Rose Gold, Glass Life, Baby Blue Benzo. Sara Cwynar's titles fish-hook you with color, alliteration, trends, and commerce. The title is a package; it's a cosmetic; it's a matrix; it's the erotics of economics. What she does so well is make her viewer fall into a picture even when it shows its own making. She is a visual storyteller bent on inducing her viewers into the contradiction of sobriety and stupor. You love the dream, but you also love learning how you love the dream.

We are lucky to have 52 Walker as our gracious hosts for this talk, so I hope you join us for a special one, where we'll be in Cwynar's latest magnum opus, Baby Blue Benzo, (curated by Ebony Haynes) ​​​​where we'll talk about kitsch, the power of objects, images, and when things start becoming valuable versus invaluable.

Azikiwe Mohammed rejects the idea that art’s ultimate aim is the expression of a creator’s unique genius. He is a self-described “guy who makes stuff,” producing a playfully humble array of objects and spaces specifically intended to welcome and serve communities the fine arts world often overlooks. He's lived an incredibly curious life, seeing what happens - and who lives - in the off hours. He collects, makes, manifests, and can tell stories that sometimes feel like tall tales.

Join us for a conversation about creative perception, community, fluidity in form, photography, and how he only needs four hours of sleep.

Sagarika is known for her process and use of textiles. The textiles are built backwards, like glass paintings - hand-dyed and rolled fibers successively layered together in a reverse choreography, creating a trove of biomorphic mysteries. She then cuts open particular parts, revealing hints of what lies beneath.

They are stunning.

Join us for a conversation about textiles, history, time travel, and how to overcome the perceptions of others.

When David Hammons wants to make a trade with you, you might be onto something. This trade inaugurated the very beginning of Jacob Kassay's career, and what followed is a crash course in the Art World, the machinations of the market, the pitfalls of overexposure, and ways to survive when you're an Artist before anything and everything else. More importantly, it was the beginning of a body of work that was and is deeply invested in perception, space, and time - a metaphysics rooted in the body, and in very close looking.

We're gonna talk about everything Jake experienced, the highs, the lows, and everything in between.

I met Steve this past summer at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where we were both resident faculty. I quickly fell in love with his wit (biting), his work (also biting), and his tenderness (much less biting). In our conversation here, we cover his first experience with an artwork, his relationship to portraiture, and the origins of Modernism in the auction block.

He’s unabashed in his distaste for prioritizing personal hardship to make art. In his own words, “This idea that we’re going to get together and have a party for our pain, and somehow art is gonna come out of that..? No baby, you better go to an observational drawing class.” Regardless of whether you agree with Steve’s perspectives, listening to him tell it is thoroughly enjoyable.

I've known Jamian since her first show at Rawson Projects in 2013. Back then, she was loud, brash, ambitious, and non-stop. She cursed like a sailor, smoked constantly, drank like her body was a bottle, and said everything smart and stupid thing she thought.

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She hasn't changed a bit.

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Jamian loves saying the "wrong" thing. And painting the "wrong" thing. It's part of what drives her. Sometimes her work makes people upset. Sometimes she makes people upset. Sometimes she makes me upset. I still think she's a great artist.

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This one is going to be messy.

Ser Serpas makes paintings, sculpture, and poetry. Her work is hard to explain without selling it short. I could say she's made exhibitions from stuff she found on the streets of the cities she was exhibiting in, or that her most recent exhibition in Paris at the Pinault Collection was inspired by the film "The Others" with Nicole Kidman, or that she''s made paintings by pressing wet paintings together, but none of these descriptions gets to the strangely alchemical transformations she's able to pull off in the work. It's genuinely free. It's alive. It reaffirms my belief that art still happens in the strangest, most unpredictable ways. I can't wait to talk to her.

NewCrits invites you to our seventh Artist Talk with Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. at 8pm.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr is an artist who uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Sometimes his images work towards the mysteries a person can hold. Other times they might explore the tension created through juxtapositions, or wisps of narrative and context, leaning further into abstraction. Altogether, his work foregrounds the possibilities and problems of photography today.

