Marni Kotak
America on the Dark Side of the Moon
October 22 – November 28, 2026
Opening Thursday October 22, 6-8pm
Presented by Microscope Gallery at Grace Exhibition Space, 182 Avenue C, New York
Microscope is very pleased to present “America on the Dark Side of the Moon” as the seventh solo exhibition of works by Marni Kotak with the gallery. The show, which draws correlations between a mental health crisis the artist experienced and the current state of the country, will take place offsite, occupying the two floors of Grace Exhibition Space in the East Village, where Kotak constructed her newest installation.
The catalyst for the durational performance/installation, video, sculptures, paintings, and drawings on view is a manic episode during the first Trump administration where Kotak heard Richard Nixon’s voice say: “We’re Back! This is America on the dark side of the moon. Go write down your thoughts about it on a dollar bill.”
With urgency, and a sense of dark humor, Kotak’s works advocate for the “power of individuals to affect change by reclaiming their emotional response to the current political environment in the US,” one in which political leaders, oligarchs, corporations, judges and others operate with increasing impunity and authoritarianism, with little regard for the health, welfare, and existence of this country’s populace.
The performance/installation, “America on the Dark Side of the Moon,” condenses a half century of US politics, a period that nearly corresponds to Kotak’s lifetime, within a single setting: her darkened living room, dimly lit by an oppressive, glowing hand-painted moon. Pink Floyd’s 1973 album plays on a vintage record player. And, a video “We’re Back!” — juxtaposing news broadcasts of Nixon’s resignation, NASA’s Apollo missions, Trump’s addresses to the nation, and the recent Artemis II flights — loops on a Zenith console TV.
Each day of the show, which encompasses the midterm elections, Kotak draws on one-dollar bills that she has scattered across a grey-painted US flag rug, each representing one year of this country. In these drawings Kotak responds to the daily news and conversations she has with gallery visitors who she invites to share — over tea — their own current struggles. Once completed she affixes the drawing over its dark areas, which due to its size becomes more difficult as the show progresses.
Related works on view expand upon economic, political, and mental health themes of the performance/installation. A new medium-sized sculpture featuring a hand-painted metallic moon sits atop an Amazon delivery container. A two-channel video “American Left/Right Channels” (2025) constructs a dialogue from separate conversations the artist had with her father (a MAGA Republican) and her mother-in-law (a life-long queer woman’s rights activist), who are sitting in their respective living rooms in Massachusetts and Texas.
A series of back-lit vanity mirrors “My Time on the Dark Side of the Moon” (2024-26) represents the eight phases of the moon onto which the artist has hand-painted excerpts from actual diary entries she made between 2015 and 2020. Selections from “For What It’s Worth” (2016-present), an ongoing series of sharpie and acrylic on actual dollar bills of several denomitations or, more recently, on the artist’s own “Dark Side Dollars.” The series which began shortly with her Nixon hallucination in 2016, not only provides a record of White House actions over the past decade, but also Kotak’s mental breakdown and return to stability.
In the sculpture “Mad Me Victory” (2026), Kotak both exposes and embraces the depths of what she refers to as her “madness.” Among the actual objects and photographs from that time period that occupy a triangular shelf unit are what now read as prescient self-portraits of Kotak adopting various personas each tasked with saving the country from itself.
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Marni Kotak (b. 1974) is a multimedia and performance artist presenting everyday life being lived. She has received international attention for her durational performances and exhibitions, most notably “The Birth of Baby X” (2011) in which she gave birth to her son as a live performance and the subsequent related shows in 2011, 2017, and 2022; “Mad Meds” (2014) during which the artist slowly withdrew from psychiatric medications prescribed for postpartum depression; and in “Dancing in the Oval Office” (2019) for which she danced each day within a recreation of the White House Oval Office. Kotak’s works have also appeared at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; Artists Space, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY; White Box, New York, NY Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY; English Kills Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; among others. She has performed extensively in the US and abroad.
Her exhibitions have been featured in Artforum, Art Pulse, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Studio International, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time Magazine, Washington Post, among many others. Kotak’s work also appear in books and publications including Exhibition as Interior, Interior as Exhibition: Space of Display within and beyond the Museum and Gallery, Bloomsbury Publishing (2025); The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption,” Bloomsbury (2022); Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations, Palgrave McMillian (2021); The Art of Feminisim: Images that shaped the Fight for Equality, 1957-2017, Chronicle Books (2018); and Blackwells Companions to Contemporary Art: A Companion to Feminist Art, John Wiley & Sons (2019), among others. Kotak has appeared on Good Morning America (ABC), CBC Radio, NPR, ZDFKultur, and other broadcasts as well as in the documentary “The Art of Making it,” (2021) which appears on Amazon Prime. Marni Kotak received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
Special Thanks to Jill, Hoke, and Grace Exhibition Space.
