Times Square Arts presents the Spring Season Arts Program. As part of the Alliance’s commitment to showcasing the best of contemporary art, this season’s lineup includes works from peter campus, RaFia, and Petra Cortright, as well as partnerships with SPRING/BREAK Art Show, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Armory Show, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Rhizome.
All events are free to the public.
March 5–31, 2019
Times Square Immersive
Presented with SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Broadway Plazas
The exuberant exhibition platform sprawls onto the Broadway plazas with four sculptures that blur reality and fantasy with delight and warning.
MIDNIGHT MOMENT
March 1–31, 11:57pm–midnight
Head of a Sad Young Woman
Artist: peter campus
Presented with The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Armory Show, and Cristin Tierney Gallery
Times Square's Electronic Billboards
The seminal video artist studies the exchange between subject, viewer, and artist through a psychological portrait of a melancholy young woman whose monumental gaze will tower over Times Square.
April 1–30, 11:57pm–midnight
Dizzillusions
Artist: RaFia
Times Square's Electronic Billboards
In this spritely, looping video, the artist’s digitally painted portrait floats against a background of psychedelic waves and vibrating, color-shifting shapes, reflecting the sensorial overload of city living.
May 1–31, 11:57pm–midnight
Pink_Para_1stchoice
Artist: Petra Cortright
Presented with Rhizome
Times Square's Electronic Billboards
The artist performs in front of a webcam using filters and editing techniques to draw out an endless, accordion-like flow of her movements — the first Midnight Moment created with and for the computer screen.
About Midnight Moment
Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. Presented by the Times Square Advertising Coalition and curated by Times Square Arts since 2012, it has an estimated annual viewership of 2.5 million. For more information, visit tsq.org/midnightmoment
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity. Generous support of Times Square Arts is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Visit TSq.org/Arts for more information. Follow us on Instagram at @TSqArts.
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Artists
peter campus (born 1937, New York City) is a seminal artist in the canons of new media and video art. After receiving a Bachelor of Science in Experimental Psychology from Ohio State University in 1960, he studied at the City College Film Institute. He worked as a film editor and in film production, last for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He then followed his dream to be an artist, becoming a pioneer in video art in 1970. His initial video works were performance based, many made at WGBH in Boston at the New Television Workshop. He won a Guggenheim Foundation award in 1975, a National Endowment for the Arts grant the following year, and received a fellowship at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1976. In 1971, he began to show his video installations in the U.S. and Europe and is still showing in ever widening circles. petercampus.net
Petra Cortright (born 1986, Santa Barbara, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY (2008) and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). Selected exhibitions include: Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); The Metabolic Age, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; On YouTube. Kunst und Playlists aus 10 Jahren, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; Im Inneren der Stadt, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinberg, Russia (2017); I Was Raised On the Internet, MCA Chicago (2018); and The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019). Her works are in the permanent collections of The Péréz Museum, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MOTI, Breda in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and MCA Chicago. petracortright.com
RaFia Santana (born 1990, Brooklyn, NY) is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist using animated graphics, self-portraiture, and music production to soothe the self, bend perception, and make jokes. They also make use of social marketing and fundraising as a means to support and uplift marginalized communities. RaFia has exhibited their work at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, MoCADA, Tate Britain, the Museum of the Moving Image, Housing NY, BronxArtSpace, and more. They have been featured in Teen Vogue, Paper Magazine, VICE, Topical Cream Magazine, and other leading publications. RaFia has performed and participated in panels, discussions, and events at Black Portraitures at Harvard University, Afrotectopia at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Pratt Institute's Department of Digital Arts, Newspace Center for Photography, and MoMA PS1. raf-i-a.tumblr.com
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Partners
The Armory Show is New York City’s premier art fair and a leading cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th and 21st century art. Staged on Manhattan’s Piers 92 and 94, The Armory Show features presentations by leading international galleries, innovative artist commissions, and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show serves as a nexus for the international art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery, and patronage in the visual arts. thearmoryshow.com
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is a contemporary art museum that connects diverse audiences to the urban experience through its permanent collection, special exhibitions, and education programs. Reflecting the borough's dynamic communities, the Museum is the crossroad where artists, local residents, national, and international visitors meet. The Museum was founded in 1971 by a group of local residents to bring the visual arts to the borough. To this day it remains the only fine arts museum in the Bronx. The Museum’s permanent collection is now composed of more than 2,000 works of art in all media, conveying a broad range of modern and contemporary art practices. Since 2012, The Bronx Museum features a Free Admission policy that has increased attendance from a modest 20,000 annual visitors to up to 100,000 today, and deepened the Museum’s role as an accessible, community-focused institution. bronxmuseum.org
Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery committed to the development and support of both established and emerging artists. The international exhibition program emphasizes critical theory and art history, with an attendant interest in under-recognized artists and art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. cristintierney.com
Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, digital preservation, and software development. Founded by artist Mark Tribe as a list serve, including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet. rhizome.org
SPRING/BREAK Art Show is an internationally recognized exhibition platform using underused, atypical and historic New York City exhibition spaces to activate and challenge the traditional cultural landscape of the art market, typically but not exclusively during Armory Arts Week. By first inhabiting St. Patrick's Old School, and then the former James A. Farley Post Office, the initiative offers independent curators free space within New York City landmarks, past and future. In exchange for no-cost exhibition space, visionary perspectives both established and unknown are charged with engaging these areas under a unifying theme and pushed to extend the boundaries of typical market week practices. All artworks in the show are displayed and available for purchase online, giving artists unknown, emerging, mid-career, and beyond a virtual complement to their tactile exhibition. Low-cost exhibition space and low-cost entry for art patrons, public, and practioners alike widens the arts audience in New York and broadens the dialog of what constitutes value and economy in a 21st century city. springbreakartshow.com
Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) is a trade association comprised of major advertisers, retailers, real estate firms, media companies and other businesses involved in the outdoor sign industry in Times Square, along with organizations representing Broadway and the community. Members of TSAC include: ABC Regional Sports & Entertainment Sales, Clear Channel Spectacolor, Daktronics, D3 LED, Digital Domination, Hines Management, Jamestown One Times Square, Lamar Advertising Company, Landmark Sign & Electric, Metro Media Technologies, Newmark Knight Frank, North Shore Neon, P.R.omotion!, Sherwood Outdoor, SL Green, Times Square Alliance, The WOW Factor and Thomson Reuters. www.timessquareadcoalition.org. Follow TSAC on twitter at @TSACNYC.