Sky Hopinka is an artist and filmmaker based in Hudson, NY. He currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.
1
ADAM PENDLETON (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY STUART COMER WITH DANIELLE A. JACKSON AND GEE WESLEY)
Pendleton’s concept of Black Dada has recently been a source of inspiration and joyous and generative confusion for me, and the artist’s exhibition at MoMA further magnifies the brilliant mutability of meaning that undergirds his expansive and penetrating practice. Alongside a video portrait of theorist Jack Halberstam and a sound collage featuring the riveting words of radical poet Amiri Baraka, Pendleton’s paintings, drawings, and films—here displayed on a soaring, five-story-tall black scaffolding that fills the museum’s atrium—offer misty yet pointed ways of looking at national and personal history.
On view through February 21, 2022.
2
ANAÏS DUPLAN, BLACKSPACE: ON THE POETICS OF AN AFROFUTURE (BLACK OCEAN PRESS)
I’ve returned to this book a number of times this past year, drawn again and again to Duplan’s astute, poetic, honest, and piercing voice. The product of six years of research, this collection of interviews, essays, and poetry catalogues various aesthetic strategies for building toward a liberatory future. “You must weave your present self,” Duplan writes, “and take up your future self, which has always been you.”
3
BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ (LEONARD & BINA ELLEN ART GALLERY, MONTREAL)
With this solo presentation of moving-image work, Muñoz spun an intricate and nuanced web of relations that also entangled the viewer. Addressing overlooked links among the politics of space, the poetics of the personal, and the very land on which the gallery sits, Muñoz deftly bypassed Western definitions of the Caribbean, specifically her home, Puerto Rico.
4
CARRIE SCHNEIDER (CANDICE MADEY/CHART, NEW YORK)
The photographs in this two-venue show were as striking in their composition as they were in their construction. Produced using a camera that Schneider built herself, the unique, abstract prints were intensely personal, offering glimpses of the artist’s private working through of accumulated memories and objects.
5
CRYSTAL Z CAMPBELL (HARTNETT GALLERY, ROCHESTER, NY; CURATED BY ALMUDENA ESCOBAR LÓPEZ)
Archives are the starting point for Campbell, whose works elicit questions about how we witness and remember. Short films, writings, and slideshow performances constitute a rich body of work that continues to demonstrate the possibilities for—and urgency of—communing with the past.
6
FALLON SIMARD
It’s hard to pinpoint a single show or event or project when it comes to Simard’s interlinked production. The Toronto-based artist’s protean practice takes a multiplatform and transtemporal approach to engaging with Indigenous communities, Indigenous identity, and 2SLGBTQQIA rights. He moves deftly among video art, memes, workshops, and public activism with urgency and humor—and with an unflagging focus on resistance and care.
7
NEW RED ORDER (ARTISTS SPACE, NEW YORK; CURATED BY JAY SANDERS)
The public secret society New Red Order continues to mystify and encourage me, and its recent exhibition—including multichannel videos, performances, and sculptures—is no exception. Playfully, evasively, intentionally, and directly, the collective undertakes critiques of institutions, schools of anthropology, pop ideas of Indigeneity, and “Indigeneity” itself, ensuring that we all keep thinking about our own complicity amid the matrix of our power and oppression.
8
TERESA BAKER (DE BOER GALLERY, LOS ANGELES)
Baker’s sublime constructions of yarn, paint, Astroturf, beads, bark, and corn husk conjure visions of cartographies at once impossible and real. Expressive, tactile, restrained, the compositions evoke a powerful singularity that knits together the Great Plains, these individual objects, and the here and now.
9
TIFFANY SIA (ARTISTS SPACE, NEW YORK)
Sia’s portrait of Hong Kong, uniting themes of geography, history, and meteorology, refuses to take clarity as its objective. Rather, the complexities of individual perspective, collective perspective, diaspora, time, power, and resistance become pressure points by which we feel the weight of this ever-changing city.
10
ULYSSES JENKINS (ICA PHILADELPHIA; CURATED BY MEG ONLI AND ERIN CHRISTOVALE)
The work of Ulysses Jenkins was a revelation. Across the videos and performances featured in this career retrospective—among them Two-Zone Transfer, 1979, and Inconsequential Doggerel, 1981—one found a constellation of themes that remain relevant some fifty years on. With nimble curiosity, Jenkins confronts the hegemonies of race, gender, and the state, as in Without Your Interpretation, 1983, which critiques the white gaze via a collaborative performance featuring appearances by Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, among others.
Co-organized with the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.