Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) (b. 1989, Dallas, TX) will transform the Museum’s Lobby Gallery into a mise-en-scène for her daily activities for the duration of her New Museum exhibition, “Nothing New.”
“Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni
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Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (b. 1989, Dallas, TX), widely known by the moniker Puppies Puppies, expands ideas around the readymade by imbuing ubiquitous and everyday objects, signifiers, and actions with a personal and political charge. She has, for example, reconfigured antibacterial gel dispensers, toilet bowl liquid, the color green, as well as the acts of sleeping, peeing, and taking a pill in installations and performances that challenge ableist frameworks of artistic and capitalist production. Many of Puppies Puppies’s exhibitions have also included actionable components: a GoFundMe campaign to support a friend’s transition fund, free HIV testing and counseling, and a working shower available for use by the public. Kuriki-Olivo thus asserts that life can be viewed as its own form of endurance practice, especially for those whose very survival is at stake, including trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color.
For the duration of her New Museum exhibition, “Nothing New,” Puppies Puppies will transform the Museum’s Lobby Gallery into a mise-en-scène for her daily activities, with a portion of the space functioning as a duplicate of the artist’s actual bedroom. If Kuriki-Olivo’s past work centered around a refusal to be seen—through the use of proxies, avatars, and performances in absentia—“Nothing New” explores new registers of transparency and obfuscation. Inviting visitors to experience her life as if through a screen, Puppies Puppies will use a fogging glass mechanism to mediate access to her activities while she inhabits the gallery, foregrounding themes of visibility, representation, and cultural consumption.
Cameras will also film the artist as she navigates between the Museum, her apartment—located seven blocks away—and day-to-day life in the city. By engaging with contemporary modes of surveillance—including those we opt into, like social media, as well as more coercive and nonconsensual manifestations—Puppies Puppies blurs the distinctions between her public and private life while also destabilizing the distinctions between URL and IRL existence. By allowing a spectacularized view into her daily existence, Kuriki-Olivo celebrates the nuanced layers of her own identity, eliding tokenization and reductive narratives of racial and trans identities.
“Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New” is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator, with Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant.
