Word of the Year

October 2017 – October 2018

Hunter East Harlem Gallery
The Silberman School of Social Work
2180 3rd Avenue at 119th Street
New York, NY 10035

Gallery hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12-5pm

Word of the Year is an exhibition project hosted by Hunter East Harlem Gallery, inviting emerging curators to activate the a wall at Hunter College's Silberman School of Social Work using Oxford English Dictionary's "word of the year" from the previous year.

By using a word culled from mass media as a prompt, the exhibition space acts as a site for artists and curators to engage in a month-long dialogue about collective consciousness and understanding how semantics can play a crucial role in shaping public opinion.

Word of the Year 2016: "POST-TRUTH"
Post-Truth: an adjective defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

October 2017
Double Dialogue

Curated by Kristen Racaniello

Hunter East Harlem Gallery
Hallway Wall
The Silberman School of Social Work
2180 3rd Avenue at 119th Street
New York, NY 10035

Double Dialogue
This multimedia exhibition features the work of artists Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Paul Gagner. Each artist has created an installation dealing with notion of archiving, and their work attempts to unpack the monolithic views of history, truth and reality that dominate culture in the United States. Humor pervades both artist’s work, using oxymorons to point out hypocritical or dualistic thinking. When used as a vehicle for ideas, language can be responsible for conceptions of the singularity of truth and for the social rifts created by conflicting versions of truth. Rasheed and Gagner recognize the tool of language and exaggerate it in their works, thus giving their audience a momentary glimpse of realities alternative to their own. Double Dialogue seeks to draw connections between these two artists’ through their critical analysis of the cultural ironies surrounding them. 

Kristen Racaniello is an independent curator and PhD candidate at the CUNY Grad Center with a focus on Medieval Art History.