Welcome to The Big Picture, where CULTURED’s critics zoom out for a wider view of the art world. While the main focus of The Critics’ Table will be reviews, this space is reserved for longer reflections—treatises, prognostications, diaries, and meanderings. Really, anything goes. For the inaugural installment, Co-Chief Art Critic Johanna Fateman waded into the back-to-school furor of early September in New York, when the galleries open for the fall, and emerged with this report.
The season began, for me, in Times Square, outside Olive Garden, where a 27-foot box truck was parked. I was there for the unveiling of “BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY),” an ambitious undertaking, organized by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol of Project for Empty Space, that feels—with its earnest, anarchic energy and community-minded bent—made to order for these jittery pre-election weeks.
The truck serves as a mobile exhibition space for a rotating group show and event series, with stops planned for 11 U.S. cities. Inside the narrow cargo compartment, a salon-style arrangement of mostly small pieces works as a repudiation of the right’s legal and legislative triumphs of recent years—and its grand plans for the future. Or perhaps that’s not exactly—or everything—it hopes to do.
