May 26 – July 17, 2022

May 22 – July 30, 2022

Leslie H. Wexner, the Ohio billionaire who was once one of the world’s important art collectors, made his fortune at the mall by turning around faltering brands into massively successful behemoths like Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret and founding others like the Limited and Bath & Body Works. But since 2019, when Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was charged with sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York and who had previously been Wexner’s money manager, the mall mogul’s reputation and fortune have been on the decline.

Wexner’s relationship to Epstein is now explored in a new three-episode documentary series on Hulu, called Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons, that became available to stream on Thursday. Directed by Matt Tyrnauer, who was previously explored fashion and sex scandals in series like Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008) and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017), the tantalizing new documentary charts Wexner’s rise and fall, and is the latest documentary to do so, with Netflix having released White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch earlier this year.

According to Angels and Demons, Epstein was known to attach himself to older, wealthier men as a way to secure funds and power. Wexner ended up being one of those men, entangling himself deeply with Epstein and going so far as to make Epstein his financial manager and later giving him power of attorney.

That struck many in his circle, such as former Victoria’s Secret CEO Cindy Fedus-Fields, as out of character considering that Wexner was a known micro-manager and that Epstein was a college dropout who had mysteriously leveraged a job at Bear Stearns after a brief stint as a math teacher at Dalton, the prestigious New York private school. Serving as Wexner’s financial manager from the ’80s until 2007, Epstein use his connection to Wexner’s companies, most notably Victoria’s Secret, in order to proposition women.

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, one of the leading art schools in the U.S., announced employee layoffs just a few weeks after its staff unionized.

The news comes roughly two months after employees working across various departments voted 86–17 on to join SEIU Local 500 on May 24. Staff learned of the cuts just two days after the representatives for the newly-formed union petitioned the school’s administration to enter into negotiations before issuing changes to employee working conditions, Artforum reported Thursday.

The restructuring move is poised to cut around 10 percent of the union’s bargaining unit, the group of workers who conduct labor negotiations, ahead of contract talks. 24 positions total will be affected by the layoffs. The announcement was disseminated in an email sent to employees and reviewed by Artforum. In the internal message, the administration said they expected “about half” of the 24 positions set to be cut would affect union employees.

SEIU Local represents staff spanning public schools universities and nonprofits in Maryland and Washington, DC. Employees including those at Goucher College, Howard University, and Planned Parenthood.

“We have agreed to bargain with Local 500 about how the restructuring process will affect those positions and about the details of the severance package that will be offered to the represented staff members in those positions,” the email said.

Over the course of my time posted on the sidewalk outside last night’s opening of “The Patriot,” a 200+ artist, 100 percent bonkers open-submission group show at the Lower East Side gallery O’Flaherty’s, I heard a couple variations on the same refrain: If the police showed up this fast, it must be a pretty good party.

It wasn’t just one or two cops either. At peak, there were multiple squad cars and at least five policemen lined up outside the space, which drew a line before opening and reached capacity almost instantly. Lower East Side gallery openings don’t typically come with a line snaking around the block and a band of cops. But O’Flaherty’s, which is less than a year old and helmed by the rising artist Jamian Juliano-Villani along with her friends, painter Billy Grant and musician Ruby Zarsky, is not typical.

It’s something else, something somewhat rare: It’s fun. And completely insane.

When I arrived at 8, the line was already in full force, with an almost comical number of people fighting to get through the doors. Outside the gallery, a contortionist, flanked by neon-pink alien sculptures, wrapped her leg behind her head as progressive house music blared over a nearby boombox. I spotted Grant close to the entrance, and he ushered me through the throng.

Upon entering the darkened gallery, lit like a haunted house by attendees’ flashlights, I was bombarded with the first of at least seven rooms of art, five of which were hung salon-style with a dizzying array of work ranging from what looked like known contemporary art entities to the kind of artist who might, say, submit a fairly straightforward-looking portrait of Tom Petty. I couldn’t get a hold of a checklist, so who really knows.

For someone who spends most of life reading and writing, dance is a miracle. Literature twists language to get at truth, but dance circumvents it altogether. Of course, this is only true at the moment of performance; the work of dance is full of language–often commands, usually unheard by the audience. Milka Djordjevich’s CORPS, which I saw at NY Live Arts a couple of weeks ago, invites us to consider the interplay of communication and labor in dance. It opens with a two-word command, “Snaps, go,” spoken by one of six dancers in drab gym uniforms as they march into view, fingers obediently snapping. When another says “no-head, go,” they begin to shake their heads, still snapping. This continues, with about forty moves in different combinations—from sources including military drill, ballet, and cheerleading—for the first half of the piece. (My personal favorite was “pointers,” a raffish shaking of double finger-guns that I plan to try at my cousin’s wedding). It’s a strangely anarchic, nonhierarchical performance of command-giving: any dancer can call the next move, and the official vocabulary is interspersed with chatty asides. Controlling their own collective fate, they still end up doing things that none of them seem to want—like jumping up and down for what feels like ten minutes, breathless, awaiting instruction. Anyone who has had a job, or a family, will recognize the inertia of the group project. In the second half, the drill team, now in gold-spangled, softly jingling, not-quite-matching costumes, begins a magnificent disintegration, each dancer interpreting the moves from the first sequence in their own ways, then getting weirder, ultimately collapsing into a pile on the floor. There they chat, all speaking at once, repeating everyday phrases until they morph into new ones (“in or out/in and out/In-N-Out/have you been to In-N-Out?/best burgers…”). This psychedelic segment is a bit more exciting than the flawed austerity that precedes it, but you can’t choose a favorite—each half relies on the other for meaning. 

—Jane Breakell, development director

For his 1973 anthology The Oxford Book of Light Verse, W. H. Auden included poetry that took as its subject “the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet as an ordinary human being.” The collection, which includes Byron and Pope, confirms that “lightness” doesn’t preclude “greatness.” I wonder: would Auden consider Tim Key’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush light verse? Certainly, it tackles contemporary social life from the perspective of an everyman—it takes place during COVID lockdown in London, featuring a poet-narrator who traipses around the capital while talking on his iPhone. 

The book, subtitled “an anthology of poems and conversations,” is difficult to classify. It has theatrical and fantastical touches, and Key revels in an absurdity that verges on nonsense poetry—but this isn’t that. Maybe if you squint a bit—or a lot—you could call it vers de société. As with Key’s first lockdown anthology, I felt I was encountering a comic novel. It’s a preposterous volume, in which “the Poet” is contemptuous, rash, insecure, ridiculous, and farcically ordinary. His personality comes through so strongly in these pages that it’s easy to imagine him delivering each line, exasperated mumbles and all. Here’s a silly example, from “Leaning”:

Chella Man wears many hats. At only 23, the Deaf trans phenom has enjoyed impressive careers as a YouTuber, artist, activist, actor (he’s best known for his role as Jericho, a mute superhero in the DC Universe series Titans), and now, curator.

This summer, 1969 Gallery in TriBeCa is hosting Man’s curatorial debut, a show titled “PURE JOY: 14 Disabled Visual and Performance Artists,” on view through August 13. It marks one of the first New York group shows bringing together work by a growing coalition of disabled artists.

The recent opening for Man’s show was packed. ARTnews sat down with the multi-hyphenate to catch up about the show and his own artwork.

ARTnews: Tell me why you chose to focus on disabled joy.

CHELLA MAN: The main reason is simply that disabled people are often not asked about joy. We are asked about how we deal with our trauma and how we deal with discrimination. But I find I’m rarely asked about joy, or about what makes me happy. Isn’t that sad?

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