Currency: What do you value? is a group exhibition that asks questions about the relationship between art and money, exploring the flaws of our current economic reality. The featured artists expose the complex relationships between currency and how society values or doesn’t value art, work and time.

Continuing the focus on economic realities from our Debtfair campaign — where artist’s works are presented alongside information about their debts, jobs, and daily financial struggles— we turn to the economic realities of arts activist groups and the issue of the institutional capture of our work along with strategies for long-term sustainability.

This project, first shown at the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2017, is here reconceived by the artists of Occupy Museums to focus on the Puerto Rican debt crisis and the art-related debt of artists on the island. This project features works by artists Yasmin Hernández, Sofía Maldonado, Celestino Junior Ortiz, Norma Vila Rivero, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Adrian Viajero Román, Melquiades Rosario-Sastre, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Jose Soto, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial, the seventy-eighth installment of the longest-running survey of American art, arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics. Throughout the exhibition, artists challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community. The Biennial features sixty-three individuals and collectives whose work takes a wide variety of forms, from painting and installation to activism and video-game design.

The artists in Making Progress confront the complacency of hopelessness with keen observation of the facts and a need to create different, better futures — from small and actionable to fantastical and utopian. Exhibiting a wide range of approaches and responses, from a top-down re-envisioning of institutions to more personal reactions, the works in this exhibition go beyond institutional and cultural critique. Whether realistically possible, or wishful thinking, or escapist, they not only critique systems of power and control but also devise creative strategies for survival. Making Progress demonstrates a tempered optimism: that amidst the chaos and uncertainty of the moment, art can expand our perception of what is possible.

Group Exhibition and Performance at Project: ArtSpace

Group Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

Debtfair is an ongoing artistic campaign to expose the relationship between economic inequality in the art market and artists’ growing debt burdens, exploring the idea that all spaces function with a layer of extraction just below the surface. Occupy Museums and Art League Houston (ALH) invite Texas-based artists to reframe and exhibit their artwork within the first-realization of Debtfair to illustrate the economic realities for Texas artists and their relationships to the cultural economy at large.

Momenta Art is pleased to present WORK IT OUT, a group exhibition that investigates the links between labor, actualization and transformation from multiple perspectives. As Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto was intended as a rejection of “progress” as a principle of capitalism, the Enlightenment idea of “progress” has long become objectionable in the leftist intellectual landscape. Nevertheless, the works in this exhibition resonate with, contradict, and deviate from Kojève’s interpretation of dialectic and “progress”.