Healing

William Cordova, Mitch Epstein, Tony Feher, Louis Fratino, Zipora Fried, Jeffrey Gibson, Josephine Halvorson, Arturo Herrera, Sheila Hicks, Merlin James, Cameron Martin, Wardell Milan, Vik Muniz, Jennifer Packer, Kay Rosen, Erin Shirreff, Kara Walker

This presentation of Healing is conceived in homage to the 1992 group exhibition of the same name that inaugurated the founding of the gallery, then called Wooster Gardens, by Brent Sikkema. The show was conceived and organized by Sikkema and Olivier Renaud-Clément, and featured works produced by the participating artists specifically for the exhibition. Held during the height of the AIDS crisis, Healing, 1992, proposed a thoughtful meditation on our intertwined capacities for creation and caretaking. “Somehow,” writes Faye Hirsch, in a review for Art in America, “they present the hopeful possibility that memory will be enough, materializing as it does in the least expected places.”

The Healing of 2024 emerges from the convulsive years of another global pandemic, alongside a more proximal experience of grief for the gallery. Across eras and societal transformations, few things in life remain as constant as loss and its cataclysmic reframing of normality, on both a collective and individual scale; yet as such loss persists, so too does our impulse to gather, communicate, create, and, in the process, move towards a place of renewal. This contemporary exhibition is not intended as a direct mirror of the original Healing, but rather a continued throughline of making art as a means of understanding the uncertainty and tenderness found within our shared affective moment.