"Stand in the Stream" captures the rise of the internet and social media as tools for political organizing while simultaneously exposing their evolution into powerful sources of surveillance and marketing. Edited with precision and intensity, the film’s footage (all shot by Kahn or screen-recorded by Kahn in real time) moves globally and locally through the wild, the streets, the home, and online, in a visceral, phenomenological reflection of life, power and uprising in late capitalism. 

Articulating a powerful personal dynamic to political movements, the narrative arc of the film is shaped by the decline of Kahn’s mother to dementia, and the birth and growth of her son amid the shift of political and digital landscapes over time. An activist and former shipyard worker, Kahn's mother speaks candidly about unions, NAFTA, the dangers of politicians in the pockets of lobbyists, how she wouldn’t want to get dementia like her mother before, even as she deteriorates. Her illness and death are woven with lo-fi clips of Kahn’s home life raising her son, caretaking, repairing, working, always from the POV of a camera. Interspersed and ongoing, is Kahn’s persistent screen recording of live streams on the internet. 

"Stand in the Stream" mimics our screen-saturated perspectives, hinting at questions of accountability, acknowledging our participation in a sometimes voyeuristic and alienated consumption of the world through images. In Kahn’s massive collection of footage—edited with an operatic sense of sound’s power to draw the epic from the mundane—we experience capitalism’s acculturation of our very personhood and the blooms of resistance and resilience.
 
Kahn’s sound design includes original compositions by Kahn and the musician/composer Alexia Riner.

On view September 16 - December 4, 2022

Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works on paper and on canvas combine found images, sourced from the Internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons.

This program of three works in the Art Institute’s collection represents highlights from McMillian’s work in video. In Untitled (The Great Society) I (2006), he stages a performance in which he recites President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan. By narrating this speech—in which Johnson outlined his ambitious agenda for social welfare legislation aimed at ending poverty and racial injustice—McMillian raised questions about how history and politics are themselves consistently, and repeatedly, performed. A Migration Tale (2014–15) follows a masked, black-clad character traveling on foot and via subway, a contemporary reference to the Great Migration that millions of African Americans made during the first half of the 20th century. In Preacher Man (2015), McMillian sits calmly on a chair in an empty field and presents philosophical musings by the experimental jazz composer and musician Sun Ra.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Arlene Shechet on the opening of "Disrupt the View: Arlene Shechet at the Harvard Art Museums" on view through July 6, 2025.

By presenting her recent work alongside historical German, Japanese, and Chinese examples, sculptor Arlene Shechet encourages us to look anew at works of porcelain and other objects from the Harvard Art Museums. Decorative arts are typically displayed in museum galleries dedicated to the same culture and period, often in isolation from other media. In Disrupt the View, however, Shechet draws on her past collaborations with porcelain manufactory workers to speak to a larger history, recontextualizing these remarkable objects as both handmade and industrially manufactured, painterly and sculptural.

"Roberts’ artwork exposes the implicit racism in societal standards of beauty, decorum and value for Black children, simultaneously providing insight into what it means to grow up Black in America.

“When I was growing up you couldn’t look people in the face, you had to look down, cast your eyes down,” Roberts said. “I want these kids to look you directly in your face, have a conversation with you, be strong. You’re not lesser than. That’s why all the works have that one (eye) glare straight at you.”

By Chadd Scott - 24 September 2022

"In his recent exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, “Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio,” Sepuya presents two series of photographs that oscillate in scale, light, and technique. The Daylight Studio series depicts the mechanics of the artist’s studio, presenting the studio space as a kind of stage where images are constructed. Historically, the photographer’s “stage” has been a platform of control designed to objectify and dominate marginalized subjects. Alternatively, Sepuya’s studio is a space for play, pleasure, and empowerment where subjects have agency over their bodies and interactions. Sepuya exposes the scaffolding that divides the artist and the subject and conceals the dynamic spaces and relations that animate the studio."

By Lauren Guilford - 15 September 2022

"Arlene Shechet expands and deepens both her “embodied, intuitive” making of objects and her masterful organization of installations in architect Steven Holl’s ‘T’ Space. Built with keen awareness of architecture’s origins in Greek ritual drama, the venue is shaped like a T and is illuminated by varied windows, doors, and skylights, as trees cast shadows on its walls and floor. In five carefully engineered new works—one installed outdoors—with new formal attention to the figure, Shechet extends her unique blend of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses."

By Hearne Pardee - September 2022

"After the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, approximately half the states triggered or scrambled to enact near-total bans on abortion. A day after this development, its devastation difficult to fathom, I visited Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Hammer Museum, where I was transfixed by her video Letters to an Army of Three as well as an accompanying artist book and wall installation (all 2005). These projects animate an archive of letters written to the Army of Three, an activist group in the Bay Area that distributed vital information about accessing safe abortion services to women and their loved ones in the decade before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision."

By Jackson Davidow - 25 August 2022

"Spanning video, projection, objects, and paintings, The Ritual Is for All of us offers another view into Pope.L’s legendary durational practice. Though he is often linked to his “Crawl” series — public performances that found the artist dragging his body across the asphalt of the New York City streets from one location to another — Pope.L’s practice resists categorization, flitting from theater to writing to visual art with a mischievous glee. Whether he’s using a VHS camera or found objects, his work considers the slipperiness of language and time, inviting the viewer into absurdist encounters that leave us contemplating our own perspectives and social conditions."

By Allison Conner - July 2022

"For Bowers, activism and art are inseparable. In her day-to-day life, she works with activist groups that promote environmental, immigration and trans rights, all of which feature heavily in the Hammer show. In the gallery focused on environmental activism, one miniature drawing is a self-portrait — a detailed replica of a mug shot, a token from an eco-activism-related arrest."

By Catherine Womack - 8 July 2022

"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s intimate portraiture flips the script bringing the behind the scenes into prominent display. The result of a performance between drop cloths, tripods and raw wooden benches in the light of day that heightens the interactions between the nude bodies of both the subject and the photographer—all are central figures in their own right."

By Janelle Zara - July 2022