Haverford College

THE FUTURE OF NEXT WEDNESDAY NIGHT

Douglas Crimp and Shana Cohen-Mungan '24

May 2-May 13, 2024

VCAM Exhibition Wall

Opening: Thursday, May 2, 4:30pm

VCAM Exhibition Wall

A plan for next Wednesday night seems unremarkable. A note of minor importance. But any plan, whether five-year or weekly, is an act of hope. Written for a dinner with Oscar, to call Linda, about a protest, or scrawled in illegible script, plans are quotidian gestures that hold social worlds together. For people whose lives global racial capitalism imperils, a plan can be an aperture—opening possibilities for survival.

The Future of Next Wednesday Night explores the stakes of insisting on a temporality of possibility amidst mass death in Shana Cohen-Mungan’s archival collaboration with late AIDS activist and queer theorist Douglas Crimp. In 1977, Crimp bought his first weekly planner, which he used as a tool to devise social connectivity. The mundane act became radical when the AIDS crisis began obliterating his queer relational network. This exhibition features collage, drawing, sewing, staining, and a video from Cohen-Mungan’s experiments with a 2024 Week-At-A-Glance planner. The works rub along and against the calendar grid to open a sense of the mundane texture of queer planning as an aesthetic practice of survival.

Supported by the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and VCAM's Malcolm Baldwin 1962 Fund.