SEE THIS COUNTRY CLEARLY: Jonathan Allen and Michael Paul Britto

Curated by Sara Reisman

On view: November 21 - December 21, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, November 22, 6-8pm

FREE PUBLIC EVENTS as part of See This Country Clearly

Sunday December 15th, 3pm 
Artist Talk, moderated by curator Sara Reisman

Join us on Sunday, December 15th for a conversation between artists Michael Paul Britto and Jonathan Allen who will discuss their current exhibition See This Country Clearly. Light refreshments will be served.

Saturday, December 21st, 3pm 
Collage Workshop  

Michael Paul Britto and Jonathan Allen will co-lead a hands-on collage workshop for students and adults, focused on helping them develop stories and narratives to tell their own stories, with the following prompt: What would you like others to see clearly about your community? Materials will be provided, but please feel free to bring books, magazines, photos that you would like to use in your own original collages.

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BronxArtSpace is pleased to announce the opening of SEE THIS COUNTRY CLEARLY, a two-person exhibition curated by Sara Reisman, featuring recent work by visual artists Michael Paul Britto and Jonathan Allen whose distinct but complementary practices converge around the politics of civic life, each approaching that which is public by connecting the personal with the political, and the particular with the universal. Working in collage, text, public address, video, and installation, Allen and Britto question what it means, in this pivotal time, to be on the right side of history, and how to really see our country for what it is, a flawed democracy, the course of which has shifted away from historically democratic safeguards.

Allen’s text-based series of public interventions hail passersby to reflect on our collective political condition, with an emphasis on the forms of agency we embody in particular in times of crisis. Britto’s recent collages powerfully explore the lived experiences of people of color in the United States, which he draws from deeply invested relationships that emerge from his work a public school teacher and his mentorship of youth living in the New York City Housing Authority. The public aspect of each artist’s approach operates at different scales: Allen’s Interruptions are literally situated within the advertising surfaces in public spaces of circulation, whereas Britto’s collages and projections reflect on the experiences of the very youth he works with in public school and public housing. Bridging language and figure, the two artists create a potent dialogue that merges personal stories of resiliency with broader calls to action and solidarity.

Begun in 2017, Allen’s Interruptions series are real time interventions into the surfaces of street advertisements, temporarily installed for an incidental audience. Often destroyed within hours of installation, more than 370 unique interventions have been installed as part of this project. These works form a window into the United States’ social and political struggles since the first Trump presidency. His messages - calls for access to health care, environmental protection, and a ceasefire in Gaza, among others - take on new urgency as we enter a new presidential administration. Britto’s collages and projections from his NYCHA series hone in on individual experience, contrasting silhouettes of people with the architecture of New York City public housing, and the interior architecture of the gallery. The uneasy tension between these posturing figures and the spaces they inhabit is amplified by intricately cut and seamlessly collaged magazine advertisements. Together the artists push against the boundaries of the systems of circulation that define our everyday movements, questioning how we might resist the commodification that subsumes daily life, both on screen and in the built environment.

SEE THIS COUNTRY CLEARLY  builds on Allen and Britto’s recent exhibition at PS122 Gallery titled SEE YOUR COUNTRY CLEARLY, which functioned as space for reflection and hope leading up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The titles of both showsd refer to a speech by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Boy Interrupted: American Plunder and the Incomplete Life of Jordan Davis, which implores  the audience to educate themselves on the history, politics, and social conditions of life in the United States. Having closed the weekend after the election results came in, many visitors experienced the previous exhibition with a heightened sense of urgency, understanding a new sense of vulnerability across many cultural communities in New York City. This new iteration of the exhibition is distinct from the previous show at PS122 Gallery where each artist had a solo presention, and includes additional artworks by Britto and Allen, bringing their practices into more direct dialogue within Bronx Art Space’s gallery.

Jonathan Allen works in painting, collage, video, and performance. He holds a B.A. in Visual Arts / Art History from Columbia University, and in New York has exhibited at BRIC, Lu Magnus, PS122, Exit Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artists Space, Gitler & ____, Bravin Lee, FiveMyles, and Caren Golden, among others. He has participated in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)’s Workspace, Process Space, and Swing Space residency programs, the Bronx Museum of Art’s Artist in the Marketplace program, and has been awarded residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, Cill Rialaig in Ireland, Milvus Artistic Research Center in Sweden, and Blue Mountain Center. He is a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Chenven, Puffin, George Sugarman Foundations and Brooklyn Arts Council. Currently Allen has work on view at The Brooklyn Museum, in the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition. Interruptions, his ongoing series of political interventions in NYC can be viewed on Instagram @jonathanallenstudio. In total, over 370 unique interventions have been installed as part of this project; the complete series and other artworks can be viewed online at JonathanAllen.org

Michael Paul Britto works in digital photography, sculpture, collage and performance, and video. He is based in Bronx, NY. Britto will exhibit collages from his NYCHA series, contrasting silhouettes of people with the architecture of New York City public housing. The uneasy tension between these posturing figures and the spaces they inhabit is amplified by intricately cut and seamlessly collaged magazine advertisements. brittofied.com, @brittofied

Sara Reisman is a curator, educator, and writer based in New York City where, since 2021, she is Chief Curator at the National Academy of Design. From 2014 to 2021 she was Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and from 2008 to 2014, she was Director of New York City’s Percent for Art program at the Department of Cultural Affairs, where she managed more than 100 permanent public art commissions across New York City's five borough. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania and SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and since 2016, is on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Masters Program. Her curatorial and educational engagements have focused on socially engaged art, the history of exhibition making, public art, both temporary and permanent, artist books, and the intersections between art and activism. At the National Academy, she has co-curated numerous shows with Associate Curator Natalia Viera Salgado, including a two-part exhibition Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment currently on view through spring 2025.