By: Nemo Librizzi
EXHIBITION
Closing Reception feat. Poetry Reading & Screening of STREET by Jamie Nares
SOCIAL REGISTER
Featuring:
Jamie Nares, Lee Quinones, John Newsom, Jim Jarmusch, Stefan Bondell,
Ryan McGinley, Lucien Smith and Raymond Pettibon
Curated by Nemo Librizzi
Social Register is a survey of artists well-known on the downtown scene. Each one generally confined to the platform of their respective gallery, a pop up show has the unique opportunity to exhibit these leaders side by side, creating a powerful representation of “what’s happening now” on the New York scene. Curated by Nemo Librizzi for cutting edge cultural movement, The Trops, long-standing friendships with seminal talents grant rare access into the artist’s studio.
OCTOBER 2022
PERFORMANCE
N’AP BOULE
Location: Manero’s on Mulberry
Featured Performance: Sheila Anozier & Rufus Cappadocia
“Sak Pase” is a common Haitian Creole phrase that means “What’s happening?” It is often used to greet friends, similar to how you would say “what’s up” in English. The expected response is “N’ap boule.” N’ap boule is a contraction of “nou ap boule” from “Nous après brûler,” literally meaning “we are burning” and representing the response “we’re good” or “we’re hanging out.”
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 3
EXHIBITION
Burnt Offering
ARMANDO NIN
SATURDAY JANUARY 14
As digital devices make us more connected, we somehow find ourselves isolated, our behaviors manipulated by an algorithm. How did we get here? Reflecting on our roots, there is a rediscovery of fire, the heat and light that enabled creative work to blossom. Gathering around the flames, we evolved culture, community, charcoal. Burnt Offering is a special one day exhibition presenting artworks by Armando Nin and performance by Kanami Kusajima, expressing contemporary art as an alchemy of fire and soot into fuel for the human spirit.
HOLIDAY EVENT
YALDA
DEC 21, 2022 (WINTER SOLSTICE)
Featured Performance:
Mehrnam Rastegari & Martin Shamoonpour
Originating in the pre-Zoroastrian tradition, Yalda, also referred to as Chelleh, celebrates the sunrise after the longest night of the year. Ancient Persians believed that evil forces were strongest on the longest and darkest night of the year. Every year, Iranian people celebrate Yalda night on the winter solstice by gathering together for eating, drinking and reading poetry through the night. In line with this tradition, The Trops hosted a Yalda evening of visual arts, performance arts, and poetry in the Heart of NYC.
EXHIBITION MAP
Ben Ruhe
South Beach Constallation, Miami Beach, FL
Heavens to Murgatroyd is a mapped exhibition of paintings by artist Benjamin Ruhe, presenting artwork across an assortment of real world gathering places.
Integrating soulful whimsicality into his mixed media artworks, Ben Ruhe translates interdimensional beings and textures into his distinct figurative language.
EXHIBITION
RAMBO
Paintings by Lance de los Reyes
Miami Beach, FL
Lance De Los Reyes (1977-2021) studied painting, performance, sculpture and video at the San Francisco Art Institute, later living and working in NYC.
His abstract works combine figurative and abstract forms, with influences of street art, colors, shapes, and poetry that communicate a mythological mindset in cryptic composition.
Working at the edge of painting, photography, music and film over the course of five decades, Jamie Nares has profoundly explored the relationships between memory, time, movement and thought. I spoke with Jamie about her childhood, her move to New York City in the 1970s, her multidisciplinary practice, and her generous vision of art and life.
EXHIBITION
MONOMANIA
Grear Patterson & Nick Farhi
curated by Nemo Librizzi
For everything Art has ever been, it’s amazing to see how every season, through the hand of each young visionary, it can be made new again. Particularly when the artist, with the weight of History crashing down, decides to limit themselves to the simplicity of a reserved color pallet or in the exploration of otherwise banal subject matter. With all the tricky techniques made available by successive waves of modernism and post-modernism, boldness relies on the singularity of expressing one’s own unique vision. But to then go at it as if one’s life depended on it, and still come across cool is the story of Nick Farhi and Grear Patterson, both of whom have only just embarked on promising careers. Painting while thinking and feeling. And in a time when social media tempts even the poet to flash cash, and show off clothes, shoes, or any eye-catching flummery, there is pure delight in hanging their paintings in bars, bodegas and old school neighborhood establishments in the first-ever dispersed “constellation” exhibit. As much passion as they put into their artworks, it was also thrilling to install, and watch it come to life on walls not accustomed to hosting high concept visuals.
Take a stroll through the streets with The Trops in Fort Greene, and share the cultural experience with a new kind of art scene.
July 2022
EXHIBITION:
ON MESSAGE OFF GRID
On Message Off Grid is an installation of Jona Cerwinske in New York City, presenting works created in situ, showcasing the gallery format as the ultimate studio visit as the artist creates additional works across the streetscapes of NYC.
March 2022
EXHIBITION:
MY NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER
Curated by Mike Malbon & Nemo Librizzi
Featuring: Phase 2, Jon One, Futura, Rambo, Coco144, Tracy168
Projection Photography by David Schmidlapp
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, a generation of children took to the streets, and signed their names to the trains and walls of a crumbling New York City infrastructure. If unique autographs- like Coco 144- were a significant form of self-expression in their unadorned form, this group practice would undergo in time a transformation, what Phase 2 described as an “evolution of style” towards a convoluted new application of the alphabet Tracy 168 called “wild style”. This innovative language dismissed as “graffiti” by the media was illegible to the outsider, and a creative call-to-arms for the initiate, a battle of letters and words Rammellzee dubbed “Iconoclast Panzerism”. Finally, writers would eschew the signature altogether, and pure abstractions would serve as the artist’s calling card, beginning with Futura’s seminal non-representational “break train”. The subway era was brought to a dramatic finale with the spontaneous compositions of Jon One, who would go on painting in the same vein to artworld acclaim overseas. And in the short, rich career of Lance De Los Reyes, this story is recapitulated from his first humble Rambo tags, to an abstract body of paintings famed for sophisticated color instinct and poetic impact. In this historical context, The Trops presents My Name is Writ in Water, a survey of abstractions curated by Mike Malbon and Nemo Librizzi.
Dec 2021 – Jan 2022