Man on Fire: Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology at WhiteBox, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Aug. 8, 2024.
It’s important for Juan Puntes, founder of WhiteBox, to stipulate that the art space, located on Avenue B just above Houston Street, is not a gallery. Despite the name, suggesting a traditional blank-walled exhibition environment, WhiteBox belongs to the “alternative space” tradition, rooted in the artist-run galleries in SoHo and Tribeca in the 1960s and seventies. It’s a not-for-profit organization founded in Chelsea in 1998 and supported by grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council for the Arts, its production costs partly offset by co-curators and collaborators.
In WhiteBox’s current iteration, opened in 2022 after a four-year stint in Harlem, Puntes skinned the walls in unfinished OSB—not even plywood with a nice wood veneer, as if to preclude the misunderstanding of its being a traditional art gallery. The rough environment conveys a sense of being improvised that comports with the spirit of Puntes—and of everything in New York City and the world, frankly. Everything is moving so quickly, transitioning, developing, living and dying. It’s imperfect, and it suits Puntes’s latest effort to stage a little art-world rebellion, one small show at a time.
WhiteBox’s current exhibition, Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology, on view through August 10, pitches itself as “a symbolic space that addresses issues like food sovereignty, rewilding, ecofeminisms, hydrofeminisms, and restorative aesthetics” and “researches, experiments, and builds knowledge around the Democracy of the Air, Earth, and Water.” That sounds like a lot. Yet the method, in the hands of Puntes, is modest, personable, and intellectually engaging. Puntes’s earnest openness, along with staff curator Yohanna Roa, to conversations with everyone who gazes through the window and walks through the door—untutored neighborhood residents and art history PhDs alike—means the level of discourse stays personal, one to one, meeting others where they’re at, even when Puntes is spinning out a dozen references and associations for every idea, as he often does.
. . .
Sometimes, when it’s furthering our thinking or challenging received ideas—and not merely repeating unquestioned ideas stagnating among us for lack of a will to think—artwork can be a form of communication that offers a combination of aesthetic delight, intellectual excitement, and glimpses of hopeful possibilities. Attending these exhibitions can give a sense of community and belonging, and a degree of solace at times when the discourse and functional operation of actual democratic electoral politics seems utterly impossible to influence positively, such as the perpetually frozen conflict in the Middle East. Maybe with a piece like Stefano Cagol’s Far Before and After Us, which captures images of the artist on Norway’s Golta Island, lit as if the craggy rock formations are bubbling out of volcanic lava—the individual human against fire—we can feel a slight primal connection to the time-scales in which that which is sedimentary and seemingly unchangeable is still in a process of creation.
Full text at https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/at-whitebox-by-stephen-zacks/6517
