I thought this Halloween would be one for the books because it lined up on a Saturday, but that evening took an absurd, grotesque turn that truly illustrated the complexity of the human condition. I was on my way to a haunted housewarming party when the 3 train abruptly stopped just after leaving Bergen Street station. After 10 minutes, the conductor announced that the MTA was investigating an unauthorized person on the tracks, and everyone, including me, sighed, groaned, rolled their eyes, and swore under their breath.
With the onslaught of subway surfing incidents and other underdeveloped frontal lobe nonsense that goes on, we all assumed it was some mindless teenagers trying to make the most of fright night at the expense of us costumed strangers. Until the following announcement mentioned a “possible injury,” and then the next one confirmed that a “person jumped off the platform” and that this train was now out of service.
The utter ridiculousness set in when I took stock of the characters in my car — aside from myself as Snoopy, there was Kayako’s ghost from The Grudge, Andy Warhol, Oscar the Grouch and his trash can, a witch, a luchador, and some children dressed as superheroes. All of us, stuck on a powered-off train in a dark tunnel some 50 feet underground on Halloween night. It wasn’t funny in the slightest, but the city’s collective jadedness with the inconvenience of fatality culminated in a veneer of forced levity to hide an ugly, unsympathetic frustration.
As we filed through the dark, empty cars of the rescue trains that led us back to the platform 90 minutes later, the atmosphere shifted when an elderly passenger began suffering from an asthma attack. Within two minutes, the same people who weren’t hiding their irritation with the body under the train ended up sourcing and passing along someone’s spare inhaler to the MTA worker tending to the passenger. I called it a night once I saw the conductor with tears in her eyes.
Last week, I reported on an artist who went viral for secretly installing his own painting at The Met. Depicting police in riot gear beating and arresting protestors in the foreground of the celebrity spectacle at the Met Gala, the artist told me the work captured the absurdity of “A-list celebrities prancing, while the world outside the museum gates is collapsing.” While totally different situations, there are parallels between what the artist wanted to say and what I experienced on Saturday night. We’re obviously not rich celebrities being photographed in haute couture at a Bezos-sponsored soiree, but we were costumed for other arrangements and shielded from the pain, suffering, and loss that occurred in our vicinity.
But some people are resisting these wicked dynamics. Today’s Election Day, and we have candidates like NYC Assemblymember, Ridgewood-based artist, and Democratic socialist Claire Valdez making tangible progress in taking on the affordability crisis. We have fighters like Danielle Bensky, an Epstein survivor holding the Museum of Modern Art accountable for its allegiance to Epstein affiliate and billionaire museum trustee Leon Black.
I won’t end this with some corny message to get out and vote, but I will stress that we have to show up for each other and ourselves, no matter how futile and scary it might feel.
I’m an Epstein Survivor. MoMA Must Drop Leon Black.
For more than two decades, one question has followed me since I was abused by Jeffrey Epstein: “Why me?”
In trying to understand what happened, I have come to recognize that the answer lies not only in the manipulation I endured, but also in the institutions and social structures that helped make that manipulation possible.
Leon Black’s board position at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is one of the starkest examples of institutional ignorance — a head-in-the-sand, look-the-other-way mentality that will inevitably give abuse of power a dark corner to grow and fester in. | Danielle Bensky
Hyperallergic Halloween Recap
The Greatest Art Costumes From Hyperallergic’s Halloween Party
From “Las Dos Fridas” to a walking Eva Hesse sculpture, Hyperallergic members, readers, friends, and artists brought the spirit of the season to our second annual costume contest.
From Our Critics
John Yau
Lisa Sanditz: Missing Mountain at Alexandre Gallery
“Sanditz is sensitive to the seismic changes that have taken place in the last 20 years. Like Turner, her interest in the beautiful colors of the poisoned sky has led her to be open to the effects mankind has made part of its environment, to be both an observer and witness.”
Eileen Isagon Skyers
Siphon at Pioneer Works
“Siphon arrives as machine learning has made us newly, urgently curious about intelligences foreign to our own. If we can barely grasp the inner lives of fungi, plants, or octopuses, how can we be sure we’d recognize a machine mind?”
Lily Kwak
Cici Wu: Auld Lang Syne (prelude) at 47 Canal
“Uncannily alive, [the sculptures’] soft glow draws me toward my own ambivalent pasts. In the back of the gallery, a door-shaped lantern admits a stream of light, as if to say, ‘Someone is home, and awaits your return.'”
What Else Is Happening?
- TONIGHT — Democratic congressional candidate Claire Valdez is co-hosting the North Brooklyn NYC-DSA chapter’s election night watch party at Freda in Ridgewood (Tue Nov 3) [actionnetwork.org]
- Matthew Marks Gallery opens three exhibitions this week — two solo presentations of Jasper Johns’s recent drawings and Wayne Guyton’s sculptures, and 101 Drawings, a group show featuring Nayland Blake, Alex Da Corte, Willem de Kooning, Nicole Eisenman, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Martin Puryear, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others. Attend the opening reception for all three shows! (Wed Nov 4) [matthewmarks.com]
- Thought that the Venice Biennale was the “Art Olympics?” Eight undergraduate students at the Fashion Institute of Technology are going head-to-head in the school’s annual Brush Off. Watch the live art competition unfold across several fast-paced rounds and a panel of judges. (Thu Nov 5) [fitnyc.edu]
- Powerhouse Arts is hosting its opening reception for the staff art show, featuring artwork from 55 working artists across the organization’s fabrication and print shops, departments, and programs. The exhibition will be on view through Dec 6. (Thu Nov 5) [powerhousearts.org]
- To mark the closing of After Magic, an exhibition of early works by late NYC Abstract Expressionist and spiritualist Pat Passlof, Eric Firestone Gallery invites Hilma’s Ghost co-founder Dannielle Tegeder, a hard-edge abstractionist, art professor, and practicing witch, to lead a Divination arts workshop observing Passlof’s own painting rituals with the occult. (Sun Nov 8) [RSVP Google form]
- Public artists Chloë Bass and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste convene for a Civics 101 crash course hosted by fellow arts publication Triple Canopy at Public Record. (Mon Nov 9) [dice.fm]
- Ever thought about modernist cutlery design? Design writer Dung Ngo can’t wait to give you the inside scoop (;~P) at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through an illustrated lecture exploring how prominent designers including Zaha Hadid, Isamu Noguchi, Katie Stout, and Achille Castiglioni reinvented flatware. This event complements the launch of Ngo’s new book Knife Fork Spoon: Modernist Cutlery 1900-2025. (Tue Nov 10) [cooperhewitt.org]