Past Programs

Many of our past programs are archived on our Vimeo page — watch now!

(Re)visiting Spura

April 7 - May 22, 2011

A new exhibition by the New School’s City Studio, (Re)Visiting SPURA, explores a whole range of ways to see this complex place, through considering the SPURA diaspora, displaced many years ago, its current conditions, and the complex conversations about planning for its future, this exhibition springs from the City Studio’s research in the community and hopes to continue encouraging productive conversation about the site’s future.

The Days Of This Society Are Numbered

March 6 - April 16, 2011

The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present The Days of This Society Are Numbered, an exhibition inspired by French thinker Guy Debord’s 1979 declaration that “The days of this society are numbered; its reasons and its merits have been weighed in the balance and have been found wanting; its inhabitants are divided into two sides, one of which wants this society to disappear.”

Jane Benson: The Splits

March 6 - April 16, 2011

The Splits is a new collaborative performance project by Jane Benson. The world premiere of The Splits will gather together ten musicians, composer Matt Schickele, and an ensemble cast of rigorously altered instruments for a multi-media event centered on acts of cutting and splicing, regeneration and proliferation.

The West at Sunset

December 9 - February 20, 2011

The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present The West at Sunset, a multidisciplinary group exhibition in response to a masterwork of spiritual literature, Rene Daumal’s 1952 novelMount Analogue.

Yonamine: Dipoló

November 12 - December 4, 2010

Yonamine’s socially committed voice stands as a critical inquiry into the signs, ideas, and practices that constitute the ideological landscape of the global age. His output addresses the relationship between contemporary African iconography, colonial history, and identity politics. Bringing together his native country’s mythologies and Western narratives, he examines both the traumatic experience of Angola’s everyday life and the fragmented collective unconscious of a diasporic world.

Tania Candiani: From Confections To Floor Patterns

November 12 - December 4, 2010

Candiani’s community-driven practice examines the political condition of social groups in consumer society, from women to immigrants. In performances and participatory projects, she brings together the representation of the female body, craft traditions such as textiles, and high culture references in the form of texts in order to address the value systems and behavior patterns that generate collective identity. Her output comments on the ideological apparatus that frames class inequality and responds to the effects of capitalist principles in shaping the dominant vision of the world.

Rick Cary: Credo

September 30 - November 5, 2010

The photographs in Credo document moments in the religious lives of a small Pentecostal congregation and their pastor Reverend Jimmy Morrow at the Church of God in Jesus’ Name Only in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Mary Valverde: Variations On Notes

September 30 - November 6, 2010

In this exhibition Valverde references such form generating patterns as Metatron’s Cube, The Flower of Life, and the The Vesica Piscis. Rendered and altered through a lively collage of materials such as chalk, string, aluminum tape, washers, pennies, and colored fabric, these patterns are transformed into mysterious constructions which point to a cosmic search for beauty in the unknown.

Amplify: Creative & Sustainable Lifestyles In The Lower East Side

August 5 - September 15, 2010

AMPLIFY: Creative and Sustainable Lifestyles in the Lower East Side is an exhibition of sustainable community design — including neighborhood gardening initiatives, healthy food systems, and collaborative services for senior citizens — in downtown Manhattan.

Beth Livensperger: Visible Storage

August 5 - September 26, 2010

Beth Livensperger has created a painting series depicting reflections on glass or other surfaces, exhibited for the first time in Visible Storage. The reflections consider a flat space and a deep space at the same time, and confound the viewer’s sense of placement, inserting slivers of space behind one’s presumed vantage point.