The Ford Foundation Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Perilous Bodies, features 19 artists whose artwork explores the inhumanity and injustice created by divisions of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Below is a collection of select critical reviews about this exhibition.

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Published in The New York Times | April 17, 2019

New York Art Galleries: What to See Right Now

By Will Heinrich

Some credit for the almost unbearable intensity of “Perilous Bodies,” the group show that inaugurates the Ford Foundation’s new gallery for art concerned with social justice, goes to its 19 artists from around the world. Confronting ills from sexual violence in India to resource extraction in Africa, most of them succeed in getting to the heart of very difficult material. (The gallery was part of an overall renovation, and most of the work in the show is unrelated to the foundation’s contemporary art collection.) But most of the credit is due to the show’s curators, Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, who wove their work together.

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Published in Artefuse | April 11, 2019

Perilous Bodies: Personhood as Seen Through the Eyes of Two International Curators at Ford Foundation Gallery

By Katie Hector

Walking down the broad, half shaded sidewalk of East 43rd my feet have led me to the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. The Midtown East location is off the art-goers beaten path but the lure of the current exhibition, Perilous Bodies curated by Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, is a convincing draw. The gallery space, situated on the second floor, is the newest addition to the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice and came into existence after a two-year renovation to the building. Under the vision of Director Lisa Kim, the contemporary art space aims to cultivate social justice by facilitating individual leadership within international communities. For Kim, the inaugural show Perilous Bodies, “explores the inhumanity and injustice created by divisions of gender, race, class, and ethnicity”. The curatorial duo Abichandani and Becker set the tone for future programming as they weave together the perspectives of nineteen artists from around the world.

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Published in NPR | April 6, 2019

Dangerous Art: A Stark But Inspiring New Exhibit

By Diane Cole

A rickety-looking wooden boat is piled high with overstuffed bags covered in colorfully patterned African fabrics. Hanging overboard: a collection of plastic teapot-shaped pots and gasoline cans. Instead of floating on water, this ark is adrift on an ocean of green glass bottles.

The boat is actually a piece of art called “Road to Exile,” by the Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo, part of a series of works examining migration and colonialism. Poised at the entrance to “Perilous Bodies,” the initial exhibit at the Ford Foundation Gallery in Manhattan, it is the first stop on a journey through the perils of living in the 21st century.

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Published in The New Yorker | March 25, 2019

Goings On About Town: “Perilous Bodies”

By Andrea Scott

Just outside this scattershot, if deeply felt, nineteen-person show is a ten-foot-long wooden boat by the Cameroonian sculptor Barthélémy Toguo, encircled by wine bottles. A nod to Homer’s wine-dark sea? The boat’s cargo—bright bundles fashioned from African fabric—steers the conversation from classics to politics. Homer was writing about the Aegean, which surrounds the island of Lesbos, the site of the notorious Moria refugee camp. By locating the piece, “Road to Exile,” at a remove from the rest of the show, the co-curators, Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, cannily establish a sense of displacement—and of optical pleasure serving socially conscious agendas.

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Published in WNYC | March 1, 2019

Charlie for the Culture

By Charlie Herman

WNYC’s business and culture editor, Charlie Herman, joins us for this week’s installment of “Charlie for the Culture.” This week, he’ll discuss the new Ford Foundation Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, “Perilous Bodies,” opening on March 5, and a new production titled, “The Just and the Blind,” which runs at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall from March 5-6.

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Published in Afropunk | February 27, 2019

For Curators of Color, Journey to Utopia Begins With ‘Perilous Bodies’

By Diana McClure

A three-part exhibition masterminded by a trio of women and a forward-thinking institution, under the theme of Utopian Imagination, is about to drop in New York City. The exhibit’s first act, which opens on March 5th, inaugurating the new gallery space run by the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice, is called Perilous Bodies and it unfurls like an epic masterpiece, with raw, honest investigations into violence across the globe.

Grounded in the wisdom that there is no learning without reflection, the exhibition’s curators Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, in collaboration with the leadership of Lisa Kim, director of the Ford Foundation Gallery, felt it was crucial to first look at the pathology of human violence. The selections on view deconstruct injustice through visceral and emotive works of art. Brought together, they reveal the shared and interconnected fragility of a world infused with violence, displacement and individual suffering. Conceptually, bodies of knowledge, of land, and physical bodies are used as sites of both inquiry and testimony by the 19 featured artists.