NewCrits invites you to our sixth Artist Talk with Chitra Ganesh at 8pm.

Across a twenty-year practice, Chitra Ganesh has developed an expansive body of work rooted in drawing and painting, which has evolved to encompass animations, wall drawings, collages, computer generated imagery, video, and sculpture.

Ganesh’s oeuvre is informed by her studies in literature and semiotic theory, and regular travels to India, with particular interest in Indian film and music. Combined with her upbringing in New York City’s far reaching urban and cultural landscape, these influences taken together yield a distinct perspective. In detailed works, Ganesh combines a vast array of influences including South Asian iconography, science fiction and queer theory, with the visual languages of vintage comics, Bollywood posters, and video games.

Ganesh’s explorations of mythologies and narrative traditions bring important historical conversations to the contemporary moment. In nonlinear narratives and richly layered visual worlds, Ganesh subverts traditional storytelling to create women and queer centric narratives of the future.

NewCrits invites you to our fifth Artist Talk with Kamrooz Aram at 8pm.

Kamrooz Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Working in painting, sculpture, collage, and exhibition design, Kamrooz Aram’s work stages an encounter between the European-American avant-garde and non-western forms of abstraction.His exhibitions very often try to rearrange the boundaries between art and artifact through different modes of display. His lyrical paintings and arrangements break down the hierarchies of Western aesthetics, asking that we rethink its categories and re-encounter these ideas and objects anew.

NewCrits invites you to our fourth Artist Talk with Stella Zhong at 8pm.

Stella Zhong’s work suspends existential uncertainty and humor. She builds vastly empty spaces punctured by barely visible, nonconforming objects in the periphery—highly idiosyncratic worlds that disorient authority. Immersed in physics and bypassing the human, her large-scale installation, video, and painting use obscurity and lack of reference as the condition to observe strength in smallness, latent life, and moments where alienation and intimacy converge.

NewCrits invites you to our third Second Tuesday Artist Talk with David Brooks at 8pm.

David Brooks is an artist whose work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. His work investigates how cultural concerns cannot be divorced from the natural world, while also questioning the terms under which nature is perceived and utilized. Often displacing infrastructural frameworks to draw comparisons with natural processes, his sculptural interventions are more enacted than constructed – better read as performative scenarios than disembodied compositions.

NewCrits invites you to our second Second Tuesday Artist Talk with Heidi Lau at 8pm.

Heidi will be in conversation with artist, Ajay Kurian. Karaoke will follow.

Heidi Lau is a New York City based artist who grew up in Macau. Her primary materials are paper and ceramic. In her research-based work, Lau explores nostalgia, memory, and the creation of history. Taoist cosmology influences much of her work, as do folk superstitions and Macau's colonial history. Lau is particularly interested in burial chambers as a transitional space in which a body teeters between personhood and objecthood.

NewCrits invites you to our first Second Tuesday Artist Talk with Jade Kuriki Olivo aka Puppies Puppies at 7pm.

DJ set by the artist will follow

Jade Kuriki Olivo aka Puppies Puppies is a conceptual, performance and installation artist. Her work often draws on the emotional resonance of found objects and shared experiences to explore existential themes like love, intimacy, mortality, power relations and states of being. Until 2018 her works were created anonymously – the name Puppies Puppies revealed neither gender or origin, nor whether a group or just a single individual was behind the pseudonym. Stepping away from this unattributed artistic persona became central to of a series of works beginning in 2018 that coincided with the transitioning of the artist to Jade Kuriki Olivo. In the years since, her activist practice and commitment to the rights of BIPOC transgender, gender non conforming, two spirit + minorities has increasingly become a focal point in her artistic work. In recent years, Kuriki Olivo has used exhibition invitations to draw attention to issues surrounding this community, as well as inviting artists to exhibit either alongside her or in her place.