Hunter East Harlem Gallery at Hunter College to Open 'If You Leave Me Can I Come Too?'

Hunter East Harlem Gallery at Hunter College is pleased to present the exhibition; If You Leave Me Can I Come Too? The group exhibition showcases artwork that reveals the power and beauty arising from the acknowledgement of death. The show features 12 international contemporary artists working in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, installation, and video.

The exhibition draws its title, If You Leave Me Can I Come Too?, from a painting by exhibiting artist Friedrich Kunath. Seen as a question, the exhibition seeks to expose, either directly or symbolically, a prompt for conversation around the particularly taboo subject of death in contemporary society. The exhibition vision sidesteps the funerary, scientific, and darker aspects often associated with death in favor of showcasing the powerful, communal, and human qualities that are also inherent to the passing of life.

How do individuals and societies revolve around the common denominator of death -- something experienced by all living? The universality of the circumstances that surround the passing of life present a variety of themes that are common among the selected artists. Some of the works in this exhibition are the result of the artists' meditation on their own mortality as seen in the title painting by Friedrich Kunath, while others are an observation on greater societal influences and communities around death, like Keith Haring's famous Crack Is Wack mural and a new gallery rendition created from the #crackiswack hashtag. Artist Jean Seestadt's participation in the show draws from her time as an artist resident at the Carter Burden Center, a senior citizen center located in East Harlem, where she collected oral histories and built relationships with the community and senior artists. Some works, like Sara Cwynar's photograph and Brad Kahlhamer's eclectic sculptures, construct mementos inspired by history, past civilizations, and religious traditions and others are based solely on site-specific circumstances, as seen in Javier Castro's video of Havana graveyard workers. Yet overall, the works in unison bring together a community of the living -- both physical and theoretical. The exhibition is threaded with examples of artists unpacking the complexities of life informed by death in an attempt to find some sort of resolution for themselves and those around all of us.

This project will be supplemented by a full schedule of interdisciplinary public programming with Hunter College and will be open to the public. For further details, visit http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/eastharlem-artgallery for further details on programming.