This Spring New Museum will Feature Exhibitions by
Carol Rama, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Kaari Upson,
Alongside Exhibitions by Elaine Cameron-Weir and RAGGA NYC
 

New York, NY…In April and May 2017, the New Museum will open a series of solo exhibitions devoted to the extraordinary work of Carol Rama, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Kaari Upson, each of which will occupy one floor of the Museum, alongside exhibitions by Elaine Cameron-Weir in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery and RAGGA NYC in the Museum’s Fifth Floor Gallery.  

“Carol Rama: Antibodies” (April 26–September 10, 2017), on view on the Museum’s Second Floor, is the first New York museum survey of the work of the Italian artist and the largest presentation of her work in the U.S. to date. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song For A Cipher” (May 3–September 3, 2017), on view on the Museum’s Fourth Floor, brings together a new series of paintings specifically realized for the exhibition by the 2013 Turner Prize finalist, one of the most renowned painters of her generation.“Kaari Upson: Good thing you are not alone” (May 3–September 10, 2017), on view on the Museum’s Third Floor, marks the first New York museum solo by the Los Angeles-based artist. 

“Carol Rama: Antibodies” 
April 26–September 10, 2017 
Second Floor 

“Carol Rama: Antibodies” is the first New York museum survey of the work of Italian artist Carol Rama (b. 1918, Turin, Italy; d. 2015, Turin, Italy) and the largest presentation of her work in the U.S. to date. While Rama has been largely overlooked in contemporary art discourses, her work has proven prescient and influential for many artists working today, attaining cult status and attracting renewed interest in recent years. Rama’s exhibition at the New Museum will bring together more than 150 of her paintings, objects, and works on paper, highlighting her consistent fascination with the representation of the body. Seen together, these works present a rare opportunity to examine the ways in which Rama’s fantastical anatomies opposed the political ideology of her time and continue to speak to ideas of desire, sacrifice, repression, and liberation. “Carol Rama: Antibodies” celebrates the independence and eccentricity of this legendary artist whose work spanned half a century of contemporary art history and anticipated debates on sexuality, gender, and representation. Encompassing her entire career, the exhibition traces the development from her early erotic, harrowing depictions of “bodies without organs” through later works that invoke innards, fluids, and limbs—a miniature theater of cruelty in which metaphors of contagion and madness counteract every accepted norm. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, including an essays by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, a previously unpublished interview between the artist and Lea Vergine, a visual essay of photographs taken in Rama's home and studio by artist Danh Vo, and a series of quotations from the artist. 
 

“Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song For A Cipher” 
May 3–September 3, 2017 
Fourth Floor 

This exhibition brings together a series of new paintings specifically realized for the exhibition by British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London), a 2013 Turner Prize finalist and one of the most renowned painters of her generation. Yiadom-Boakye’s lush oil paintings embrace many of the conventions of historical European portraiture, but expand on that tradition by engaging fictional subjects who often serve as protagonists of the artist’s short stories as well. These imagined figures are almost always black, an attribute Yiadom-Boakye sees as both political and autobiographical, given her own West African heritage. Often immersed in indistinct, monochrome settings, her elegant characters come to life through the artist’s bold brushwork, appearing both cavalier and nonchalant, quotidian and otherworldly. In part because they inhabit neutral spaces, her subjects’ idle, private moments provoke the imagination of viewers and remain open to a range of narratives, memories, and interpretations. This exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with contributions from Chris Ofili, Elena Filipovic, and Rob Storr, as well as a new interview with the artist.
 

“Kaari Upson: Good thing you are not alone” 
May 3–September 10, 2017 
Third Floor 

This exhibition marks the first New York museum solo presentation of work by Los Angeles–based artist Kaari Upson (b. 1972, San Bernardino, CA). Encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, and video, Upson’s works track open-ended, circuitous narratives that weave together elements of fantasy, physical and psychological trauma, and the often-fraught pursuit of an American ideal. A decade ago, Upson immersed herself in what became perhaps her best-known project, which began with her visit to the site of a burned-down house. For the prodigious The Larry Project (2005–ongoing), she unearthed a well of projected histories, images, and artifacts inspired by forgotten fragments from the abandoned personal archive of a man whom she had never met. Upson has continued this near-obsessive forensic approach in subsequent projects, such as My Mother Drinks Pepsi (2014–ongoing), a series of videos and sculptures of fossil-like, aluminum-casted Pepsi cans based on the interdependent relationship between herself and her mother. For her exhibition at the New Museum, Upson will debut a new series of works that center around a family living in a tract house in Las Vegas. The series will explore an environment characterized by its architectural mirroring, yet haunted by the psychological tensions inherent in striving toward an imaginary perfect double. This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Associate Curator, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, including texts by Jim Shaw and Norton, along with an interview with Upson by fellow artist Paul McCarthy.
 

Elaine Cameron-Weir
April 19–September 3, 2017
Lobby Gallery

For her first solo museum exhibition, Elaine Cameron-Weir (b. 1985, Red Deer, Alberta, Canada) presents an installation of new works conceived for the Museum’s Lobby Gallery. Cameron-Weir engages diverse aesthetic styles, merging modern, industrial, and natural designs in sculptures that emphasize the relationship of the body to surfaces and call attention to phenomena that are both manifest and hidden. Since her earliest works, Cameron-Weir has drawn inspiration from the figure of the aesthete in nineteenth-century Europe as a hallmark of heightened sensory engagement, refined sensitivity to beauty, transgressive sexual desire, and the pursuit of pleasure through artifice or illusion. For this exhibition, Cameron-Weir incorporates tools typical of a laboratory to establish a mood of observation and to propose a tension between scientific and occult practices. While her new works evoke a range of associations, they are informed by her study of antiquated scientific texts about vision, medieval armor and torture devices, and early-Renaissance orthopedics—as well as her interest in corporeal symmetry and erogenous zones as aspects of the body forged through human evolution. The exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator.
 

RAGGA NYC
May 3–June 25, 2017
Fifth Floor

RAGGA NYC will be in residence through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: BODY. A platform founded by Christopher Udemezue, RAGGA connects a community of queer Caribbean artists working across a wide range of disciplines—including visual art, fashion, and poetry—to explore how race, sexuality, gender, heritage, and history inform their work and their lives.  A vibrant community deeply committed to education and grassroots organizing, RAGGA fosters a network and an extended family that makes space for solidarity, celebration, and expression. Their residency will explore Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions, bringing together works by a group of artists who trace their own relationships to Caribbean history. The exhibition will include sculptures from Renée Stout’s Roots and Charms series, which nod to the hand-painted signs advertising elixirs and spiritual healing on the storefronts of shops in New Orleans and Washington D.C., and to the symbolic objects found within them. Tau Lewis’s foraged, ain’t free series portrays cacti, plants transplanted to radically different climates where they thrive nevertheless, a metaphor for the diasporic condition. Works in Paul Anthony Smith’s Grey Area series layer grainy silkscreened images of male acquaintances Smith encountered while back in his hometown in Jamaica for his aunt's funeral alongside images of a cemetery burial ground, suggesting a complex relationship to an island he left as a child.

Taking up Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the language of the Caribbean artist does not originate in the obsession with celebrating his inner self; this inner self is inseparable from the future evolution of his community [in which] he is his own ethnologist, historian, [and] linguist,” RAGGA NYC’s residency will also feature a number of public programs, including workshops exploring Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and an evening of performances and poetry by members of RAGGA. This exhibition is curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator.
 

ABOUT NEW MUSEUM 
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.