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Shirley Fiterman Art Center at BMCC

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Shirley Fiterman Art Center at BMCC

The Shirley Fiterman Art Center, a not-for-profit organization, is dedicated to raising funds for student scholarships.

The Shirley Fiterman Art Center, in partnership with the BMCC Foundation Board, a not-for-profit organization, is dedicated to raising funds for student scholarships, and ensuring the success of its students, who come from every borough of New York City, and countries around the world, seeking better lives. Art ahead, is a series of curated exhibitions that explores risk taking and sparks conversa

tion on art. The goal of the series is to engage students, faculty, staff and the community of BMCC, as well as a larger audience throughout New York City, in a dialogue of art and its role in our daily lives. Access to art is one priority of the series. Another is starting a relationship with art that will grow throughout a person’s life. Art will be available for sale at the event, with proceeds benefiting the BMCC Foundation Scholarship Fund.

07/29/2026

“Dyke Deck was about making art accessible. I wanted to make art for all of us.” - Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (b. 1961) gained widespread recognition for her portraits of LGBTQ+ communities in the 1990s— work that arrived at a fraught moment in American history, as q***r communities continued to face a hostile legal system, social ostracization, and political scapegoating amidst the AIDS epidemic. Opie responded by rendering her subjects within the orthodox structure of the traditional formal portrait, historically reserved for the respectable and the powerful. By presenting her sitters as leather-clad, tattooed, and openly q***r, she called for her community’s dignity on their own terms.

“At the Edge” brings together two works that illuminate the range of Opie’s practice. “Dyke Deck” (1995) is a limited-edition, 52-card playing deck featuring different LGBTQ+ personas—couples assigned to hearts, jocks to clubs, femmes to diamonds, butches to spades—all captured through an open call. Conceived as a reminder not to “let the politics of the culture wars get us down,” the deck offered images both of and for the artist’s community, sold at a price point that made them accessible to all.

Opie’s more recent series, “Blood grids” (2023), turns to art history’s formal traditions. Photographing every representation of blood in the tapestries and paintings of the Vatican Museums, Opie arranges the depictions in a grid— stripped of narrative context, yet visually connected through thematic clusters of hands, feet, and wounded bodies. The fragmented flesh and blood echo the charged physicality of her earlier portraiture, now turned directly toward the source material of Western history.

Catherine Opie is on view in “At the Edge” through August 15 at Shirley Fiterman Art Center. Free and open to the public, Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5PM, and by appointment.

07/20/2026

On the occasion of “At the Edge,” Hannah Traore Gallery is hosting ni**le molding sessions* with artist Misha Japanwala (Misha Japanwala).

📅 July 23 & 24 · 12–5PM 📍 Hannah Traore Gallery · 150 Orchard Street, New York

Pakistani artist and fashion designer Misha Japanwala responds to the Urdu concept of “beghairati,” or shamelessness. In South Asia, “shameless” is traditionally used as a derogatory term for those who lack modesty or self-respect. Through the act of casting and molding marginalized bodies, Japanwala reclaims the body as a sacred site of healing and resistance. To embrace beghairati through vulnerable acts of bodily portrayal and preservation becomes a powerful form of resistance.

In 2022, Japanwala held an open call in Karachi for individuals willing to participate in anonymous ni**le moldings. Over 70 people, aged eighteen to sixty-five, signed up. Each session invited intimate conversations surrounding stories of pain, healing, and survival. In “Fossils 6” and “Fossils 7” (2023), a selection of these cast ni**les are embedded within the rigid shape of a rock; the femme body and the stories it holds are elevated into a form synonymous with antiquity, preservation, and evolution. “Artifact MH01” (2022) presents an entire breastplate dipped in gold— at once a wearable piece of armor and a newly imagined archive, fabricated to embody shamelessness for generations to come.

Japanwala’s more recent work evolves beyond breasts to encompass thighs, bottoms, and skin folds. The vibrantly colored castings amplify pores, stretch marks, scars, and rolls, asking, in the artist’s own words: “What does it mean to document our existence in a way that is totally uninhibited by aesthetics and visual preferences and conditioning?” Through such documentations, Japanwala presents the body as a source of celebration where radical shamelessness is embraced rather than feared.

Misha Japanwala’s work is on view in “At the Edge” through August 15. The exhibition is free and open to the public, Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5PM and by appointment.

*$250 per session | First come, first serve | Sessions approx. 10–15 mins | 10% of proceeds donated to Asiyah Women’s Center

07/17/2026

This Sunday, join us upstate for a performance and Q+A with Allison Halter.

📆Sunday, July 19 | 2-4PM
📍Women’s Studio Workshop | 722 Binnewater Lane, Kingston, NY

Free — reserve your spot via the link in bio.

Conceptual artist Allison Halter works across performance, video, sound, and photography to explore physical and psychic accumulation, probing the invisibility and erasure of women in Western culture. She devotes months to learning labor-intensive crafts historically considered women’s work— constructing brooms, threading intricate cotton lace, weaving hand-tufted rugs— before deploying them through slow, repetitive movements that deepen in charge as they pile up.

