Exhibition
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon
09/27/17-01/21/18
Tours · Exhibition-Related
New Perspectives Tour
In Sickness and in Health
Cover Image:
“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” 2017. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio
Many of the featured artists in “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” engage with concepts of toxicity, transmission, and psychical or psychological health. In this tour, we will look at the work of Josh Faught, Stanya Kahn, Sable Elyse Smith, Anicka Yi, and Patrick Staff and Candice Lin, to discuss how aspects of identity (gender, sexuality, class, and race) often collide with dimensions of wellness in the mind and body. Together, we will examine what each artist considers the parameters of “health”—whether physical, mental, or environmental—and how each artwork identifies or questions assumptions about various sources of threat and potential spaces of safety. Finally, we will consider how these artists sometimes reframe concepts of toxicity or contagion, presenting them as potentially positive or even politically effective.
New Perspectives tours are led by the New Museum Teaching Fellow, an emerging scholar in art history or a related field. The topics of the tours are based on the Fellow’s ongoing research and change monthly, engaging participants in uniquely focused examinations of selected objects and installations. New Perspectives tours are free with Museum admission. Due to limited capacity, please preregister and meet in the Lobby at the time of the tour.
The current New Museum Teaching Fellow is Maggie Mustard, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation on postwar Japanese photography.
Sponsors
This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
