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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we'll close today's show by continuing our Membership Drive series on art exhibitions that are set to close soon. We're alerting you to your last chance for some great art around here. So far, we've covered Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney. Edward Hopper’s, New York there, and Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast at the Met, both closing on Sunday. Today we'll add two shows at the Queens Museum that are also closing on Sunday. All of you art enthusiasts have a busy weekend ahead of you. Can you do the Whitney, the Met and the Queens Museum in one weekend?

The Queens Museum is also hosting events on both exhibitions this weekend to further enrich your experience of the art before the shows close. More info on those events to come. With us now to talk about these exhibits is Lindsey Berfond, assistant curator and studio programs manager at the Queens Museum. Lindsey, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Lindsey Berfond: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: First up, we have of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust. That's the name of the show?

Lindsey Berfond: That is

Brian Lehrer: What? Tell us about the artist.

Lindsey Berfond: Of course. Charisse Pearlina Weston is an artist who uses glass as a conceptual artist. She's using it to examine themes of Black intimacy and the interior as it relates to both architecture and protest in the work that she's doing.

Brian Lehrer: The location of the Queens Museum, we should say Flushing Meadows Corona Park is connected to Weston's historical inspiration for the exhibit. I see. Tell us a little bit about the history that she's drawing from and how it appears in the art.

Lindsey Berfond: Yes, as I mentioned, Charisse is really looking at architecture and protest, and she's looking at a variety of histories. One of the ones that really connects to the history of our location there at the Queens Museum is the CORE protests or the Congress of Racial Equality protests that were planned for the opening of the 1965-65 World's Fair. Basically, the Brooklyn and Bronx branches of CORE were planning a stall-in. Hundreds of cars would stall on the highways surrounding the fair, what's now known as Flushing Meadows Corona Park as a form of protests the millions of dollars that were going into the fair while widespread inequality was happening across our city.

Charisse's work, she has a large-scale glass installation that's suspended from the ceiling and the gallery that quite literally causes you to stall-in in the gallery. In order to continue onto her show, you have to walk around it and it really encapsulate the way she thinks about glass and complicates glass to think about not only the present risk of anti-Black violence but also these tactics of refusal that sustain Black life despite this violence. Creating these spaces of Black intimacy and interior as a mode of resistance is how she's using glass and how it connects to that history.

Brian Lehrer: Such an interesting physical representation of that with a glass hanging from the ceiling that gets in your way for a moment if you were to think about it out of context. The Artist Will Be Present, I see to quote Maria Abramovic for an event this weekend at the Queens Museum. What's going on at this event and how can listeners register?

Lindsey Berfond: Yes, we'd love for listeners to register on our website, queensmuseum.org. We're presenting a really rich conversation, including the artist Charisse Pearlina Weston, alongside fellow artists, Jamal Cyrus and Cosmo Whyte, where they'll talk about the significance of Black archives like the ones that Charisse was digging into about the CORE protests at the Queens Museum site. They're going to talk about the ways in which their work looks at Black archives, but really importantly translates it into critiques of the contemporary landscape. How little in many ways has changed looking at these archives and what we need to do to continue that activism.

Brian Lehrer: The other exhibition closing at the Queens Museum this weekend is Crisis Makes a Book Club by Xaviera Simmons. For the layman who isn't familiar with Simmons, can you introduce her and the exhibit?

Lindsey Berfond: Absolutely. Xaviera Simmons' practice is-- the scope is wide. In this exhibition, we're really thinking about the many facets of her work across photography, painting, video, sculpture and installation. We have several works where Xaviera's work is quite large-scale. These are monumental projects on view that are all united in how they examine the conditions of this country and the art industry as well that are shaped by the construction of whiteness, labor politics, and institutional failures.

The title for her reflects on the way as many of us experienced following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the way in which reading groups popped up as moments of reckoning towards racial justice. She's critical of those movements, that they sometimes can be used as a stand-in for true action in the presence of this state-sanctioned violence. They're not enough to undo these oppressive systems in our country. Through the title and through the works, she's looking at what does true accountability look like against these histories and in different spaces of her work.

Brian Lehrer: When you see the exhibit, the piece that really catches a lot of people's attention is called Align. It's a tall black box with white writing covering it completely. Maybe it's obvious, but what's that saying?

Lindsey Berfond: Yes. With Align, we have this large scale, what Xaviera calls her text painting in the center of the museum. It's a hand-painted non-linear text that she's writing from the perspective of a white person of European ancestry and describing what white Americans of all kinds would need to undo, what they would need to say to really come to terms with examine what systemic repair can look like and what accountability can look like. That may involve Land Back, when we talk about Indigenous erasure, when we talk about reparations, undoing these structures that have caused mass inequity in our country.

She has this very interesting text that takes some physical endurance on the part of the viewer across that you walk around the structure to read, that has a lot of different resources, including a really interesting James Baldwin essay called On Being White and Other Lies or some references there, but mostly written from her own point of view from taking this voice alongside the interior of the work. It's not just the exterior of the work that has this text, but the interior work echoes a lot of her practice throughout the show where she has this directed mode of address on the outside and inside, she also makes space for warmth, for pause, for intimacy or respite. Moments of rest as we regenerate ourselves to make this structural change and take real action, which is what she's calling for throughout the exhibition.

Brian Lehrer: Simmons says, “No more book clubs.” What does she mean by no more book clubs? I see maybe ironically, but I'm sure not, the museum is giving out an assortment of books curated by the artist for free.

Lindsey Berfond: Yes. These are a core part of Xaviera's work and conceptual gesture is the free distribution of books to the public until our supply runs out of course, at the exhibition. It's her work as well. I think there's a tension there, of course. Xaviera is someone who we're distributing a bunch of really incredible books, necessary books including Alex Vitale's End of Policing, books by Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Angela Davis.

For her, the act of reading isn't enough on its own. I think what she's critical is that if you're going to have reading books, you must also act upon the knowledge that you gain. You must take that act of reading as a commitment to make change on this structural and systemic level. That's the crux of what she's saying. The reading is great, but you got to use it to move you forward.

Brian Lehrer: In our last 15 seconds, you're hosting an event on Crisis Makes a Book Club this weekend as well. What's the plan and how can listeners register? 15 seconds.

Lindsey Berfond: Definitely no need to register. You can just show up. March 5th myself and my co-curator, Hitomi Iwasaki are going to lead a tour of Xaviera's incredible exhibition.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with my guest, Lindsey Berfond, assistant curator and studio programs manager at the Queens Museum. You can find links to the museum and the events as well as images of the exhibit on our page at wnyc.org. Lindsey, thank you so much.

Lindsey Berfond: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Folks, we'll keep tipping you off to art exhibits soon to close in the city tomorrow and Friday too.

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