“CLEARING (SIGIL)” (2026) is a reprise of Halter’s public performance “Clearing” (2020). On the occasion of “At the Edge” she cast one of her handmade broom handles from 2020 in iron, affixed it with bristles, and—resting it on a weight rack— transformed it into a cumbersome barbell. At 8:30am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, before the gallery opens, Halter sweeps gestural strokes across the floor of SFAC, visible only through the windows on West Broadway.

Here, the broom carries multiple meanings: it references women’s domestic role, the historical persecution of women through accusations of witchcraft, and the accumulated weight of history. And yet, through Halter’s own care in making and wielding this iron-cast broom, the object is transformed into a tool of reclamation; at once it is a weight she is physically strengthened by, and a metaphorical paintbrush tracing the powerful, if unseen, marks made by women across both domestic and artistic spheres.

This Sunday’s performance in Kingston is a continuation of Halter’s ongoing performance, presented in collaboration with the Carolee Schneemann Foundation (Carolee Schneemann Foundation) and Women’s Studio Workshop (Women's Studio Workshop).

07/16/2026

TONIGHT!! Join us for a screening of Mariah Garnett’s film “Trouble” (81min, 2019)— an Artforum Critic’s Pick called “one of the best documentaries of the year” by Sight + Sound Mag. Followed by a Q&A with the artist.

📍 Tribeca Performing Arts Center | 199 Chambers St, New York 🚪 Doors open at 6PM | Film at 6:30PM 
Free, but spots are limited. Reserve yours via the link in bio.

07/13/2026

Mark your calendar! There are two events this week, on the occasion of “At the Edge”:

🎬 This Thursday, July 16 · 6PM Mariah Garnett — “Trouble” screening + Q&A Tribeca Performing Arts Center · 199 Chambers St Free, but spots are limited — reserve yours now via the link in bio.

🧹 This Sunday, July 19 · 2–4PM Allison Halter — “CLEARING (SIGIL)” performance + Q&A Women’s Studio Workshop · Kingston, NY
In collaboration with Women's Studio Workshop & Carolee Schneemann Foundation  Free and open to the public, reserve your spot with the link in the bio.

07/06/2026

“What does being an artist living in precarity mean today? How do we find the spiritual fortitude to continue? What resonates in archives, and how can we transform cycles of history if we move forward, collectively? Is death the end?” — Mariah Garnett

Experimental filmmaker Mariah Garnett blurs entrenched categorizations: director versus subject, storyteller versus archivist, documentary versus fiction. By dismantling the rigid binaries that govern both art and life, her practice deconstructs the invisible wall between archives and their makers, upending systems of assumed power.

In “At the Edge,” Garnett presents “Full Burn” (2014) alongside two suspended flags, “Army Protection David” and “Mad Major Maura” (both 2017), and a rarely shown series of 2019 animations loops. “Full Burn” opens with a slow-motion shot of a special-ops marine turned stuntman being set on fire. As this man and his peers recount their Hollywood careers, the line between the war zone and the movie set dissolves. Garnett works not as a director seeking documentation but as an impartial observer—a role underscored by her own appearance in the film, being massaged by a veteran turned Rolfer.

The adjacent flags and animations were inspired during the making of “Trouble” (2019)—Garnett’s documentary following her search for her estranged, Northern Irish father—and her coinciding discovery of his involvement with the radical socialist screen-printing collective, The Poster Workshop. In the flags, Garnett appropriates posters made for The People’s Democracy and overlays them with her own self-portraits, screenprinted on denim at large scale. The animations activate the collective’s caricature-style archives into loops that are simultaneously playful and unnerving. Here, past and present collapse; fact and fiction blur.

🎬 Join us for a screening of Garnett’s film “Trouble” + a moderated Q&A with the artist on Thursday, July 16 at 6:30PM at BMCC’s Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers St. Reserve your free spot via the link in bio.

Mariah Garnett is on view in “At the Edge” through August 15. Free and open to the public, Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5PM and by appointment.

07/02/2026

Across a five-decade career, Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) insisted that the body—female, unruly, and unflinching—was both her medium and her message. Her work consistently pushed art beyond the canvas and into the realm of performance, ephemerality, and lived experience. “At the Edge” brings together three works that exemplify this practice.

In “Up to and Including Her Limits” (1973–76), Schneemann suspended herself in a tree surgeon’s harness, using her extended arm and crayons to mark the surrounding walls. Her entire body became the instrument of mark-making—a direct response to the hyper-masculinity of Abstract Expressionism—insisting that the act of creation cannot be separated from the body of the creator.

