The New Generation by Bjarne Melgaard

Hell is Where I Die. Photo: Jessie Stead, January 2014.

Haribo: Haribo is a band made up of the artists Raul de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple. Their shows are maximally destructive, sloppily straddling art and performance in such a way that gives hope to an anti-commercial union of the two in our post-Lady Gaga era. “They are a reminder of how some people just can’t stop being compulsively creative, and they are good at it in a really kind of bad way that gives a fresh feel to a rather dying art landscape called New York.”

Pena & Jo (the Art of Comfort). Image courtesy of the artist.

Raul de Nieves: Whether painstakingly adorning impossibly crystalline women’s shoes (with more crystals), or eviscerating the stage or some manifestation of himself in an unruly performance, Raul de Nieves is squarely on his own path, developing a lived vocabulary of objects and events that propose questions about identity, glamour, pleasure, and chaos. “The idea of the shiny object and making things for boys that look like they’re done for girls makes Raul one of the most intense players of gender and feminine motions versus masculine gestures in New York today.”