Peter Saul, Ronald Reagan in Grenada, acrylic on canvas, 1984 (Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation. Photo: Jeffrey Nintzel)
Who: Judith Bernstein, Kim Jones, Gary Carrion-Murayari
What: New Museum Conversations
Where: New Museum Zoom
When: Wednesday September 30, free with advance RSVP, 8:00
Why: There doesn’t seem to be a lot to laugh about these days, what with the Covid-19 crisis, protests over police brutality, an economy in freefall, the battle over the next Supreme Court justice, and the upcoming contentious presidential election. But artists Judith Bernstein and Kim Jones are going to try to make us smile even given our current state of chaos when they sit down for the New Museum Conversation “Humor and Politics in Art” on Zoom with curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. The provocative seventy-seven-year-old Newark-born, NYC-based Bernstein has been fighting the status quo in her work for more than fifty years, while seventy-six-year-old California-born, NYC-based performance artist Jones has been stoking controversy in his oeuvre since the mid-1970s. The talk will focus on eighty-six-year-old California-born artist Peter Saul’s “Crime and Punishment,” which is on view at the New Museum through January 3. You can see Saul’s February 27 pre-shutdown talk with New Museum director Massimiliano Gioni here.
Bernstein was at the New Museum with her 2012-13 solo exhibition “Hard”; she also participated in the group shows “After Hours: Murals on the Bowery” in 2011 and “The Last Newspaper: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models” in 2010-11 and such talks as “Who’s Afraid of the New Now?” in 2017; Jones’s relationship with the museum includes “Kim Jones as the Mudman” in 1986, “Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection” in 1995, and “Collage: The Unmonumental Picture” in 2008. Expect a raucous, no-holds-barred discussion with little subtlety.