The Bronx Museum

THE SEVENTH AIM BIENNIAL OPEN HOUSE:
EXHIBITING ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION
Saturday, April 18  •  3:30 – 5:00 PM
With AIM Artists Hedwig Brouckaert, Jordan Cruz, Juyon Lee, & Motohiro Takeda; Moderated by Nell Klugman, Co-Curator of The Seventh AIIM Biennial
3:30 – 5:00 PM • In the Lobby
For All Ages • Optional RSVP
Drop-Ins Welcome! 

This Conversation is part of The Seventh AIM Biennial Open House, featuring a variety of activities led by artists currently exhibiting work at The Bronx Museum!

You are welcome to participate in all activities or come by for a particular part of the open house. An RSVP is not required to attend, but it helps us know how many people to expect, so we appreciate it if you do!

The artists describe this program, which they’ve titled “Tender Monuments,” as follows: This is a conversation with four AIM artists whose practices converge around personal, communal, and environmental grief, moderated by curator Nell Klugman.

Working across glass, wax, organic matter, ceramics, and mass consumer debris, the four artists transform materials to embody memory while acknowledging its fragility. Objects associated with permanence become vulnerable through the process of melting, burning, and breaking, while fleeting experiences such as conversation, digital interaction, seasonal change, and everyday ritual are given physical form.

The discussion centers on material transformation and commemoration: How do artists decide what to preserve, archive, or surrender? What does it mean to make intimate histories public? How does material act as a reliquary or a space of transformation?

By collapsing boundaries between private mourning and collective experience, Brouckaert, Cruz, Lee, and Takeda consider how impermanent materials can bear enduring meaning, and how seemingly stable materials reveal their own instability. Together, they ask how art can memorialize loss without fixing it in place, and how care lies not only in preservation, but in allowing change.