New
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Tours · Exhibition-Related

New Perspectives Tour: Accumulated Culture

Cover Image:

“Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath,” 2019. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni

This New Perspective tour will explore global capitalism and labor in relation to American culture through the works of artists Lubaina Himid and Mika Rottenberg. Both artists take up US capitalism’s insistence on material accumulation, oppression, and displacement as the foundations of “American freedom.” With Himid’s installation and paintings, we will ponder the commodity most foundational to the accumulation of capital in America—enslaved Africans—and slavery’s legacy in today’s culture of labor. Through Rottenberg’s video work, we will consider the cultural emphasis on the value of products over that of workers, as well as our own desires to accumulate material possessions. Together, we will consider a fundamental question: What does it mean to have in the first place?

New Perspectives tours are led by a 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. To read descriptions of current and upcoming New Perspectives tours, please view the calendar. New Perspectives tours are free with Museum admission. Due to limited capacity, please preregister here and meet in the Lobby at the time of the tour.

The current New Museum Teaching Fellow is Troizel Carr, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, where his research questions the (im)possibility of black childhood through fairy tales and black children’s figurations in post-emancipation art and literature.

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.

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