GHENT, NY.- Art Omi presents three major projects this fall: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio's first East Coast outdoor installation examining colonial histories through botanical extraction, YATTA's immersive exploration of Black wandering and West African musical heritage, and Harold Stevenson's first New York institutional solo exhibition, celebrating four decades of fearless figurative work.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio: Invernadero herido (para Huerta)
Opening: Saturday, October 11, 3–5:30 PM
Sculpture & Architecture Park

This autumn, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio premieres Invernadero herido (para Huerta) [Wounded greenhouse (for Huerta)] (2025), a new commission by Art Omi and his first outdoor installation on the East Coast, centered around the Wardian case, a nineteenth-century device of colonial extraction that became the basis for the Crystal Palace in London. This apparatus was used to transport living plants from Central and South America to European collectors, and later became used as a model for the use of solitary confinement in hospitals and prisons. The glass enclosure points to entanglements between human and nonhuman histories and lives.

Aparicio examines colonial histories of materials linked to pre-Hispanic cultures in Central America, particularly his family’s homeland of El Salvador. Tracing the cultural and technological knowledge embedded in historical uses of rubber, amber, and tree bark, his work lingers on materials with medicinal properties that are mined by corporations today. This project continues his exploration of migration and modes of survival.

Curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Senior Curator

YATTA
Opening: November 15, 3–5 PM
Newmark Gallery

Art Omi presents a solo exhibition with YATTA on view from November 15, 2025 through February 1, 2026. An immersive installation comprising video, sound, digital collage, and a series of original interviews, the exhibition will reimagine the pastoral as a site of reckoning, rather than escape. The exhibition examines a Romantic, colonial notion of nature exploration and leisure that YATTA names “the white wander.” For YATTA, the white wander is “unburdened, meadow, Walden, Thoreau. White wander scores earth music. Earth music is Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, and Iron and Wine—music that reaches towards a rootedness that, I think, can only be found in a real, real way, on the continent of Africa.” Using their music as a tool for worldbuilding, YATTA creates an expanded framework for those historically excluded from access to an unburdened relationship to the earth full of ease, leisure, and the right to wander.

The exhibition is rooted in the music of renowned Sierra Leonean guitarist S. E. Rogie, a pioneer of Palm Wine music and YATTA’s great uncle. Palm Wine music, a hybrid of Portuguese fingerpicking and traditional West African folk, has informed the music of indie bands such as Vampire Weekend, Iron and Wine, and more. Inspired by their research into the connections between these sounds and their reflections on nature culture, YATTA seeks to posit West African guitar music and Black wandering as “a balm for the psychic wounds” of the transatlantic slave trade and the fraught relationship that Black people have had to land in the United States as a result of forced migration and labor.

Curated by Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant

Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy
June 28–October 26, 2025
Newmark Gallery

Art Omi presents Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy, the late artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York, on view from June 28 to October 26, 2025. The exhibition will trace forty years of Stevenson’s exploration of the body as an expanded field across painting, drawing, and writing. In the pre-Stonewall era, Stevenson’s unflinching commitment to the male nude led to trouble: a jail sentence for his gallerist, Iris Clert, in 1962; his work’s removal from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1963; and, in response to an Artforum feature on his work in 1966, a published letter of complaint excoriating the magazine for promoting such “contemporary trash and moral depravity” in its pages.

Stevenson’s career was filled with near breaks. He was invited to participate in the 1963 exhibition Six Painters and the Object at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but when curator Lawrence Alloway saw a photograph of his painting The New Adam, he cut the work and replaced Stevenson with Robert Rauschenberg. Stevenson had painted the thirty-nine-by-eight-foot nude in modeling sessions with actor Sal Mineo, his lover (though started as an homage to another lover, Lord Timothy Willoughby, who mysteriously disappeared at sea); Alloway informed him the Guggenheim could not exhibit “a nude with a phallus the size of a man.” Stevenson, in turn, used Alloway’s rejection letter in press materials while touring the painting across Europe. That same year, the artist installed a forty-foot painting of another lover, matador El Cordobés, atop the Eiffel Tower; it caused such traffic bottlenecks that he was forced to take it down after less than a week.

Much of Stevenson’s life was marked by waiting: for critics to contend with his work, for the American art world to shed its puritanism; for overdue checks to arrive. In 1999, at age seventy, he wrote that he was shocked to find these disappointments “less real than my routine fantasy…I am determined to go on living that fantasy a lot longer.” After all, he wrote, “Fantasy is what art is made from.”

Near the end of his life, Stevenson spent more than two years waiting for the Guggenheim to decide if they would acquire The New Adam, the painting they had rejected decades earlier. Grace Glueck had trashed the work in her New York Observer review of his exhibition at Mitchell Algus Gallery in 1992. Stevenson published a scathing response, titled “SoHo Rats”: “She will not be around when I show again in 30 more years, but by then there may be a critic unprejudiced toward the message of nobility and spirit The New Adam hopes to offer.” A little past Stevenson’s thirty-year prediction, his work returns to New York with a bang this year.

Curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Senior Curator, with Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant