Cheryl was a four-member, semi-anonymous, cat-masked artist collective based in Brooklyn, New York, known for its video art, museum installations, participatory events and dance parties. Cheryl originated in July 2008 in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Since then, Cheryl regularly produced thematic art/performance/dance events and installations in New York and in Europe until 2018, when they went on hiatus. They returned with two parties at Rubulad in 2024. No future events are scheduled at this time.
Cheryl was best known for its thematic video work, often paired with an upcoming event of the same theme. Cheryl's work has been showcased through various installations and events with the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Palazzo Strozzi, the Jewish Museum (New York), and the Bruce High Quality Foundation among others.
Cheryl has been featured in/on The New York Times , New York magazine, The New York Observer , Out magazine, V , W , Time Out , Black Book magazine, The Village Voice , Flavor magazine (Paris), Glamour (France), NBC and RAI among other outlets.
Cheryl is an artist collective that explores the themes of mortality, mania, the feline-human connection, the limits of shoulders, the flammability of dollar-store hair extensions, and the staining power of fake blood. Through themes ranging from topical to bizarre, the CHERYLs revel in the joyous power of dance-induced psychosis/euphoria. Cheryl has been bringing its particular brand of FRESHMAGICK to New York City since colonial times, and has since acquired a dedicated cult following and media attention for over-the-top happenings involving outrageous costumes, exuberant dance moves, and participatory dance floor suicide.
The four elements of CHERYL are fake blood, glitter, shoulder pads, and hair extensions.
MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art institution at 22-01 Jackson Avenue in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens in New York City, United States. In addition to its exhibitions, the institution organizes the Sunday Sessions performance series, the Warm Up summer music series, and the Young Architects Program with the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA PS1 has been affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art since January 2000 and, as of 2013, attracts about 200,000 visitors a year.
Manuel Parrish is an American songwriter, vocalist and producer. He, along with artists such as Yellow Magic Orchestra, Kraftwerk, Art of Noise, Arthur Baker, Afrika Bambaataa, John Robie, Jellybean Benitez, Lotti Golden, Richard Scher and Aldo Marin, helped create and define electro in the early 1980s.
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly arts, culture, and politics journal. Bui was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014. In 2015, The New York Observer called him a "ringmaster" of the "Kings County art world." Bui was the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. Wright graduated from West Virginia University before coming to New York. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.
Alanna Heiss is the Founder and Director of Clocktower Productions, a non profit arts organization, online radio station, and program partnership with six cultural institutions in three boroughs in New York. She founded The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc. in 1971, an organization focused on using abandoned and underutilized New York City buildings for art exhibitions and artists' studios, of which P.S.1 was a part. She served as the director of P.S.1 and its later incarnation, the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from its founding in 1976 until her retirement in 2008. She is recognized as one of the originators of the alternative space movement.
Art International Radio was an online, non-profit, cultural Internet radio station and home to the Clocktower Gallery, a historic New York City alternative exhibition space. Art International Radio was directed by Alanna Heiss, the founder and former Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens.
Klaus Biesenbach is a German-American curator and museum director. He is the Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Berggruen Museum and Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, as well as the berlin modern under construction.
a.a.s is a British art group that uses performance, installation, video, participatory art and Ritual in its practice.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Florian Idenburg is a Dutch architect and co-founder of the award-winning architectural design firm SO – IL in New York City.
A. L. Steiner is an American multimedia artist, author and educator, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her solo and collaborative art projects use constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, and performance. Steiner's art incorporates queer and eco-feminist elements. She is a collective member of the musical group Chicks on Speed; and, along with Nicole Eisenman, is a co-curator/co-founder of Ridykeulous, a curatorial project that encourages the exhibitions of queer and feminist art.
Julianne Swartz is a New York-based artist. She is known for immersive installations, architectural interventions and sculptures that bring sound, optics and kinetics into play to create alternative, multisensory experiences. She uses utilitarian materials to warp, reshape or deepen perception, generating unexpected, ephemeral and participatory experiences out of common situations. Critics suggest that her work inhabits liminal areas, both literally and conceptually, bridging the perceptible and evanescent, public and private, visual and embodied, affective and technical. Art in America critic Peter R. Kalb wrote, "Swartz appeals to the senses and emotions with a quiet lyricism, using unassuming materials and marshaling grand forces like wind and magnetism" to offer "a thoughtful excursion into sound, sight and psyche."
Valerie Hegarty is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, trompe l’oeil states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances. Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets, romantic conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation. Sculpture critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay."
Laura Parker is an American conceptual, installation, and social practice artist. She is best known for her participatory installations and large scale drawings that address themes of food, agriculture, and soil, which have played a role in the back-to-the-land movement, food-to-table movement, and Locavore movement in California. Her participatory art installations and philosophy on soil, terroir, and locality have influenced Michelan star restaurants, wineries, and celebrity cookbooks, including Insalata’s Restaurant in San Anselmo and Robert Mondavi Winery and chef Robert Reynolds.
Glasslands Gallery was a music venue, dance club, and art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Glasslands was founded by Brooke Baxter and Rolyn Hu in 2006, as a relocation of Baxter's earlier art space in the same building, Glass House Gallery. Hu and Baxter held the lease on the Glasslands space until 2012 when they made a turn-key sale to Rami Haykal and Jake Rosenthal of PopGun presents, who had been managing bookings since 2009, and day-to-day operations since 2010. PopGun owned the business and lease for two years until the venue was displaced to be converted into Vice Media‘s office headquarters. As a concert venue, Glasslands was one of the longest-running of several 2000s independent creative venue spaces in the vicinity of the Williamsburg waterfront, which included 285 KENT, Death By Audio, Secret Project Robot, Monster Island Basement, B.P.M., Live With Animals Gallery, the Rock Star Bar, and many others.
Shaun El C. Leonardo is an American artist and performer best known for his work exploring the relationships between masculinity, sports, race, and culture.
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born American visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Her paintings, sculptures and installations explore the themes of social injustice and cultural invisibility. She draws on the folk traditions of the Americas, including their rituals, music, dance and art.
Robert Yasuda is an American abstract painter, most known for contemplative, atmospheric works that straddle painting, sculpture and architecture. He first attracted wide attention in the 1970s for large wall works merging painting and installation art, mounted at MoMA PS1, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Since the 1990s, he has focused on paintings that disrupt conventional formats using hand-carved wood panels and custom framing elements, upon which he builds multi-layered iridescent surfaces that respond dynamically to shifting conditions of light, time and vantage. Reviewing this later work, ARTnews critic Barbara MacAdam described Yasuda as a "romantic minimalist" whose paintings present an intangible, fleeting reality that is nonetheless referential, showing his roots in their construction, shifting tones and titles.
Susan Kaprov is an American multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans the fields of photography, painting, graphic design, and installation art.
Taja Cheek, known professionally as L'Rain, is an American experimentalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator known primarily as the lead vocalist and songwriter of her eponymous band. L'Rain has been recognized for experimental music that draws on a vast number of traditions and genres in a practice and aesthetic Cheek calls "approaching songness".