Scavo joins MoMA PS1 Assistant Curator Kari Rittenbach and Thomas Laprade, co-director of Montez Press Radio and member of the 2024 Warm Up host committee, for a listening session of cassette tapes sourced from the museum’s archives. The tapes, many of which are partially or totally unlabeled, include recordings from some of the earliest Warm Up performances in the PS1 courtyard.
Warm Up began in 1998, just one year after rewritable compact-disc technology became widely available as a digital storage solution. Hear Rittenbach and Scavo discuss the evolution of Warm Up and the audio integrity of cassette tape ribbon, alongside commentary from special guest and former PS1 Curatorial Assistant Maika Pollack, now Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Syracuse University Art Museum. Listen to the conversation on Montez Press Radio or below.
Hear Kari Rittenbach and Nick Scavo on Montez Press Radio
MoMA PS1
In Conversation with Reynaldo Rivera
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Reynaldo Rivera’s work has immortalized the colorful figures circling through his orbit since the early 1980s, when he first began using his camera to record their dreams and desires. His photography refutes the medium’s specious objectivity, reflecting the atmosphere of the surrounding environment by making use of available light—both natural and artificial—as well as shadow.
Rivera’s first solo museum exhibition, Fistful of Love/También la belleza, includes never-before-seen photographs from the artist’s archive, alongside a film newly edited from Hi8 footage. His photographs—which are included in MoMA’s collection—are informed by the drama and deep emotion of boleros and rancheras, the glamor of Old Hollywood and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, and earlier trailblazers in photography like Nadar, Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Rivera joined guest curator Lauren Mackler and MoMA PS1 assistant curator Kari Rittenbach to discuss the exhibition, revealing the stories behind some of his subjects (often friends or lovers), what it means to publicly exhibit his very personal “blue” series, and the experience of looking back on the past three decades of his work.
Read the full conversation at the link below.
MoMA PS1
Stewart Uoo’s Set Design for Warm Up 2024
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Stewart Uoo
(American, b. 1985)
Contemplating Non-Dualism IV (Triptych) 2024
Acrylic, pigment, and collaged canvas
Used Sun (Eclipse) 2024
HDU foam, epoxy, glass and acrylic tiles, hardware, and motor
Untitled (After Tony Walton for Diana Ross: Live In Central Park 1983) 2024
Silk, thread, acrylic paint, epoxy, and glass tiles
Set design for Warm Up
Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York
For this Warm Up season, New York City-based artist Stewart Uoo conceived a three-part modular setting for the museum terrace: a spinning mirror-tiled sculpture, hanging panels of brilliantly dyed silk, and a psychedelic DJ booth to be graced by performers in MoMA PS1’s iconic summer music series. Riffing on the alternate history of New York School painting as backgrounds for dance theater and social performance, Uoo stains the Warm Up stage in a summery palette of radical optimism. With references that include both canonical and subversive artistic interventions in the performing arts—by Cy Twombly (Bacchus, 2011) and Martin Wong (Peking on Acid, c. 1970s), among others—the main components of his outdoor installation approach the scale of architecture via painting. Suspended at the center of the installation, a custom sculpture based on a found tire flaunts inlaid mirror tiles that cast luminous track prints in their wake. Uoo’s polychromatic triptych on the DJ booth doubles as a conceptual altarpiece, encouraging crowds to dissolve into the light, haze, and heat each Friday night—and let the rhythm take over.
