CLIFFORD OWENS: I’M NEW HERE
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present I’m New Here, an exhibition of performances, works on paper, and photographs by Clifford Owens.
June 26 – August 8, 2025
For three decades, Clifford Owens has questioned the foundational narratives by which contemporary art is seen, exhibited, and historicized. He has become increasingly recognized as a visionary maker and thinker who moves fluidly between genres. I’m New Here, organized by curator Jay Gorney, will give viewers the opportunity to experience the many facets of Owens’s project in a single space. The exhibition brings together new work with photographs, objects, and drawings made over the entirety of his career. It will include performances commissioned for the occasion of the show and scheduled throughout its run.
The artist will continue to emphasize the presence of the audience as a vital, living element in visual art, demonstrating how performance is an indispensable element throughout a broad range of contemporary practices. This takes shape in his ongoing commitment to establishing a radical pedagogy of performance art, one in which the presence of Black artists and intergenerational dialogue are foundational pillars. Understood in this spirit of outreach, I’m New Here is offered as an act of communion and an invitation to gather. It constitutes an acknowledgment of the central role played by the body in many spheres of cultural production.
The wall-based works on view are powerful testaments to this theme. Important examples from his Scrub and Pocket Paper series find Owens confronting legacies of abstraction and painting through actions in which the movement of the body through space leaves behind intimate traces of its contact. The gestures and materials the artist uses to make Scrub works, for example, are informed by manual labor he performed as a young man growing up in Baltimore, when he would scrub the marble steps of row houses. By pushing ink and bleach across the surface of the paper, he highlights ways in which the body is always the primary material by which images are produced, as well as ways in which that body is inscribed in systems of class, race, and power.
Each work in I’m New Here, whether materialized or impermanent, therefore functions as an index of registers located both inside and outside of art-specific contexts.