Jimmy Raskin's Curio Shop at Miguel Abreu Gallery

Miguel Abreu Gallery at 88 Eldridge Street in Chinatown presents Jimmy Raskin's Curio Shop, running November 6 through December 23, 2026. It is Raskin's sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Raskin was born in Los Angeles in 1970 and lives and works in New York. He began as a poet but stopped writing poetry at nineteen. Since then he has set out to discover, and give form to, the conditions under which what he calls "the Poem" might remain an achievable aim in present cultural circumstances. His means are a theatrical, multimedia universe in which writing mixes freely with sculpture and with props made for lecture-performances. Collages typically sit beside videos, cartoons and diagrams that lay out the essential existential problems facing a central figure, the "Poet Pure."

The work made since 1989 keeps to remarkably consistent subject matter and a restricted set of visual motifs. Together they describe a dualistic cosmology. On one side stands the "Spirit of the restless Poet," governed by the mode of "Inseparability." On the other is "Critical Distance," governed by "Simultaneity," which Raskin calls "Infinite Juxtaposition" and associates with the figure of the "Documentarian." In effect, modes of expression are his medium.

His sources are few but pursued with intensity and in idiosyncratic ways. Roland Barthes's "rustle of language" recurs, and whole exhibitions have been devoted to single poems by Arthur Rimbaud, such as "Vowels" and "The Drunken Boat." His major book, The Prologue, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree (2005), takes up Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Raskin separates the Poet from the Critic rigorously because he is drawn to their possible, though uneasy, fusion, and he is alert to the danger of one mode killing the other. His work argues that any piece worthy of the name, any potential Poem, has to stage both.

Raskin graduated from CalArts and has shown and staged lecture-performances internationally since the mid-1990s, at venues including MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, Centre Pompidou, the Swiss Institute in Paris and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. He took part in Performa in 2009 and 2013. His previous show at the gallery, Cliché Garden, was held in 2024.