Even though school is out, an exhibition at PPOW’s second-floor gallery space in Manhattan turns the spotlight onto the arbiters of education — teachers. Centered on the osmotic processes of knowledge exchange, Airhead, on view through August 9, is made up of works by 16 artists who deploy varying tactics in their missions to reach others.
In an interview with Hyperallergic, gallery director Eden Deering explained that she and co-curator Timmy Simonds, also featured in the show, spent over a year developing Airhead as an expansion of artist and activist Shellyne Rodriguez’s 2023 solo exhibition with PPOW. Rodriguez’s views have been suppressed by colleges and universities multiple times throughout her career in academia; the pair observed how she made use of the gallery as a different space for learning, including community-based teach-ins, and sought to further dialogue surrounding the artist as a teacher and explore alternative modes of learning within and beyond the classroom in this exhibition.
In Airhead, Rodriguez shows five new linocut and chine collé works she crafted as part of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop program at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. The prints depict patterned tile floors at the dead ends of narrow corridors, nodding to our collective living spaces via their collaging of elements, such as chairs, balloons, flip-flops, and radiators, and to the precolonial natural world via motifs such as the “Three Sisters” agricultural crops (corn, beans, and squash).
Speaking on how teaching is at the core of her being, Rodriguez emphasized that her work “doesn’t just take place in the institutional classroom locked behind the tuition paywall,” but instead channels Guyanese political activist Walter Rodney’s concept of “grounding” — or turning any communal space into a site of learning and exchange.
“The prints I contributed to the show depict a common space in New York City where the potential for grounding is constantly tried and tested so that we might create new collective bodies that bring our experiences along to meet consciousness together,” she wrote to Hyperallergic.
“We bring the classroom outside, wherever the people gather,” Rodriguez continued. “The building lobby, the student encampment, the corner, and the quiet nooks we inhabit where we get to be with ourselves.”
Airhead includes a portion of Philadelphia-based Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio’s reForm (2014–17), a collaborative installation and world-building experience crafted alongside 10 Philadelphia students in response to the city’s closure of over 20 public schools in 2013. The show also revisits Fluxus member Alison Knowles’s “99 Red North” (1970/2024), which invites visitors to take a Red Delicious apple in exchange for leaving something of theirs behind.
A large section of the exhibition is devoted to late East Village storyteller Anton van Dalen‘s decades-long project Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre Props (1995–2015) — a maquette of his apartment building accompanied by small, graphic sculptures of figures and elements of the changing neighborhood over time.
Adam Putnam’s “Untitled (red hallway)” (2019) projects the image of an endless, dingy hallway through mirrors and theater gels — “making something out of nothing,” as the artist puts it in the exhibition’s accompanying booklet. Also utilizing reflection, Gabo Camnitzer’s “The Suit of Mirrors” (2019), stands out in the gallery space. Crafted as a pedagogical tool to help his students understand their sense of self, the environments they inhabit, and how both concepts interact with and differ from each other, Camnitzer explained to Hyperallergic that the reflective wearable sculpture operates as both “an art object meant to be considered, and as a performative costume meant to be used.”
His students, Camnitzer told Hyperallergic, enjoyed the novelty of wearing the suit around the school; he observed nuanced reactions, from performativity to quiet contemplation. Students “are most interested in practices that can disrupt normal institutional operating procedure, and draw things in from beyond the traditional curriculum,” he said.
As such, the exhibition seems to posit that the current cultural and political moment calls for a rethinking of the classroom altogether, harkening back to Rodriguez’s post-academic praxis.
“If our work is of any value, then it serves to dismantle the institution itself,” she said.
