JOHN LEWIS — GOOD TROUBLE

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I feel lucky and blessed that I’m serving in Congress. But there are forces today trying to take us back to another time and another dark period. We’ve come so far, we’ve made so much progress. But as a nation, as a people, we’re not quite there yet. We have miles to go. — Rep. John Lewis, (D) Georgia

As someone who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma and Washington D.C., Congressman Lewis—who has represented Georgia’s 5th District since 1987—knows the necessity of participating in the franchise. He spent the 1970s going door to door registering future Black voters and viscerally understands—in our current summer of reckoning—the existential challenges facing our country leading up to the November elections.

JOHN LEWIS—GOOD TROUBLE, Dawn Porter’s documentary on the life and work of the civil rights activist, is a testimony to the power of persistence and presence—of being there. As the late Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings confirms in the film, “The reason [Lewis is] effective as a leader is because he’s lived it.”

Streaming now on multiple platforms. See links below for details.

JOHN LEWIS—GOOD TROUBLE

Magnolia Pictures

Laemmle Virtual Cinema, Los Angeles.

Dawn Porter, John Lewis—Good Trouble (2020), from top: John Lewis; Lewis leads Selma, Alabama, marchers, March 7, 1965, courtesy and © Birmingham News; John Lewis—Good Trouble poster, courtesy and © Magnolia Pictures, 2020; President Barack Obama presents a 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom to Lewis during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington; Lewis (far right) with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (center) and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy (far left). Images courtesy and © Magnolia Pictures.

HERMÈS MEN’S COLLECTION — SUMMER 2021

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HORS-CHAMP—Hermès Men’s Collection, Summer 2021, created by Véronique Nichanian.

A live performance imagined with the artistic collaboration of Cyril Teste.

Julien Boizard was the director of photography, and the original music was composed by Emmanuel Jessua.

Cyril Teste, Hors-Champ, Hermès Men’s Collection 2021, video images courtesy and © Hermès Paris, 2020. Top: Cyril Teste walks between mirrors reflecting models. Last two images: Hors-Champ shot of Teste directing; Véronique Nichanian watching final moments of the show, Paris.

CAMILLE HENROT — GROSSE FATIGUE

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Streaming for the first time, Camille Henrot’s GROSSE FATIGUE—which won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013—is now on view as part of the Virtual Views: Video Lives program at the Museum of Modern Art.

Henrot uses the familiar setting of a computer desktop to narrate the origins of the universe. The video draws on the artist’s experience during a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, for which Henrot was granted access to film the collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Set to a spoken-word poem written by Henrot in collaboration with the poet Jacob Bromberg, and scored by Joakim Bouaziz, GROSSE FATIGUE draws from scientific theories, religious creation stories, and oral traditions. The text is voiced by multimedia artist Akwetey Orraca Tetteh...

The work features a rapid-fire choreography of pop-up windows with images drawn from a potentially limitless field of references. The swiftly proliferating imagery signals both the speed and lightness of the digital world and, conversely, the exhaustion provoked by overwhelming streams of data. Henrot has explained that the work attempts to confront “the desire to universalize knowledge [that] is accompanied by the conscience I have of this act. As soon as you think you have laid out and circumscribed the entirety of your universe within a single, selfsame landscape, isn’t the only question of any worth, and which relentlessly nags and torments the mind, But what is there beyond the limit?”*

CAMILLE HENROT—GROSSE FATIGUE*

Museum of Modern Art

Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue, 2013. Images courtesy and © the artist, Silex Films, and Kamel Mennour.

SYDNEY VERNON

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WHEN WE SEE US—Sydney Vernon’s first solo exhibition, now at Thierry Goldberg—has been extended through July 10.

Family is at the forefront of Vernon’s solo debut, as scenes and characters in her works on paper are pulled from photographs of her immediate relatives. The familial artifacts span over forty years, extending back to before Vernon was born, and allow the artist to connect to specific moments in history and reflect on the context of the world at the time the images were created. The past never passes for Vernon, and its influences are shaped and reconsidered in current time.*

SYDNEY VERNON—WHEN WE SEE US*

Through July 10.

Thierry Goldberg

109 Norfolk Street, New York City.

WHEN WE SEE US—3D TOUR

Sydney Vernon, When We See Us, Thierry Goldberg, March 8, 2020–July 10, 2020, from top: My Fair Lady, 2020, gouache, pastel, and silkscreen on paper; For Sam and Al, 2, 2019, oil, charcoal and pastel on paper; Water Damage, 2019, oil pastel, silkscreen, charcoal and acrylic paint on paper; Untitled, 2020, ink, paper, charcoal, oil, and acetone transfer on paper; The Warmth of Other Suns, 2019, charcoal and pastel on paper; Untitled, 2020, oil, pastel and colored pencil on paper; All the things you could be by now, 2018, ink, charcoal, oil paint, oil pastel, and screenprint on paper; When We See Us, 2019, acetone transfer, charcoal, silkscreen, magazine clipping, acrylic paint, and pastel on paper; Untitled, 2019, silkscreen, rubber stamp, charcoal, vellum, ink and pastel on paper. Images courtesy and © the artist and Thierry Goldberg.

NAN GOLDIN — THE OTHER SIDE

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From my first night at The Other Side—the drag queen bar in Boston in the ’70s—I came to life. I fell in love with one of the queens and within a few months moved in with Ivy and another friend. I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too. Completely devoted to my friends, they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. — Nan Goldin*

Following the 2019 Steidl* publication of an expanded and updated version of Goldin’s 1992 book The Other Side, Librairie Marian Goodman presents a selection of the artist’s earliest photographic works.

NAN GOLDIN—THE OTHER SIDE

Through July 25.

Librairie Marian Goodman

66 rue du Temple, 3rd, Paris.

See “Ballad,” Aperture’s Summer 2020 issue on Goldin and her world.

Nan Goldin, from top: Roommate as Blonde Venus, Boston, 1973; Naomi in the leather dress, Boston, 1973; Roommate in her chair, Boston, 1072; Roommate with teacup, Boston, 1973; Colette modeling in the Beauty Parade, Boston, 1973; Best friends going out, Boston, 1973; Roommate in the kitchen, Boston, 1972; Roommate after the bar at home, Boston, 1973. Images courtesy and © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.