Summary
- Carnival, a new group show curated by acclaimed performer and painter Joe Coleman, is currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch’s Wooster Street Gallery in New York.
- Running through June 28, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a cabinet of curiosities, exploring the cultural significance of the carnival throughout history.
- The show features over 40 artists from active carnival scenes and blue-chip names alike. Among them are Coleman himself, Kembra Pfahler, Nadia Lee Cohen, George Condo, Mario Ayala and more.
In an art world too often steered by polish and market predictability, the carnivalesque is the rupture we didn’t know we needed. Rejecting neutrality for spectacle and reveling in contradiction and catharsis, this is the spirit that animates Carnival, a new group show on view at Jeffrey Deitch, curated by performer and painter Joe Coleman.
Drawing on his earliest memories of New York – when freak shows, flea circuses and Ripley’s ruled over Times Square – Coleman’s latest reconnects us with a lost childhood wonder. The exhibition conjures an over 40-piece roster of artists, many of which belong to the artist’s close community of burlesque dancers, sideshow performers and costume designers – key figures within modern-day senes. Together, with a handful of contemporary art darlings, they explore evolving and enduring aspects of the carnival, reworking ideas of care, empathy and acceptance along the way.
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Inside the gallery, the transformation is total: visitors are greeted by regalia of Mermaid Parades’ past, hand-painted sideshow banners hang from above, while a magnificent beaded carousel slowly spins in the heart of the room. Further on is a small-scale recreation of Coleman’s own Odditorium —his at-home tribute to the American grotesque. Ghanaian fantasy coffins, wax figures embedded with real bone and an expansive Johnny Eck tribute share space with the likes of Kembra Pfahler, Jo Weldon and Guillermo del Toro. Blue chip names, such as Nadia Lee Cohen, Anne Imhof, Mickalene Thomas, George Condo, Diana Yesenia Alvarado and Mario Ayala also join the fray, with works that traffic in camp, excess and uncanny theatricality.
“I believe that the carnival is a kind of profane, holy place where the private desires, fantasies and fears of a society are given uninhibited free expression,” Coleman explains. “This expression produced unique works of art to embody this mysterious part of ourselves.” Life within the carnivalesque is a dance between the raw and the superficial, mischief and play. More than a mere spectacle, the exhibition opens a space for radical self-invention, a space where strange is sacred and “monstrous” is simply another word for misunderstood.
The exhibition is now on view in New York through June 28.
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery
18 Wooster St,
New York, NY 10013
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