Care / Condition / Control
Curated by A.E. Chapman
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge St, NYC
Feb 22 – April 27, 2025
“In the final analysis, man is nothing but water, a certain amount of mineral matter, hair and nails.” Shimmering Details, Volume I, Péter Nádas.
Social-scientific investigations into the body have shown us that although individuals may appear to “own” their bodies, their public presentation and use are deeply shaped by social contracts and expectations. Contrary to popular belief, the body does not possess a continuous, homogeneous, or linear history. Rather, the norms, regulations, and modes of resistance surrounding the body are best understood through the lens of conflict and representation. Hair and hairstyles, in particular, operate simultaneously as natural attributes and as mutable, fluid forms—making them potent markers and litmus tests of a given era’s socio-cultural climate. Hair embodies class, race, religion, conviction, age, and physical and mental well-being. It acts as a site for stereotypes, norms, violence, care, and ritual.
Care / Condition / Control originates from A.E. Chapman’s research into the 150-year history of Hunter College as part of a curatorial practicum that she was enrolled in 2020 for her master’s coursework. During that time, she began thinking about hair after it appeared repeatedly in alumni work, including Germaine Koh’s Fête (1997-ongoing), a continually evolving sculptural series composed of the artist’s own cut hair, and Oasa DuVerney’s MYLFworks (2011), a series of videos on ambiguous scenes of domestic labor.
From this initial encounter, Chapman’s contemplation of hair—particularly as it appears on the human head—expanded into a large-scale group exhibition featuring sixteen artists, from renowned figures to emerging voices, spanning from the 1970s to the present day. As the curatorial statement notes, the show explores hair as a vehicle for interdependence and collective care within communal networks. Through diverse media—including performance, sculpture, assemblage, drawing, printmaking, and photography—the exhibition includes works by Rebecca Bair, John Coplans, Armando Guadalupe Cortés, Cristina de Gennaro, Magdalena Dukiewicz, Oasa DuVerney, Jarrett Key, Greer Lankton, Meryl Meisler, Sara Messinger, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Calli Roche, Joseph Rodriguez, Melissa Stern, and Trish Tillman.
The show explores how hair can carry intergenerational trauma and perform political rituals through acts of presentation, or how it may even manifest as an instrument of violence—forced haircutting used as a weapon of social control, as seen in Armando Guadalupe Cortés’s Jauiri Kuáti (2025). The works can be loosely grouped around thematic categories: the societal stigma of aging that women face, as evoked in Cristina de Gennaro’s Carol (2021) the objectified female body, obsessively regulated through norms, domestic violence, and virility, or shaped by fetish and sexual pleasure, as in Magdalena Dukiewicz’s Object #11 and Object #4 (2023), or the ritualized maintenance of hairstyle and hair care in pieces by Jarrett Key (Hot Comb No. 3 “Snaggle Tooth” and Hot Comb No. 4), Sara Messinger (Untitled, 2023), and Melissa Stern (High School Hair, 2020). Other works consider masculinity, such as those by Joseph Rodriguez and John Coplans, or meditate on time and bodily duration, as in Germaine Koh’s practice. Greer Lankton If You Can Pass For A Girl (1989) interrogate queer identity, gender transition, and normativity, while Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #94 and Double Self-Portrait (1980) with Richard Prince approaches femininity and feminism through layered citation and performance.
While the subject touches on broader cultural and sociopolitical debates, it’s no coincidence that the works on view are deeply personal—autobiographical, self-reflexive, and often composed from the artists’ own DNA. They act as portraits of the self and the body, physically and symbolically entangled with hair as both medium and metaphor.
One could easily envision the show expanded into a museum-scale survey, broadening the field to include artworks from surrealism, folk traditions, crafts, and religious or ritual practices involving hair: shaving, cutting, or veiling. Such an expansion could open discourse around hair not only as it appears on the head, but across the body, allowing a more complete investigation into its roles in shame, power, intimacy, control, and desire.
