NEW YORK, NY.- Working across video, painting, and performance, Cheryl Donegan (b. 1962) explores the production and consumption of images in mass culture, middlebrow design, and art history. Donegan’s New Museum residency and exhibition, presented as part of the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY, tackle the ways and means by which our connections to the past are produced, fabricated, and renewed, particularly in fashion and art history. The exhibition comprises works from throughout Donegan’s career, bringing together key projects with others that represent new, though related, directions in her practice. “Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials” is on view from January 20 to April 10, 2016 in the Museum’s Fifth Floor gallery.

In her performance and video work spanning from the early ’90s to the early ’00s, Donegan often used her body as an apparatus for mark-making, parodying conventions of commercials and music videos while considering the politics of self-representation. Over the last decade, she has continued her exploration of the mediated image and her interests in surface, compressed space, and the mark’s indexical relation to the body in paintings and sculptures produced in her studio and in videos distributed on social media.

As part of the exhibition, the Museum’s Fifth Floor Resource Center features a major new installation by Donegan, titled “Concept Store,” that displays garments, textiles, objects, videos, and works on paper she has created, alongside elements she has sourced from websites such as eBay and Vine. In these and other works, the artist engages in a process she calls “refashioning the readymade” by alluding to longer histories of repurposing in both art and culture. As part of her residency, Donegan will premiere “EXTRA LAYER,” a collection of outerwear commissioned by the New Museum and produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me at a fashion show that will take place in the New Museum’s Sky Room on Thursday, April 7, 2016. Donegan will engage high school students from the Museum’s Experimental Study Program (ESP) in the show.

The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, with Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator. The “Concept Store” installation is curated by Burton, with O’Keeffe and Alicia Ritson, Research Fellow.