Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment

Kate Gilmore and Jonah Westerman

Generous financial support for this exhibition was 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 was provided by Ivan Bart & Grant Greenberg and Ava & Paul Zukowsky.

Over the course of Spring Semester 2023, nine performance artists created works that posed fundamental questions about art and life. The projects experimented with a sense of being alive in this moment, probing the influence of history on our present and proposing different ways of shaping and understanding community—from the intimate experience of one-to-one relationships to attempts to see humanity at planetary scale.

Hard Return promoted modes of artistic activity that the pandemic made impossible for a while and explored the museum as a space of community, reflection, and support.