New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture, curated by Jan Garden Castro and Eileen Jeng, opened at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs on Sunday, May 10, 2015 from 2:00-5:00 p.m. and remained on view through July 12, 2015. A color brochure with an essay by the curators has been published to accompany the exhibition.

The multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-national artists of the exhibition, Claudia Alvarez, Afruz Amighi, Rina Banerjee, Christian Ruiz Berman, Sanford Biggers, Cui Fei, Leonardo Drew, Rashawn Griffin, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Wenda Gu, Ginny Huo, Tamiko Kawata, Iván Navarro & Courtney Smith, Kambui Olujimi, Cecilia Paredes, Soo Sunny Park, Yinka Shonibare, Nari Ward, and Ishmael Randall Weeks, are changing and expanding the vocabulary and agendas of the art world by injecting ideas from their unique world cultures and experiences. These proactive artists utilize materials and imagery in innovative ways that address themes including race, gender, ritual, craft, and language. The materials often challenge existing associations and subvert expectations. They break down barriers to create new mythologies. Their works conflate the local and global, past and present, fact and fiction. These artists are transcending the limits of individual cultures.

In New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture, beauty, craft, and aesthetics become the handmaidens of truth—to expose dilemmas, problems, and histories that can be ugly, repressed, and hidden. The artists are consciously reshaping dilemmas into objects of contemplation. They—along with many other artists whose works could easily have fit in this exhibition— are vernacular cosmopolitans of a kind, moving in-between cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have a prior existence within the discrete world of any single culture or language. Their works are inclusive, revelatory, and in search of common grounds and associations. The works trigger a conversation with viewers and with each other—to propose positive interventions from which we can gain courage and new ideas.

Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs is a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit organization that presents independently-curated exhibitions of contemporary art. Working with curators, writers, and art historians, DGCP aims to illuminate and deepen the public’s understanding and appreciation of issues and trends in contemporary art. Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (closed Tuesday and Wednesday), and by appointment.