“Americana I Ching Apple Pie” (1977) turns to the domestic sphere as a site of critique and liberation. Photographs document Schneemann’s staged performance of baking an apple pie out of miscellaneous objects—nails, hammers, flowerpots—alongside a dryly humorous score, which instructs participants to enter the kitchen “with defiant joyful anger” in the spirit of “Liberation Through Joyous Aggression.”

“War Mop” (1983) pushes that domestic space up against global conflict. A mechanized mop swings a television monitor in relentless rotation, its screen cutting between news footage and the ruins of Damour, Lebanon. Displayed alongside xerographic collages from Schneemann’s artist book “The Recent History and Destruction of Lebanon” (1983–87), the work extends its indictment of military violence beyond the gallery wall and into the realm of historical witness.

Collectively, these works affirm what Schneemann spent a lifetime proving: that the personal and the political are never far apart.

Carolee Schneemann is on view in “At the Edge” through August 15. Free and open to the public, Wednesday–Saturday, 12-5PM and by appointment.

06/25/2026

On August 18, 1982, Lorraine O’Grady (1934–2024) staged her most personal work to date: “Rivers, First Draft.” The performance was part of “Art Across the Park,” an exhibition series of site-specific commissions in New York’s public parks.

Staged along Central Park’s lesser-known Loch, O’Grady conceptualized a “three-ring circus of movement and sound”—three simultaneous performances, each narrating a period of her life through characters assigned a corresponding age and color: the Little Girl in a Pink Sash (childhood), the Teenager in Magenta (adolescence), and the Woman in Red (adulthood). A small, invited audience from Just Above Midtown (or JAM, a gallery that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color), gathered alongside a handful of passersby as the dream-like procession unfolded on either side of the Loch’s stream.

In “At the Edge,” a series of ten photographs documents elements of this ambling performance— the Little Girl reading her Latin lessons, the Teenager sitting in solitude with headphones, the Woman in Red rejected by the “Black Male Artists” behind a closed door. Together they capture O’Grady’s experience as a child of Caribbean immigrants growing up in Boston, and the intersecting forces of identity, belonging, and endurance that shaped her later life and work.

The photographs cannot fully capture the ephemerality or site-specificity of O’Grady’s self-described “collage in space”—nor do they try. Freed from their original context over four decades later, they invite new audiences to bring their own histories to the work, sparking fresh discourse around intersectionality, identity, and endurance that resonates as urgently today as it did in 1982.

“Rivers, First Draft” is on view in At the Edge through August 15. The Shirley Fiterman Art Center is free and open to the public, Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5PM and by appointment.

06/23/2026

“In the closing of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, protagonist Milkman Dead, ‘surrenders to the air,’ confronting his family’s ruptured legacy while embracing the possibility of freedom. He does not succumb to broken realities; he reclaims them as a means to ride toward liberation. This project begins here.”
–Zoë Pulley

Every Tuesday at noon, look through the windows of SFAC from West Broadway to experience “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it”—a site-specific installation that grows throughout “At the Edge.”

Each week over the course of ten weeks, Zoë Pulley (Zoë Pulley) prompts an AI language model to compile the top ten news headlines from around the world. The artist then rearranges the generated words into declarations that carry new insight while retaining their original intent. The results are printed on nylon flags and hung one by one at SFAC, accumulating into a haphazard archive of a ten-week news cycle.

The work responds to Lorraine O’Grady’s 1977 “Cutting Out NYTIMES,” revisiting the late artist’s act of cutting and rearranging words imbued with power for the age of algorithmic media. Pulley asks: what does AI’s aggregation—its selections, omissions, and incoherencies—reveal about the media ecosystem it draws from?

Suspended from PVCs and cables that evoke societal infrastructure, the flags raise more questions than they answer. A free zine accompanies the installation, documenting each flag alongside its source headline.

Rooted in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Pulley’s project asks us to consider not just where information comes from—but where it might carry us. In her own words: ”To surrender to the air is not defeat. It is the condition of flight.”

“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” is on view in the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, 81 Barclay Street. Free and open to the public 12pm-5pm, Wednesday-Saturday.

06/01/2026

We are thrilled to announce “At the Edge,” opening Wednesday, June 10th at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center. An opening reception will be held from 6-8pm.

“At the Edge” brings together eleven artists and one collective spanning five decades whose practices grapple with the urgencies of their time—working across performance, video, installation, and mixed media to push against established definitions of art and culture.

The exhibition features work by: The 181, Sara Dotterer, Mariah Garnett, Allison Halter, Misha Japanwala, Selena Kimball, Ann Messner, Shelley Niro, Lorraine O’Grady, Catherine Opie, Zoë Pulley, and Carolee Schneemann.

A full schedule of performances, screenings, and conversations will run alongside the exhibition, through August 15. Link in bio for details.

📍 81 Barclay Street, New York, NY 10007

Address

81 Barclay Street
New York, NY
10007

Opening Hours

Wednesday	12pm - 5pm
Thursday	12pm - 5pm
Friday	12pm - 5pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+12127765631

Website

http://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/sfac/

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