Best Outdoor Art Shows This Summer
What to see around the city this summer, pleating with an elite fashion designer at the Brooklyn Museum, and hi from Rhea!
Hello! My name is Rhea, and I’m coming up on my fourth year as a staff writer at Hyperallergic.
No, this is not the premise of a fanfiction story for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland … We’re just talking about Precious Okoyomon’s Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation, which “transforms the concrete corner of the museum into a place of joy, exploration, and, dare I say, tranquility,” per Hyperallergic’s co-founder and Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian. On view for the next two years, Okoyomon’s installation is high on our list of 15 must-see outdoor art shows across all five boroughs.
For those who prefer foolproof air conditioning over unpredictable weather patterns, I might suggest a visit to the Brooklyn Museum for a monumental exhibition devoted to Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen. An established name in celebrity and haute couture, van Herpen is best known for her gravity-defying, 3D-printed designs that take structural inspiration from the natural world. One of our contributors, Livia Caligor, had a chance to both speak and pleat with the designer onsite at the makeshift atelier featured in the exhibition.
Running from my own thoughts on the treadmill we call life, I often forget about how privileged I am to live in a city bursting at the seams with culture and inspiration. Perhaps a visit to My Camera Is My Sketchbook at the Schoelkopf Gallery is in order, as Richard Estes’s visual reflections on New York City remind us that beauty can be appreciated and captured anywhere.
Slide through a teddy bear, get weird with a neural network’s hallucinations, play ping-pong on an artist-made table, and so much more.
Precious Okoyomon’s new work transforms the concrete corner of the museum courtyard into a place of joy, exploration, and, dare I say, tranquility. | Hrag Vartanian
A show at the Brooklyn Museum invites guests to work alongside the Dutch fashion designer in her recreated atelier. | Livia Caligor
Walter Benjamin and the Edges of Photography at the Jewish Museum
“Photographs that aestheticize things while erasing their meaning are dangerous, [Benjamin] argued .... Practitioners can bathe the chimneys of a steel factory in the same soft light as the trees of a forest, but unlike the paintbrush, the camera creates an undeniable impression of reality. Beyond that, not only can photography glaze everything into something beautiful, but people (myself included) will happily eat it up.”
“Water reappears in various forms .... Its changing states, from melting ice to evaporating mist, become a metaphor for Hong Kong herself — 'always on the verge of disappearing,' as late cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas puts it — leaving little time for reflection before new changes arrive.”