SEPTEMBER ART

Also Worth SoHo · 3 Stops · 2-3 hours · 1 Closing

04 The Industrial Object Refuses

Americana in print on its 250th anniversary, an artist who makes painting from industrial debris and oxidation, and the New Museum’s century-spanning argument about what technology does to the human body. A downtown afternoon on objects that won’t stay in their categories.

Living in America: The Printed Image
Anchor · Living in America: The Printed Image · Susan Sheehan Gallery

This walk is looser than the others, but the through-line is real: all three stops are about what happens when a material or an object refuses the category it was assigned. Susan Sheehan’s Living in America assembles master prints for the Semiquincentennial — Celmins’s obsessively patient oceans, Ruscha’s deadpan horizons, William Henry Johnson’s screenprinted Harlem — and the medium is the argument. Printmaking is the democratic multiple, the image released from the singular hand, and the show uses that to ask what American cultural identity looks like when reproduced at scale: who gets included in the ’America’ being celebrated, and whose image counts as a master print. Johnson’s Harlem Renaissance screenprints sit that question on the wall beside Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, and the distance between them is the whole contested history. Kragelund at island works from the opposite direction: his paintings are built from industrial materials — enamel, fibreglass, epoxy, oxidized steel — and they use the physics of material degradation (the Mach band effect, the way gradients appear lighter or darker than they are) as a painterly argument about the hidden violence in everyday commercial infrastructure. He makes the object refuse its surface reading. New Humans, if still open, is the century-long context for both: 200 artists across 100 years on how technological change rewrites what it means to be human — a contested definition that runs from Bellmer’s broken body to Anicka Yi’s aerobes floating in the OMA galleries. A thinking walk more than a sensory one.

SoHo · 3 Stops · South to North
  1. 01Strm und Drangisland · 83 BoweryCloses Oct 24
  2. 02New HumansNew Museum · 235 Bowery
  3. 03Living in AmericaSusan Sheehan Gallery · 146 Greene StreetCloses Thu Sep 10
The Route · 3 Shows
01 / Susan Sheehan Gallery

Living in America

Living in America: The Printed Image · Susan Sheehan Gallery
146 Greene Street Closes Thu Sep 10 Gallery site → Walk to here →
Living in America: The Printed Image
02 / island

Strm und Drang

Strm und Drang · island
Strm und Drang
03 / New Museum

New Humans

New Humans: Memories of the Future · New Museum
235 Bowery Wed, Fri–Sun 11am–6pm, Thu 11am–9pm, closed Mon–Tue Gallery site → Walk to here →
New Humans: Memories of the Future
Walk the Route