The Ford Foundation Gallery’s second exhibition in the “Utopian Imagination” trilogy, titled Radical Love, features 23 artists whose artwork responds to the previous exhibition, Perilous Bodies, by offering love as the answer to a world in peril. The works are grounded in ideas of devotion, abundance, and beauty; here, otherness and marginality is celebrated, adorned, and revered.

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Published in The Art Newspaper | August 8, 2019

Three exhibitions to see in New York this weekend

By Gabriella Angeleti and Victoria Stapley-Brown

The recently opened Ford Foundation Gallery has morphed into “a space of visual lushness and opulence, one that envelopes the viewer in a sense of love, protection, power, and unity”, according to its director Lisa Kim, in the exhibition Radical Love (until 17 August). There is a palpable magnetism to the works by artists such as Faith Ringgold, Omar Victor Diop, Baseera Kahn and Ebony G. Patterson, which revere subjects who have often been “othered”, including people of colour, queer people or those with disabilities.

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Published in The New York Times​ | August 7, 2019

New York Galleries: What to See Right Now

By Jillian Steinhauer

With colors and patterns exploding against the red-painted walls in the Ford Foundation Gallery, almost every piece in this jam-packed show demands your attention, yet the artworks manage to coexist without competing. “Radical Love” is the second exhibition in a trilogy focusing on justice. The first examined inequality; this one centers on practices of care, affirmation and celebration. For Baseera Khan and Thania Petersen, that means turning prayer rugs into objects of intimate expression. Sue Austin’s and Jah Grey’s videos treat the liberation of oppressed bodies with an ethereal touch.

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Published in Hyperallergic | August 2, 2019

What Does Radical Love Look Like?

By Steph Rodney

There has been a good deal of talk about radicality lately, but to proclaim that there is such a thing as “radical love” begs for more than avowal or declaration; one expects a demonstration or explanation of the thing. The show Radical Love at the Ford Foundation Gallery, curated by Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, engenders a particular critical response (at least in me), one that looks to answer the provocative questions the title raises: What kinds of love are modeled or enabled here? In what ways are they radical? What will the world look like if shaped by these forms of love?

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Published in Artnet News | July 31, 2019

With ‘Radical Love,’ the Ford Foundation’s Art Gallery Makes the Case for Loving as a Social-Justice Strategy

By Nico Wheadon

In its inaugural year—one marked by a heightened culture of global fear—the Ford Foundation Gallery is surveying the theme “utopian imagination” through three daring exhibitions curated by Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker. Whereas the first exhibition, “Perilous Bodies,” explored the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieving justice on earth—such as xenophobia, racism, class, and gender inequality—its second, “Radical Love,” looks inwards for hope, bringing together art that spotlights the often-invisible labor of self-care, unconditional love, and collective empathy.

In their statements, curators Abichandani and Becker nod to activist and author bell hooks as a source of inspiration for the exhibition’s conceptual framework, which looks at love as a human right and shared responsibility. Here, love is presented as far more than a feeling, and is explored by the exhibition’s 23 artists as practice, gesture, mode of resistance, tool of survival, reflection of self, and acceptance of other. hooks’s claim that “[a]s a nation, we need to gather our collective courage and face that our society’s lovelessness is a wound” is foregrounded brilliantly in works such as Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s expansive portrait installation, Evidence of Things Not Seen (2008).