Looking Back / The 9th White Columns Annual - Selected by Cleopatra's : White Columns, New York, NY

“Looking Back” is the ninth installment of the White Columns Annual. The exhibition is now a fixture on White Columns’ calendar. Each year, an individual or a collaborative team (e.g. an artist, a curator, a writer, etc.) is invited to make an exhibition at White Columns based on their personal experience of looking at art in New York in the previous year. For the ninth ‘Annual’ exhibition, White Columns has invited the New York-based collective Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Colleen Grennan, Erin Somerville), to make the selection.

In a very straightforward sense, the ‘Annual’ exhibition hopes to reveal something of the complexities involved in trying to negotiate – and engage with – NewYork’s constantly shifting cultural landscape. The format of the exhibition inevitably encourages highly subjective and deeply personal responses to the realities of viewing art in New York. The ‘Annual’ exhibition series hopes to illuminate aspects of the specific, yet highly idiosyncratic routes –geographical, intellectual, historical, social, etc. – that individuals follow in an increasingly expansive and fragmented cultural environment.