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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.

08/31/2026

We are pleased to announce “William Majors: Making a Mark,” the largest survey of Majors’s art to date, opening September 9, 2026.

Throughout his short but vital career, William Majors (1930–1982) produced an innovative, varied body of work spanning paintings, prints, collages, and drawings. This exhibition brings his work back into view, reintroducing an artist whose accomplishments have long outpaced his public recognition.

“Making a Mark” pays particular attention to Majors’s printmaking practice and the context that shaped it. On display in its entirety is “Etchings from Ecclesiastes,” a 1965 portfolio of eighteen etchings commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art’s Junior Council. While developing this pivotal work, Majors was involved in Spiral, a collective of Black artists founded in 1963 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. Loans of prints by fellow Spiral members—along with works by Majors’s other peers, including Melvin Edwards and Jacob Lawrence—situate his practice amidst the group’s shared concerns and the broader political and cultural climate of the period. The exhibition further considers this moment alongside the wider printmaking renaissance unfolding in New York at the time, including the emergence of community spaces such as the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (EFA RBPMW) and the Lower East Side Printshop (Lower East Side Printshop).
 🗓️ Opening Reception: September 9, 6-8pm
📍 September 9-December 19, 2026 | Shirley Fiterman Art Center, BMCC/CUNY | 81 Barclay Street, New York, NY
 Free and open to the public.

08/15/2026

“At the Edge” closes today. One final day to step inside— and to witness what the 181 sets in motion.

The 181— Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, and Jason Rhodes— has been composing situations together since first gathering by the Pacific Ocean in 2007. Inspired by Roman Signer’s “accidental sculptures” and the mathematically precise slapstick of Buster Keaton, their happenings are uncontrolled but measured, drifting away from any predetermined plan to underscore the variability of all things— even time and sound. Any attempt to formally define their practice they view with distress.

On the opening day of “At the Edge,” the 181 set “WITH YOU ALL THE WAY: |channel relay|” into motion. The compositional objects— a lead box, a weather balloon, and more— have remained in taped-off sections of the gallery ever since, present yet idle, awaiting this moment.

For their closing composition, the four collaborators— unable to meet in person— began sending something through the mail between themselves. That “something” arrived at SFAC in a silvered tube of the kind used to store ice cores: cylinders drilled from deep inside polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, holding particles of the Earth’s atmosphere from thousands of years ago. Today, a gallery attendant will open the tube, extract what’s inside, and place it at the edge of the specimen case in the North Gallery, where it will remain for the final hours of the exhibition.

“If you look into the light you’ll see something.”

📅 Closing Day | Saturday, August 15 | 12–5PM 📍 Shirley Fiterman Art Center | 81 Barclay Street

08/13/2026

📣This is the last week to see “At the Edge,” with two final events before the exhibition closes on August 15th.

📆 Tonight | August 13 | 6PM Ann Messner & Selena Kimball in conversation, moderated by Director Dr. Lisa Panzera.  📍 Shirley Fiterman Art Center

📆 This Saturday | August 15 | 12–5PM The 181 presents their final composition of “WITH YOU ALL THE WAY.” Something has been traveling through the mail between the four members of 181, shipped to SFAC in a silvered tube. On closing day, it will be opened, inviting viewers to look closely: “If you look into the light you’ll see something.”  📍 Shirley Fiterman Art Center

Both events are free and open to the public.

08/10/2026

“One morning, after spilling coffee on the paper, I realized I was flipping through primary documents that would be used to shape and validate future histories. So why not record my interpretation of ‘today’ as it is happening while I still feel it?” - Selena Kimball

Selena Kimball examines how the past is archived and how, through acts of selective preservation, the future is written. Working across collage and printmaking, she investigates history as filtered through and shaped by the perspective of the narrator.

Central to her practice is “Untitled Times (completed scroll)” (2017–2024), a 252-inch continuous collage composed of fragments cut from Kimball’s daily copy of the New York Times, rebuilt into her own version of the news over nearly a decade. The work is inspired, in part, by the Jefferson Bible, offering a counter-practice to Thomas Jefferson’s editorial erasures of– his act of literally cutting away– the parts of the New Testament he deemed irrational. Here, Kimball presents a liminal landscape that refuses to negate the margins, the images passed over, or the people briefly seen as newsworthy before being quickly forgotten.

Sections of the scroll have been transformed into silkscreen paintings on linen, including “Untitled Times, sec. 06 (dome)” (2023). Within this large-scale work, Kimball traces her physical presence through footprints and lift marks— artifacts of making that professional printers would call blemishes. From a distance, the work reads as a ravaged, dystopian terrain. Up close, one bears witness to a a residue of compressed information: what Kimball calls “imagined reckonings” of archives that refuse neutrality.

📆Join us this Thursday, August 13 at 6PM for a conversation with Selena Kimball and Ann Messner, moderated by Director Dr. Lisa Panzera. 📍 Shirley Fiterman Art Center · Free and open to the public

08/06/2026

📆 Join us Thursday August 13th at 6pm for ann messner + Selena Kimball in conversation, on the occasion of “At the Edge.”

Ann Messner works across sculpture, installation, performance, and film to negotiate the boundaries between public and private, authorized and unsanctioned. Her early practice was rooted in the gritty reality of New York City in the 1970s. It was within this volatile landscape, where infrastructure was crumbling and municipal bankruptcy loomed, that Messner began inserting herself into public space, mapping loose scenarios where the outcome depended on the unpredictable responses of passersby.

The three works on view in “At the Edge” each staged a distinct intervention. In “slalom” (1977), Messner arranged city garbage cans in a staggered line down a Lower Manhattan street, inconspicuously challenging motorists to navigate them slalom-style— an absurdist disruption of the urban grid. “subway stories” (1978–79) found Messner in the New York City subway during rush hour, deploying egregious props— blowing up a large flesh-colored balloon in an overcrowded car, traversing a full train in a scuba diving suit— and transforming commuters into unwitting collaborators. “Hitchhiking” (1978), made in Germany, extended this logic across a wider geography: Messner mapped a triangle of three cities and traversed it entirely by soliciting rides from strangers, documenting each encounter with a Polaroid of the driver and their car’s rear identification plate.

Central to all three works is the question of documentation. For Messner, the film or photograph that records a performance is categorically different from the performance itself; a viewer encountering documentation knows they are looking at art, while a performance bystander experiences something altogether more ambiguous. And yet, the documented interventions maintain a sense of urgency from our vantage point in 2026. The habitual movement of strangers through space— compressed into absurdist conditions, subjected to the screeching wail of the underground— has not changed. Neither have the charged stakes of disrupting it.

“At the Edge” is free to the public, Wednesday-Saturday, 12-5pm.

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.

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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