LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- Whitney Claflin’s (American, b. 1983) first solo museum exhibition, I was wearing this when you met me, features a focused selection of works tracing her distinctive approach to painting and ongoing engagement with notions of infatuation, misrecognition, and waywardness. On view from March 27 through August 25, 2025, the exhibition includes over twenty new and recent paintings, which careen between subjects and styles ranging from lyrical abstractions and breezy sketches to snippets of text, renditions of logos, and scraps of mass-produced textiles.
Following the associative logic of a mixtape or poem, they express transient states of intensity. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also includes drawing, photography, video, and sculptural interventions, highlighting Claflin’s multifaceted approach.
With varying degrees of legibility, Claflin embeds a plethora of references and subcultural symbols within her works, from nods to 1970s flower-power paraphernalia, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and beloved New York bars, to Pavement lyrics. The late-90s DIY scene of her teens in Providence, Rhode Island, forms a touchstone of Claflin’s practice, which channels its dissonant lo-fi energy while reflecting on the increasing rarity of the conditions making such radical and communal projects possible. Interests in the capriciousness of trend cycles and the binding effects of branding inform her work. The logo for Dickies jeans appears in one painting, while in Venice Beach (2011–22), among the earliest works in the show, Claflin recycles the sign she used to advertise the hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark “vases” (empty wine bottles) she sold for a period on the boardwalks of Venice Beach. In other works, insignias become springboards for abstraction, as in Die Eisdealier (2024), in which an icecream cone dissolves into a storm of gestural marks.
The frenetic tempo and texture of New York City, where Claflin has lived for fifteen years, suffuses her work. The city surfaces in references to signs, stores, and streetscapes: drippy brushwork mimics the palimpsest of a building’s wall, while a price sticker from Academy Records invokes the longstanding New York record store, which has persisted despite shifting economic odds and rising rents. The photograph Union (2022), printed on a sheet of Avery® shipping labels, captures a tag scrawled on the side of a mailbox; it reads “Cat Marnell,” the name of New York ‘it-girl’ blogger, with the “a” transformed into an anarchy symbol. Claflin’s works capture the uneasiness of cultural tipping points, in which relations between center and periphery, norm and exception, are rearranged or flattened.
The exhibition also features a suite of drawings depicting leftover items such as yogurt cups, receipts, and matchbooks made in conjunction with Claflin’s book of poetry Food and Spirits (2022). The residues and trimmings of daily life—such as Juul pods, decals, SIM cards, and make-up—festoon many of her surfaces. She twists modes of adornment typically coded as feminine or sweet into gestures of defiance or armoring. In Cinema (2024), two nails tack a rhinestone bracelet to the edge of a canvas upon which dark brushstrokes frame a vacant, glowing, yellow center. Claflin’s works posture as discrete scrims across which images transform and dissolve, analogues for the process of negotiating selfhood within a universe that teems with affinities, intoxications, and distastes.
Whitney Claflin (b. 1983, Providence, RI) lives and works in New York. Select solo and two-person exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2024, 2020); Drei, Cologne (2024, 2020); Haus Erholung, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2024); Drei (2022); and Real Fine Arts, New York (2017, 2014, 2010). Select recent group exhibitions include Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (2024); G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig (2023); Layr, Vienna (2023); Office Baroque, Antwerp (2023); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2022); Sandy Brown, Berlin (2021); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2020); Galerie Buchholz, New York (2019); Croy Nielsen, Vienna (2018); and Greene Naftali, New York (2018).
Whitney Claflin: I was wearing this when you met me is organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
