The Jason Rhoades Variety Show

To mark the exhibition finalé of ‘Jason Rhoades. DRIVE II’ at Hauser & Wirth 22^nd Street, we are thrilled to host ‘The Jason Rhoades Variety Show.’ Special guests will include performer Morgan Bassichis, artist Alex Da Corte, curator Dr. Adrienne Edwards and art historian David Lewis, alongside exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner. The show will take place in the amphitheater at the gallery’s 18^th Street location in Chelsea.

The Variety Show will consist of short, snappy presentations on Rhoades-adjacent topics: 

Dr. Adrienne Edwards
on Power 106 FM Radio in Los Angeles

David Lewis
on Francis Picabia and Race cars

Alex Da Corte
on Car Culture (and possibly ‘Brat’ culture, after the album by Charli XCX)

Morgan Bassichis
reading from Charles Mee’s play ‘Under Construction’ inspired by Jason Rhoades

Ingrid Schaffner
reading from the artist’s book ‘Volume A Rhoades Referenz’ and introducing ‘Illastrations,’ a new facsimile publication of drawings by Rhoades.

This event is free; however, reservations are required. 
Click here to register. 

About ‘Jason Rhoades. DRIVE II’
For Jason Rhoades, the car was a vehicle of artistic pursuit and ambition. Starting 5 September, Hauser & Wirth New York will present a major exhibition of his ‘Car Projects,’ including a fleet of different makes of readymade car sculptures. The installation will also feature a monumental work from 2000 named in tribute to the dada modernist and car collector Francis Picabia. ‘DRIVE II’ is concurrent with the yearlong exploration of Rhoades’ art and car culture taking place at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles. 

‘I spend hours going to my studio, so I established this extension of my studio, or rather this second space, in my Caprice.’ – Jason Rhoades

About Morgan Bassichis
Morgan Bassichis is a comedian, writer, and musician who has been called 'a tall child, or, well, a big bird' by The Nation and 'fiercely hilarious' by The New Yorker. Their recent shows include 'Can I Be Frank?' (La MaMa, June 2024), about the performance artist Frank Maya, and 'A Crowded Field' (Abrons Arts Center, April 2023), which explored the use and abuse of Jewish holidays by Zionism. Morgan's performances have been presented by Creative Time, the Kitchen, the New Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum. Their museum exhibition 'More Little Ditties' was presented by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023. They co-edited with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky the young adult anti-zionist guidebook, 'Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah' (Wendy's Subway, 2023). Their book of to do lists, 'The Odd Years', was published by Wendy's Subway in 2020. Morgan also edited and wrote the introduction to Nightboat Books' 2019 reprint of 'The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions,' written by Larry Mitchell and illustrated by Ned Asta. They have released two albums: 'March is for Marches' with Ethan Philbrick (Triple Canopy, 2019) and 'More Protest Songs! Live From St. Mark’s Church' (2018).

About Alex Da Corte
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ) is a Venezuelan-American artist. Institutional exhibition highlights include the 20-year retrospective 'Mr. Remember' at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2022–23) and the video survey 'Fresh Hell' at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2023); the Whitney Biennial 'Quiet as It’s Kept' (2022); the Roof Garden Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); the Biennale di Venezia 'May You Live in Interesting Times', Venice (2019); the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2019); and solo exhibitions at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Secession, Vienna (2016); Art + Practice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2015); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with Jayson Musson). Recent longform critical writing include catalogue essays for the international touring exhibitions 'Marisol: A Retrospective and Ellsworth Kelly at 100'. In March 2025, The Modern, Fort Worth, will mount 'The Whale', a large-scale survey of his paintings. In 2026, with the Whitney Museum’s Meg Onli and Scott Rothkopf, Da Corte will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years. Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

About Dr. Adrienne Edwards
Dr. Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She co-curated the 2022 Whitney Biennial and was president of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale. She is currently organizing an exhibition and performances, and editing a catalogue on the choreographer Alvin Ailey that opens at the Whitney in September 2024.

Previously, she served as curator of Performa in New York and as curator at large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to over fifty interdisciplinary performance and moving image commissions, Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the exhibition and catalogue “Blackness in Abstraction” hosted at Pace Gallery, New York (2016); the traveling exhibition and catalogue “Jason Moran” at Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise,” a series of performances based on a text cowritten by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney (2020); Dave McKenzie’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, “The Story I Tell Myself,” and its pendant performance commission, “Disturbing the View,” at the Whitney (2021); the performance collective My Barbarian’s twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue at the Whitney (2021–22); and Every Ocean Hughes's “Alive Side,” a four-part project including two performance commissions, video installation, exhibition, and a catalogue, co-published with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, at the Whitney (2023). She was part of the Whitney’s core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. Edwards has taught art history, visual studies, and dance studies at New York University, the New School, and the CUNY Graduate Center.

About David Lewis
David Lewis is a senior director, as of September 2024, at Hauser & Wirth. He comes to Hauser & Wirth after having run his own eponymous gallery for over a decade, with a first location on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side and a subsequent space on Walker Street in Tribeca. His gallery attracted critical praise for its rigorous program focused equally on solo presentations showcasing emerging artists and incisive theory-driven group exhibitions, and for revising the canon via thoughtful attention to under-recognized older artists and historical figures. Prominent among those Lewis has championed are pioneering feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson (1933 – 2021) and celebrated Alabama-based expressionist painter and sculptor Thornton Dial (1928 – 2016).

Lewis is widely admired for his scholarly and sensitive approach to modern and contemporary cultural narratives, and his fresh interpretations of them. For example, with the exhibition ‘Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg,’ Lewis was first to show Dial, an autodidact and product of the Jim Crow South, in context with famous art titans, proposing the trio as true peers. A specialist in the oeuvre of Francis Picabia (1879 – 1953), Lewis presented ‘Everyone Loves Picabia’ in 2023. Effectively recapping the conversations that had informed his gallery’s ethos and programming over the years, this show promulgated the value of seeking and sharing new connections between emerging and historical art.

Before opening the gallery in 2013, David Lewis lived and worked in Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY, on the theoretical challenges posed by the protean and seemingly paradoxical career of Francis Picabia, titled ‘Francis Picabia and the Problem of Nihilism.’ While in Europe, he contributed regularly to prominent international art magazines such as Artfoum and Frieze, and published extensively, including essays on Philip Guston, Henri Matisse, and Sturtevant, among many others.

About Ingrid Schaffner
Internationally admired as a curator in the field of contemporary art, Schaffner is known for her generative and original scholarship focused on themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms. Her 2013 exhibition ‘Jason Rhoades, Four Roads’ was the first American museum presentation of the sculptor’s work; organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, it was accompanied by a catalogue publication (Prestel) and traveled internationally. Schaffner is the curator of the 2018 Carnegie International, which featured major installations by El Anatsui, Alex Da Corte, Zoe Leonard, Postcommodity and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. Having most recently served as curator at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, she joined Hauser & Wirth as Senior Curatorial Director in 2023.