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Hard Return: Nao Bustamante

A speculum is haunting your OB-GYN. Bloom battled the patriarchal spirits of nineteenth-century gynecology to clear a path to a new achievement in feminist design, a journey into the utopian horizon that performance artist Nao Bustamante calls the “vaginal imaginary.” 

With this critical investigation into the history of science, Bustamante’s work questions how power inheres in the tools and practices that contour the nature, meaning, and experience of care—and of our own bodies. Bloom featured original video works, an array of objects related to the artist’s research, and live performances featuring Bustamante, composer and Reiki healing expert Pamela Martinez, and Purchase student actors and musicians.


Over the course of nine weeks from February through May, Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment will transform the Neuberger Museum of Art into a site of collaboration, investigation, and performance art. Nine artists have been commissioned to create diverse, participatory, durational week-long projects that experiment with a sense of being alive in this moment while probing the influence of history on the present, proposing different ways of shaping and understanding community.

Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment
is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and co-curated by Purchase College faculty members Kate Gilmore, a renowned performance artist, and Jonah Westerman, an art historian who specializes in performance art.

Generous financial support for this exhibition has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Purchase College Foundation. Additional support of the student participation in Hard Return has been provided by Ivan Bart & Grant Greenberg and Ava & Paul Zukowsky.