Re: Turning
curated by P! Krishnamurthy / Department of Transformation
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at The New School
Checklist link
March 30th – April 19th, 2025
Opening: Sunday March 30th, 5-8pm
Curator walk through: Friday April 4th, 5pm
Dear dear Kevin Eubanks,
How are you? We met years ago after a show of yours in NYC. More recently, while curating the Parsons Fine Arts 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition, I’ve returned to listening to your 1992 song “Turning Point.” It still leaves my heart pounding—calculated at times and unforeseeable at others. The melody, folding back upon itself at the song’s close, time rewinding for a moment before launching forward again…
Working on this MFA show, I’ve recognized your singular song as an apt model for the restless, wide-ranging creative path. Our cohort of emerging artists—Andrew Samuel Harrison, Danielle Sargeant, Faith Henderson, Felisa Nguyen, Guangyuan (Sam) Xing, Hannah Bang, Jinghui Chen, Qasim Ali Hussain, Shangari Mwashighadi, Sona Lee, Spencer Strauss, Sumaiya Saiyed, Teresa Olds, and Yeabsera Tabb—are right in the thick of it, exploring the cyclical transformations of artistic practice together.
Re: Turning lives and breathes in this uncertain space between past and future, repetition and reinvention. The artworks exist in flux: even when they appear still, they mirror acts of turning. Think of re-turning—to past ideas, to unresolved gestures, to critical influences, to the moments when meaning bends and reshapes itself.
Across fourteen distinctly different artistic approaches, common connections arise: between memories and materials, movements and multiplicities. Like time, artistic practice rarely moves in a straight line. It doubles back, speeds up, lags, changes its mind, swerves. Are these repetitions an undoing or a deepening? Is a turn breaking from the past or cycling back towards it? What does it mean to return even while arriving at an unfamiliar destination? Will (re)turns that appear today as accidents reveal themselves later as necessary steps?
I don’t have the answers, Kevin. But I hope that, like your brilliant, timely tune, Re: Turning keeps pointing towards somewhere else. As a dear friend often reminds me, life and art are “never straight, always forward.” I’m looking forward to what’s yet ahead.
Warmest,
P! Krishnamurthy
New York, March 2025