On view September 12–December 6, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, September 12, 5:00–7:00 PM
Curated by Lydia McCarthy
Featuring David Kennedy Cutler, Wayne Koestenbaum, Kalup Linzy, André Marcel Pagán, Jonathan Torres, Alan Turner, and Jake Brush.
Can you be willingly humiliated? A kind of auto-humiliation? Or does participation in your own humiliation nullify it? These seven artists expose themselves willingly, opening up versions of themselves in video, painting, photography, and sculpture.
To be humiliated is to be made humble, to be reminded of your humanity through its attempted disavowal. Private acts, vulnerabilities, hidden thoughts, and feelings can lead to humiliation when made visible within the context of contemporary normative culture, engendering shame. By taking agency in the act of humiliation, repeating what originally led to a feeling of separateness and otherness, liberation from shame feels possible. Survival of the experience can create a deeper resiliency and sense of empowerment.
Humiliation becomes riskier in a tightly controlled society, with higher stakes for those who dare to offer themselves up for ridicule. For masculine bodies it becomes an even bolder statement, an act of resistance to a culture obsessed with protecting masculinity’s image. To admit fallibility, to reveal weakness and the reality of humanness in masculinity threatens the illusory fabric that protects those in power. By letting it all hang out, there is an admission that we cannot be saved by saving face.
Art making contains an inherent potential to be humiliated. Art can reveal something deep, unutterable, with traces of the unconscious emerging through the process in unpredictable ways. Placing it on display and at the mercy of the other creates the conditions for humiliation; it requires a witness. The viewer becomes complicit in the act, completing the loop. Each of these artists engages in a kind of auto-exposure, opening themselves up to humiliation.
Image: Jonathan Torres, Mugshot, 2025. Oil on linen, 48 × 38 in.